How do militaries attempt to gain control over forbidding landscapes? How do advanced technologies designed to tame hostile environments shape military understandings of the battlefield? This dissertation examines the efforts of counterinsurgent forces to master the geographical…
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In 1993, the affluent Washington D.C. neighborhood of Spring Valley was unaware of what lurked beneath their carefully manicured lawns and million-dollar homes. Contractors hired by a resident to build an inground pool suddenly found themselves short of breath and half the crew …
Gregory the Great has been the focus of many studies that discuss the transition of Italy from late antiquity to a medieval period. He was witness to the dissolution of the infrastructure of empire in the Italian peninsula, shifting and redistribution of populations after the Lo…
The Amungme and Kamoro managed their environments for thousands of years in what is now Papua, Indonesia. In the late 1960s, seeking foreign capital to boost the nation’s economy, the president of Indonesia signed a contract with Freeport McMoRan Copper and Gold, which by 1988 b…
Backcountry skiing has continually grown as a recreational activity since alpine skiers began leaving developed ski area boundaries in the late 1930s. Placing individuals in a less managed, sometimes hostile, winter landscape creates a significant management issue for the U.S. F…
The reorganization of pastoral life in the twentieth century was inextricably bound to the rise of industrial agriculture and the forms of resource extraction that accompanied it. The places that witnessed the most sweeping ecological changes, from labor-intensive plantation agr…
This dissertation explores the political, economic, and environmental choices that led city officials in Detroit to build the world’s largest waste incinerator. In the 1970s, Detroit officials – led by Mayor Coleman Young – confronted the difficult financial realities of the urb…
This dissertation examines the relationships between the physical environment and the history of public housing in Washington, D.C. from the 1940s to the 1960s. The environmental features of public housing complexes, as well as those of the landscape around them, significantly s…
Constructed between 1972 and 1978, Vail Pass is a 16-mile section of Interstate-70 that crosses the continental divide in the Central Mountains of Colorado. It connects the ski resort communities of Copper Mountain and Vail and has played a significant role in the development of…
This dissertation studies the role of water in colonial statecraft in late-colonial Kenya. While the economic and political basis of colonial development after World War Two has been fully established, much of the work looking at the implementation of these projects focuses on l…
Residents in mining towns of the U.S. West face a troubling quandary in their attempts to preserve historical evidence of their town’s industrial past, because that evidence threatens their health. The 1980 Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CE…
There is a common misperception that historic sites cannot be maintained once they are included in a wilderness designation. This conflict ultimately does a disservice to both heritage and wilderness resources. To that end, this thesis provides a baseline inventory of all known …
Making Water Pure: A History of Water Softening from Potash to Tide, is a history of water softening in the United States from 1860 through 1970. Water’s materiality, specifically its tendency to dissolve geological features, consistently interfered with labor processes, especia…
The automobile has long been directly and indirectly connected to human conceptions of nature, yet few studies linger with the act of driving as a practice that contributes to how nature is experienced. I argue that a more nuanced understanding of automobility is necessary for a…
Despite being a country synonymous with fishing and having very strong maritime traditions, the clear origins and development of specialist fishing communities prior to the mechanisation era in Iceland, particularly the Vestfirðir region, remain unclear. Further to this, the det…
Due to escalating carbon-based emissions, anthropogenic climate change is wreaking havoc on the natural and built environment as higher near-surface temperatures cause arctic ice-melt, rising sea levels and unpredictable turbulent weather patterns. The effects are especially dev…
The capercaillie is the largest member of the grouse family extant in Scotland. This species is reported to have become extinct during the 1700s. It is also reported to have been reintroduced to Scotland from Sweden during the 1800s. There have been many assertions made about th…
What historical factors explain an American society that wants both SUVs and clean air, that seeks low fuel prices and high environmental quality? Answering this question means examining the national environmental politics of transportation that emerged and evolved in the United…
For thousands of years, the Paso del Norte region which today includes Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, El Paso, Texas, and Sunland Park, New Mexico, has been a strategic location by virtue of its geographic positioning at the lowest and easiest passage across the continental divide. D…