East Boston has the largest amount of made land in the City of Boston. It was originally comprised of five islands connected by acres of fluctuating tidal marshes and flats. The history of the Great Marsh exemplifies centuries of efforts to regulate and control the ambiguous space between land and sea.
Tag: environmental history
Hercegovina Kalifornija: Landscape and legacies in the Neretva Valley
The dream of Herzegovina as California has been around for as long as I remember. It first appeared in Yugoslavia as an industrial and entrepreneurial vision of a landscape that could provide us with everything, provided we were sufficiently entrepreneurial. But it was also an image of a place of rest, where little is needed to enjoy life, in which case industrialisation may be unnecessary.
From Firstborns to Equal Shares: Inheritance, Land, and Ecology in Revolutionary France
Inheritance can have far-reaching consequences that extend beyond the family unit, shaping not only society and economy but also the environment.
More-than-Human Remains: Reckoning with Ivory in (Post)Colonial Museums
Museums developed and funded by European colonization often grapple with the morally blurry lines between public education and neocolonial exploitation. Elephant tusk — otherwise known as ivory — is embedded in these politics of historical display.
Fearing the Subject of Study: The Climate Crisis and the Environmental Historian
The world we have constructed appears to be hurtling towards disaster, if not outright oblivion.
Smoke and Plastic: Feeling the Environmental Past
The suggestion that Barbie lives in an immaterial world was not lost on environmental icon Smokey Bear who, upon noticing her campsite, tweeted a visual critique.
A Well of One’s Own: Caste, Water, and Freedom
On a cool October morning in 2019, I visited Babu on his small plot of farmland, now a lush patchwork of vegetables that his wife sells at weekly markets in nearby towns.
Mobilizing the Energy Crisis for Racial Justice
[…] looking at Black discourses around the energy debates of the 1970s indicates a sense of continuity rather than change. Black activists pointed out that many people in the U.S. had never, in fact, had access to middle class lifestyles.