What is Environmental History? A Brief Look at the Origins and Dynamics of the Field

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What is Environmental History? A Brief Look at the Origins and Dynamics of the Field

A second massive earthquake overwhelmed Nepal on Tuesday. The quake registered at a magnitude of 7.3, killed 96 people and injured more than 2,300. These unfortunate numbers add to the already high tolls from the magnitude-7.8 earthquake that hit on April 25. By comparison, the first quake killed more than 8,150 people, injured tens of thousands more and left hundreds of thousands homeless. Yet the treacherous circumstances may worsen, as relief efforts stretch beyond capacity and incoming monsoon rains loom large. The sheer power of nature in such circumstance provides a grim reminder of the fragility of life. Our thoughts and well wishes certainly go out to all persons affected. Today, considering how nature is central to all human affairs, we reflect briefly on the growth and evolution of environmental history.

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A Delayed Response: Historians and the Study of Film

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Film is today widely used by many historians to investigate past and present social, cultural and political currents. Film historians make use of the traditional primary source materials—production records, scripts, trade journals, the diaries and memories of film-makers, and publicity records such as box-office sales and film reviews—but the main sources for film historians are the films themselves. This creates a unique dilemma, because films are complex cultural texts that are in many ways different from traditional historical sources such as letters and government records or even traditional literary texts such as novels. As such the analysis of film requires specialist methods and skills that are unique to film history.

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Stuck in Time: A Call for the ‘Transtemporal’ Historian

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Historians are considered experts, not of all history but certainly of a particular subfield. There are those of us who study Canadian history, or British or Japanese history, and within those subfields are additional ‘areas of expertise,’ such as political, environmental, or economic history. The Canadianist is certainly not bound to a Canadian context, nor is she/he restricted to study specific subfields or genres. Nonetheless, and despite recent interest in adopting inclusive modes of inquiry, historians are generally taught to embrace a sense of familiarity in their work that derives from research focused both topically and temporally. Clio’s Current has previously explored issues related to national and regional identities, political and social histories, and inquiry-based methodologies, but given that we recently passed the one-year mark, it’s perhaps appropriate for us to investigate the impact of time on historical writing.

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Historical 'Authority' and the Value of the Oral Interview

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History is an ancient and ever varying discipline whose practitioners continually redefine the parameters of what constitutes ‘history proper’. Indeed, the very notion that there exists proper techniques to investigate the past has been ridiculed into complete obscurity by most. Today in Canada and elsewhere, historians reconstruct a past based on their personal reflections with an expansive and diverse body of evidence. Genres and subfields have been developed which allow historians to further delve into the individual and collective human experience, in hopes of finding nuance in the past. But each historian reconstructs a version of the past using methodologies that are unique as well as common. Clio’s Current provides insight into contemporary issues using historical perspective, and to do so we must continually reassess our understanding of historical methodology. In today’s post we further investigate the research kit of the historian, with a focus on the oral history interview.

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