Red Meat

Dan Allosso
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I was thinking about writing a short post about all the academic history I’ve been finding at the bottom of some pretty popular books recently.  Alfred Crosby’s ideas about the Colombian exchange in Charles Mann’s 1491, for example.  Or Vaclav Smil’s story of the Haber-Bosch process for fixing atmospheric nitrogen, from his Enriching the Earth, in Simon Fairlie’s 2010 book, Meat: A Benign Extravagance.  Maybe it’s no coincidence that these are both canonical environmental history texts (they were both on my field list, thanks to my EH advisor, Ted Melillo).  Perhaps because their interest is on the edge of science, readers of popular books on environmental issues are more open to the fairly dense technical arguments.  Maybe it’s easier to move ideas from academic books to popular.  But I’m not so sure.  Science writers often have a lot of skill taking excruciatingly complicated stuff and making it comprehensible to the rest of us.  Michio Kaku, Brian Greene, Matt Ridley, and Colin Tudge are just a few of the names that jump to mind.  Richard Dawkins was Oxford’s “Professor for Public Understanding of Science” until 2008.  We could probably learn a thing or two from these authors.

And Simon Fairlie’s book is part of this tradition.  Fairlie is a British farmer and writer, and a former editor of the British environmental journal The Ecologist.  His book about meat’s place in the food chain draws heavily on Vaclav Smil’s work on nitrogen fixation, and digs a little more deeply into the downside of the green revolution Smil describes.  But the thing that really jumped out at me as I read Meat was Fairlie’s response to the famous food-mile study that stunned us all a few years ago. 

You may recall the article “Food Miles and the RelativeClimate Impacts of Food Choices in the United States,” written by Christopher L. Weber and H. Scott Matthews of Carnegie Mellon for Environmental Science & Technology in 2008.  It made headlines outside of the science community because they concluded that “eating local” was not a very good way to reduce greenhouse gases.  Eliminating red meat from your diet one day a week, they said, would reduce your carbon footprint more than going 100% local.  This came as a shock to many people who had embraced local farms and markets as a way of living more sustainably.  I was TA-ing an Environmental History course when the article became a news item, so I had my students read it and discuss.

There are a number of possible responses to a claim like this, and the students were able to see many of them.  They pointed out the social benefits of farmers’ markets and local food, the fact that most Americans get their meat from feedlot-style animal husbandry*, and they concluded that they might get even better results if they did bothrather than choose to be local or to be part-time vegetarians.  Fairlie touches on each of these points, and then he drops his bomb.  What the study doesn’t deal with – what we overwhelmingly urban Americans routinely fail to see when we look at the local question – is on the back end.  The issue isn’t raising food and getting it to market.  The issue is, getting the waste back to the farm. 

Throughout history, there has been a rough symmetry between the input and output sides of agriculture and life.  Food came out of the earth; crop residues, manure, and even human waste went back in.  Then came the era of flush toilets, food miles, and landfills.  Industrial fertilizers now fill in for the nutrients that came from all that missing waste, but they cost a lot, they run off into our water, and they don’t keep the ground from compacting and eroding the way organic material does.  And assuming for a moment that either soaring global demand or peak oil is going to push the price of energy way up in the future, it’s easy to see that the days of cheap nitrogen may be numbered.  So Fairlie’s point is an important one: if we don’t account for getting waste back to the farm, we’re ignoring a big factor in the true cost equation.

Economists have a word for this.  The things we ignore in our models and analyses are called “externalities.”  At first, they’re left out because they’re either difficult to price (like airport noise in the 1950s) or because they’re ubiquitous and “free” (like rivers and the ocean used as sewers in the 19th century).  Later, they’re ignored because they raise difficult questions about private ownership and public responsibility that free-market ideology would rather bypass.  And sometimes it takes someone like Fairlie, who lives on a farm, to remind the city-folk that just because you flushed your toilet or dragged your trash to the curb, the story isn’t over.  I personally suspect that all our problems arise from ignoring externalities.  Sounds like another book project . . .

But maybe you have to be 2/3 of the way through Fairlie’s book and already buying into his vision, for this to be a powerful “Aha!” moment.  I may not have done justice to it here.  Read the book as an example of how cutting-edge Environmental History can be turned into a best-seller, and you’ll also discover Fairlie’s answer to Garrett Hardin’s “Tragedy of theCommons.”  

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* I asked the authors about grass-fed beef and other sources of “red” meat, and Weber responded to my email, saying that “other red meats than corn fed beef do have the same high emissions” because of the methane-producing effect of digesting grass and the typically longer lifetimes of sheep and goats.  So in the view of these scientists it’s not just a feedlot issue.

Overlapping History Projects

Dan Allosso

It’s interesting and sometimes instructive when different threads of work occasionally overlap. I had this experience earlier in the week, when I turned from some brainstorming I was doing regarding the Historical Society’s RIHA program (thinking about how I might structure a proposal that incorporated some 19th-century American and British social innovators who lived on the fuzzy edge between religion and irreligion), back to my online Environmental History project. I’ve been dragging my feet completing the next video in that series, but I had some time yesterday afternoon, so I parked myself in the library’s coffee area determined to write up my notes on Theodore Steinberg’s Nature Incorporated, which is the basis for my next “chapter.”

For those unfamiliar with Steinberg’s book, it’s an insightful look at early New England textile industrialization, and how the social understanding of common resources gradually changed to allow corporations to completely control the Merrimack River from Lake Winnipiseogee to the ocean. Taken from his dissertation, Steinberg’s story of the gradual “instrumentalization” of natural resources leans heavily on the work of his advisor, Morton Horwitz, who showed (in The Transformation of American Law) how many of the most sweeping legal changes of the nineteenth century happened not as a result of legislative or executive action, but through seemingly insignificant lower court rulings and changes in contract law. This is clearly a missing link in the chain of “how the heck did we get here?!” that environmentalists have to deal with, so you can see why I want to highlight it in an “EH for regular people” series. But neither Steinberg’s book nor Horwitz’s are easy reads, so they’re easily overlooked outside the academy. So my task is to render the main ideas in 10-15 minutes, in plain English.

So here’s the overlap: around 1810, Boston merchants Francis Cabot Lowell and Nathan Appleton each individually seem to have visited Robert Owen’s New Lanark textile mills in Scotland. Lowell and Appleton took what they learned at Owen’s water-powered mills, and returned to Massachusetts to form the Boston Manufacturing Company on the Charles River and later, as the Boston Associates, developed the Merrimack. No doubt the size of New Lanark (Owen’s mills were the largest in Britain at the time) and the community that had been built to serve the mills suggested some of the new forms of social engineering the Boston Associates developed in Lawrence, Lowell, and Manchester. They had a different effect on Owen himself.

Robert Owen emigrated to Indiana in 1825 and established a socialist community called New Harmony, on the site of an earlier “Harmony” built by the followers of German pietist George Rapp. The New Harmony Working Men’s Institute (est. 1838) contains the oldest continuously operated library in Indiana. Owen’s son, Robert Dale Owen, became a leader of the Working Men’s Party in New York before entering politics as an Indiana Representative, corresponding with Lincoln about Emancipation, and writing a radical draft of the 14th Amendment. Both the Owens are claimed by social reformers, radicals, and secularists in Britain and America as founding fathers of their various movements.

Robert Owen’s story suggests that there was a moment of recognition, when he and others like him discovered the magnitude of the social forces they were manipulating. Why the Owens chose to respond to this discovery as they did, and the Lowells and Appletons as they did, might turn out to be a very interesting, very contemporary story.

New England's "Maruellous" Pine Trees

Heather Cox Richardson

How many people today have heard of the King’s Broad Arrow?

Not many, I’d wager, and yet it was once the key to settling a continent and the spark to a revolution. It’s a simple mark: three quick swings with an ax, one straight up and two in a V at the top, to make an arrow. After 1711, the King’s Mark branded old-growth New England white pines as the property of the King of England.

Those old-growth white pines were key to British interest in settling New England. In 1605, Captain George Weymouth explored the coast of what is now Maine, sailing the Archangel to Monhegan, Camden, and up the Kennebec River. He discovered vast shoals of fish and, as one of his comrades recorded, giant “firre-trees,” “out of which issueth Turpentine in so maruellous plenty, and so sweet, as our Chirurgeon and others affirmed they neuer saw so good in England. We pulled off much Gumme congealed on the outside of the barke, which smelted like Frankincense. This would be a great benefit for making Tarre and Pitch.”

The trees that so impressed Weymouth and his men were White Pines, (Pinus Strobus), still known in England as the Weymouth Pine.

These huge trees dominated the coastline where Weymouth sailed. They were the tallest trees in eastern North America, standing up to 230 feet. Their wood is soft, easy to cut, straight, and generally without knots. Unlike hardwood, it can stand for years without cracking, and it bends, rather than breaks, in a high wind. It was a perfect tree to make masts, and if there was one thing the Royal Navy needed, it was its own source of mast wood. As William R. Carlton put it in his 1939 New England Quarterly article titled “New England Masts and the King’s Navy”: “Masts, in the days of wooden ships, played a far greater part in world affairs than merely that of supporting canvas. They were of vital necessity to the lives of nations. Statesmen plotted to obtain them; ships of the line fought to procure them. . . .” They were vital to the well being of the British Navy . . . and thus to Britain itself.

The Navy had been getting its masts from the Baltic countries and Norway, but the masts they supplied had to be spliced, and the supply was always susceptible to disruption. The discovery of a new source of masts was enough to spur interest in settling New England. By 1623, entrepreneurs in Maine and New Hampshire were milling pine masts for British navy yards, a trade centered out of Portsmouth, New Hampshire’s “Strawberry Bank.”

After a war with the Dutch closed off British access to the Baltic in 1654, England began to rely on the Colonies to supply masts. The resulting boom in mast wood created a frenzy of cutting which threatened to decimate the old-growth trees. By 1691, the Crown had protected almost all white pines more than 24 inches in diameter at 12 inches above the ground. Surveyors marked these potential masts with the King’s Broad Arrow.

Colonists were outraged. Pine wood was valuable—very valuable—not only for masts but also for boards. Men routinely poached the pines, sawing the old-growth trunks into widths no more than 22 inches wide to get around the new laws. They also protested the restrictions, which were a real hardship in a region where wood was imperative for everything from houses to heat. They began to mutter that the Parliament had no right to intrude on their private property.

In 1772, a New Hampshire official tasked with protecting the King’s Trees charged six sawmill owners with milling trunks that had been marked with the King’s Broad Arrow. One of the owners refused to pay the resulting fine. He was arrested and then released with the promise that he would provide bail the next day. Instead, the following morning he and 30 to 40 men, their faces disguised with soot, assaulted the government officials and ran them out of town. While eight of the men were later charged with assault, the local judges who sentenced them let them off so lightly the verdict could easily be seen as support for their actions.

The Pine Tree Riot, as it came to be called, has often been cited as a precursor to the Boston Tea Party. The latter is the more famous occasion when New Englanders challenged royal authority, but it is worth noting that the first flag of the American Revolutionaries bore the image of a White Pine in the upper lefthand corner.

Key Questions for a World Civ Seminar

Bill McCoy

Today's guest post comes from my Eastern Nazarene College history department colleague Bill McCoy. Bill is a PhD candidate in African history at Boston University, where he is completing his dissertation: "To Heal the Leper: The Mbuluzi Leprosy Hospital in Swaziland, 1948 to 1982." Along with teaching non-western history, McCoy has taught courses on Europe since the middle ages, world political geography, and a Swaziland travel course on the history of missions. Here, McCoy considers something that quite a few of us probably think about: how to frame our courses with key questions in mind.

This coming Fall, I have a chance to teach a course at Eastern Nazarene College titled "Contemporary Questions." It's a seminar for first-year honors students, which will (because I am teaching it) replace their general education history requirement (in our context, a survey called The West in the World Since 1500). In the past, the course has been a replacement for the general education philosophy requirement, and in the future, it might replace a literature requirement or something else, depending on the specialty of the faculty member teaching the course.

So the class is a history class, but instead of the traditional chronological survey approach, I am building the course around significant question for our contemporary world and then trying to help students work through the ways that history helps us answer those questions, even if the questions will not have definitive answers. In the past few weeks, I've been brainstorming the questions that will shape the course syllabus, but I'd love some input from others about this. What questions matter most in the world today? What reading material might students enjoy/get the most out of in a course such as this. To get things started, I'll offer a few examples of questions I've considered; I would love to get reactions to these and, especially, suggestions about other questions to add to the list:

* What is the role of geography and the environment in history?
* Why is there such massive economic inequality in the world?
* What are the causes of horrors like genocide?
* Why do we live in nation-states?
* Is patriotism a virtue?
* Why do so many people live in cities?
* Who makes history? Who matters in history?
* How have humans expressed themselves in the arts?

American Geography and the Missouri River

Heather Cox Richardson

One of the things I insist all my undergraduates learn at the beginning of each of my classes in American history is basic American geography. This sounds terribly basic, I know, but no one ever bothered to teach it to me (or at least, if they did, I wasn’t paying attention), and once I started teaching it, I discovered that no one had ever taught it to most of my students, either.

I don’t do anything fancy. I start with a physical map of North America (with an inset of Hawaii, of course, pointing out the great piece of trivia that, thanks to Hawaii, America has six time zones. Then I tell them that they must know the East Coast, the West Coast, the Gulf Coast, Canada and Mexico, and three mountain ranges: the Appalachians, the Rockies, and the Sierra Nevada. I talk a bit about why each has been important in some major development (using the Donner Party for the Sierra Nevada, to keep them awake). I point out the Great Plains and the Great Basin and explain the low rainfall and high winds that create such distinctive features there, showing some of the scenery from those sections.

But the natural elements on which I spend the most time in my introduction to American geography are the Ohio River, the Mississippi River, and the Missouri River.

The Mississippi is the great artery of what became the United States, and figures prominently in most economic developments until after the Civil War (this is an easy one, since most of them have heard of the Mississippi, and maybe even have read Huckleberry Finn).

Then I turn to the Ohio. No one can understand early American history without understanding the Ohio River, the incredible fertility of the land around it, the determination of Indians to hold it, the line it created between slavery and freedom. (Huck can help here, too, since he and Jim went down the Mississippi River to reach freedom—counterintuitive until I explain they were trying to get down the Mississippi far enough to get up the Ohio.)

Then, balancing the importance of the Ohio on the western side of the Mississippi, there’s the Missouri River. The Missouri gets short shrift in American History texts and courses, it seems to me, and it shouldn’t. It dominates the West as thoroughly as the Ohio dominated the East in an earlier time. Just a few obvious points: It was the Missouri that offered Lewis and Clark a highway to the West Coast at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The land around the upper Missouri has always had some of the best hunting in the country, making it highly prized both by the native people who managed the lands before the coming of easterners, and by the interlopers who started arriving in the 1860s. It was this region, of course, that produced Red Cloud and Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, and it was to wrest control of this land that General George A. Custer marched his men to the banks of the Greasy Grass in 1876. Only a few decades later, it was the Missouri River that seemed to offer the answer when the dry plains defeated hopeful western farmers. Fifteen dams now slow the river, creating reservoirs and taming floods to make the upper Northwest more productive and habitable.

And that, of course, is the reason for this post. How many of our students—at least those east of the Mississippi—paid any attention to the historic and terrifying flooding of the Missouri River this spring? A large melting snowpack has combined with torrential rains to create a flooding emergency that rivals Hurricane Katrina. Levies are breaking up and down the river, sending evacuees fleeing as the water covers homes and fields, as well as the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Station in Nebraska (which does not appear to be in danger). Reuters is reporting that the floods along the Missouri and the Mississippi have damaged about 2.5 million acres of farmland in the U.S. which seems likely to hurt farm production. It’s probable that this will, in turn, drive up food prices. This is not an unimportant weather event.

Already, observers are speculating about what this disaster says about the way America has historically approached the taming of the Missouri. The management of water in the West has long been a subject that interests western historians, but seemed to have drifted by most people in the East. And now that debate has sprung pretty dramatically out of the pages of historical journals and into the headlines. This year’s disastrous flooding suggests that American historians might be able to do the country a service by making sure all their students know what the Missouri River is, why it’s been important in the past, and just how vital its management has been, and is still, to the nation today.

Lessons Learned from an Environmental History Course

Dan Allosso

This semester I've been a teaching assistant in an upper-level undergraduate course on American environmental history. At the final class meeting, the professor asked the students to take out a sheet of paper and write down 10 things they’ll take away from this course. I've been reading over their responses, which are an interesting combination of curious facts they picked up in class, and possibly life-changing insights.

The most commonly repeated curious fact was that pigs once roamed the streets and alleys of New York City, which I suppose was a surprise to many of the students. Others wrote they had been surprised that Central Park is completely artificial, that the interstate highway system was sold to the American people as a form of national defense, and that the “whole Earth” photographs taken from Apollo spacecraft were one of the catalysts for environmentalism. And that Mexico City has always been one of the major population centers of the Americas (this is a favorite of mine because it was something that I mentioned in a discussion section).

More interesting, from the perspective of the course’s objectives, were responses about the nature of wilderness, the role of government in environmental change, and the role activists and even extremists have played throughout American history supporting environmental causes. Most of the students successfully absorbed the course theme that not only wilderness but all of our ideas of nature are in fact ideas which change over time. Several students also remarked on how extensively the land patterns we see today are the result of government actions in the past, from the Northwest Ordinance through urban redlining. Many also remarked on their surprise that major environmental damage as well as movements to protect the environment began much earlier in American history than they had believed.

Although several students said they had learned that the government is responsible for creating (or at least not preventing) a lot of the problems we have today, many also recalled positive results of government influence like the national park system, the Civilian Conservation Corps, etc. They seem to have accepted the role of radicals like Henry David Thoreau and John Muir in pushing society in the right direction; one student even went beyond the required 10 things she was supposed to write, remarking that you can't criticize a society from within, but must separate yourself from it as Thoreau tried to do at Walden. One item I was disappointed I did not see was evidence that the students had understood the complicated process of subtle changes in law and social customs described by Ted Steinberg in Nature Incorporated, which they read early in the semester. I think this is crucial to the story of the American environment, so I’ll be spending some time thinking about how to make it a more central part of the students’ experience in my own syllabus.

Probably the biggest action-oriented takeaway in the students’ responses related to meat--and especially to corn-fed beef. Late in the semester, we watched a couple of clips from the documentary King Corn. As a result, many students said they would no longer take what they eat for granted. Food “came from somewhere and is going somewhere too,” said one student. Several said they would begin to look closely at what they eat and would try to eliminate corn sweeteners from their diets (this is something I've actually begun trying to do myself). Perhaps the most satisfying comment came from a student who concluded her list by observing, “I have learned that we must be the change we wish to see!” That makes the semester seem like time well spent.

Peppermint and History

Dan Allosso

On Monday, Andrew Sullivan blogged at The Dish about “The Atomic Gardening Society.” After WWII, researchers explored ways to use the new discoveries of atomic energy to improve daily life. Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss declared in 1954 that atomic energy would soon produce electricity that would be “too cheap to meter.” And, as Alexander Trevi records in an interview with Paige Johnson, which Sullivan highlights on his blog, national laboratories in the U.S. and U.S.S.R. developed gamma gardens, where they irradiated plants and seeds in an effort to improve flowers and agricultural crops.

One of the results of the gamma garden at New York’s Brookhaven National Laboratory was a disease-resistant strain of the peppermint plant, Mentha piperita. As Johnson says, commercial peppermint fields were increasingly suffering from Verticillium wilt, a fungal disease that reduces oil yields and ultimately kills the plants. Merritt J. Murray, a researcher for the A.M. Todd Company of Kalamazoo, developed two cultivars of Mitcham, the main commercial variety of peppermint, which were named “Todd’s Mitcham” and “Murray Mitcham.” Nearly all of the peppermint oil that finds its way into such products as chewing gum, toothpaste, mouthwash, and candy comes from these wilt-resistant plants.

It’s tempting to think of these scientific experiments of the 1950s to 1970s as the beginning of technical modifications to our food supply that have culminated in the genetically modified foods (GMOs) now causing public debate. But compared to current transgenic processes that manipulate plants and animals on a gene-by-gene basis, the process used by researchers in the gamma gardens was like stone tools versus scalpels. As Johnson notes, the “exact nature of the genetic changes that cause [Todd’s Mitcham] to be wilt-resistant remain unknown.” Scientists were literally shooting particles at plants and seeds, and then growing them to see what happened.

The other reason we can’t point to the gamma gardens as the beginning of GMOs, at least in peppermint, is that the Mentha piperita plants the researchers irradiated were already a hybrid that had been carefully nurtured by growers since at least the 1750s. Mentha piperita makes its first recorded appearance in Linnaeus’s Species Plantarum (1753). According to an 1851 history of the English town of Mitcham, titled Mitcham: Its Physic Gardeners and Medicinal Plants, the peppermint plant had been a principal product of the area’s medicinal gardens for about a hundred years. But the original, 1750s Mitcham peppermint itself was a genetically modified, sterile hybrid that could only be propagated by root cuttings.

The sterility of peppermint plants is due to the fact that they are a hybrid of two other Mentha species, water mint (M aquatica) and spearmint (M spicata). While this cross may have originally happened naturally, the resulting plants do not set seeds. They would not have been able to spread across the planet, without the active participation of mint farmers. And peppermint did spread across the globe. Brought to New England during the Colonial period, peppermint was grown, distilled, and sold through an elaborate web of early American commerce. Carried to upstate New York and then Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana by members of the mint-growing families, peppermint became a key crop in southern Michigan and northern Indiana, and later in the river valleys of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and ultimately, India. Along the way, the peppermint plant has changed, due to the year-by-year choices of farmers deciding which roots to save, as well as through the efforts of specialists like Murray.

It’s interesting to speculate about what point we want to start calling a plant product like mint “genetically modified.” It’s also fascinating to think, as we’re brushing our teeth or drinking a cup of mint tea, that the plant whose flavor we’re tasting is basically the same genetic individual as the one planted by Michigan growers in the 1860s, or Massachusetts farmers in the 1810s, or Mitcham “physic gardeners” in the 1750s. For me it cuts to the heart of that interest in continuity and change that makes us historians.

Note: Dan may be slightly obsessed with this subject, as he’s currently writing a dissertation that looks at rural American history through the peppermint oil industry.

Earth Day: Who’s In, and Who’s Out?

Heather Cox Richardson

As anyone who has opened Google today knows, today is Earth Day. Historians can look at Earth Day from a variety of angles: from studying Rachel Carson’s paradigm-changing Silent Spring, which linked the destruction of the osprey population to the degradation of the food chain; to exploring how the 1969 fire on the Cuyahoga River caught the eye of a reporter; to uncovering the movement culture that nurtured the first Earth Day movements in 1970.

Another important way for historians to think about Earth Day, though, is through the lens of a crucially important article inspired by the increasing environmental awareness of the early 1970s. In 1972, a member of the faculty at the University of Southern California Law Center published an article in the Southern California Law Review titled: “Should Trees Have Standing?—Toward Legal Rights for National Objects.” In this piece, Christopher D. Stone was, as he put it, “quite seriously proposing that we give legal rights to forests, oceans, rivers and other so-called ‘natural objects’ in the environment—indeed, to the natural environment as a whole.” Natural objects should have “legally recognized worth and dignity in its own right, and not merely to serve as a means to benefit ‘us’ (whoever the contemporary group of rights-holders may be).”

Stone anchored his suggestion in a brief overview of legal history. Societies began with a core group of families or kinship groups, he said. Everyone outside of that group was an outsider: frightening, suspect, alien. No one outside the core group had any rights. Even within a core group, some members had no rights. Children belonged to their fathers. They could be transferred, sold, even killed with impunity. Women, too, belonged to their men.

Gradually, Stone noted, societies began to expand the boundaries of those that enjoyed legal rights. Opponents greeted each expansion with resistance, fear, and ridicule, but gradually people outside that initial core group—men from other tribes, women, and children—won legal protections. In America, that protection eventually included legal standing for non-living entities, too, like corporations and estates.

Stone went on to argue that expanding legal rights to the natural world was not only logical, but also imperative to guarantee that the actual costs of industrial production were borne by the same entities that enjoyed the monetary benefits. More, though, the expansion of rights would herald a revolution in the way humans thought about and interacted with the environment. No longer would it be a resource for human exploitation; it would be an organism of which humans were a part.

Stone’s essay is justly famous in legal and environmental circles, and is well worth discussing for its legal and environmental implications. But is less well known among historians, and this is too bad. His brief overview of the contours of human society and the expansion of rights beautifully anticipated Reconstruction historians’ recent focus on what it means to be an American citizen—who was “in;” who was “out.” (And it is probably no accident that this Reconstruction historian was mesmerized by Stone’s article in college.) It also has anticipated the modern-day debate over the cultural meaning of “birtherism,” which political pundits from both sides of the aisle argue is a way to identify President Obama as “alien,” an “outsider.” The concepts Stone identified are central to historians’ understanding of our past, and of today’s Americans’ understanding of the present.

Earth Day 1970

Randall Stephens

Earth Day is 41 years old! The New York Times reminds us that:

Nearly 20 million Americans attended the first Earth Day celebration on April 22, 1970, to this day among the most participatory political actions in the nation's history. In the decades since, Earth Day has spread across the globe with thousands of events in more than 180 countries.

In the beginning, the event influenced environmental politics, triggering such national legislation as the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. "Earth Day is a commitment to make life better, not just bigger and faster," the organizers of the first celebration wrote in their manifesto. "It is a day to re-examine the ethic of individual progress at mankind's expense."

Watch part one of a 1970 CBS News report on the first Earth Day:

Earthquakes through Time

Randall Stephens

When I was on a fellowship in San Diego last summer, I became very familiar with the USGS’s “Recent Earthquakes” page. The aftershocks from the Easter Mexicali earthquake continued to rumble through southern California. Having never been in an earthquake before, even minor ones like we were having, the whole experience was bizarre and a little frightening. The US Geological Survey has another helpful page that lists “Earthquakes with 50,000 or More Deaths:
Most Destructive Known Earthquakes on Record in the World.” I include a selection from that below. Note the words “on Record.” It has been 1,200 years since Japan suffered an earthquake as destructive as the one that shook the island nation on Friday afternoon.

Year: Place, death toll, magnitude

856: Iran, Damghan, 200,000, unknown

1667: Caucasia, Shemakha, 80,000, unknown

1693: Italy, Sicily, 60,000, 7.5

1727: Iran, Tabriz, 77,000, unknown

1755: Portugal, Lisbon 70,000, 8.7

1923: Kanto (Kwanto), Japan, 142,800, 7.9

1970, Chimbote, Peru, 70,000, 7.9

1976: Tangshan, China, 255,000, 7.5

2005: Pakistan, 86,000, 7.6

2010: Haiti region, 222,570, 7.0

Men and woman have always tried to understand why earthquakes happen when and where they do. After the 1755 Lisbon quake, felt in Africa and across Europe, Europeans were eager for on-the-ground intelligence and desperately sought to make sense of the whole thing.

Social critic Walter Benjamin, oddly, delivered a 1931 radio address to children on the effects of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. He ably demonstrated its scope and terror . . . for kids, nonetheless! He also spoke about how it changed the ways Europeans thought about their world:

There is a further, special reason that helps to explain why this event affected people's minds so powerfully--why countless pamphlets passed from hand to hand, and indeed why new descriptions continued to make their appearance almost a century later. The reason is that the earthquake was the most powerful on record. Its impact was felt throughout Europe and as far away as Africa. It has been calculated that, together with its most distant tremors, it affected two and a quarter million square kilometers--a huge area. Its most powerful shocks extended from the Moroccan coast to the shores of Andalusia and France. (Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings: vol 2, part 2, 1931-1934, eds. Marcus Paul Bullock, Michael William Jennings [Harvard University Press, 2005], 537.)

Benjamin goes on to site some original accounts of the quake, including one by the Englishman Rev. Charles Davy:

It was on the morning of this fatal day, between the hours of nine and ten, that I was set down in my apartment, just finishing a letter, when the papers and table I was writing on began to tremble with a gentle motion, which rather surprised me, as I could not perceive a breath of wind stirring. Whilst I was reflecting with myself what this could be owing to, but without having the least apprehension of the real cause, the whole house began to shake from the very foundation, which at first I imputed to the rattling of several coaches in the main street, which usually passed that way, at this time, from Belem to the palace; but on hearkening more attentively, I was soon undeceived, as I found it was owing to a strange frightful kind of noise under ground, resembling the hollow distant rumbling of thunder. All this passed in less than a minute, and I must confess I now began to be alarmed, as it naturally occurred to me that this noise might possibly be the forerunner of an earthquake, as one I remembered, which had happened about six or seven years ago, in the island of Madeira, commenced in the same manner, though it did little or no damage. . . .

Perhaps you may think the present doleful subject here concluded; but alas! the horrors of the 1st of November are sufficient to fill a volume. As soon as it grew dark, another scene presented itself little less shocking than those already described: the whole city appeared in a blaze, which was so bright that I could easily see to read by it. It may be said without exaggeration, it was on fire at least in a hundred different places at once, and thus continued burning for six days together, without intermission, or the least attempt being made to stop its progress.

It went on consuming everything the earthquake had spared, and the people were so dejected and terrified that few or none had courage enough to venture down to save any part of their substance; every one had his eyes turned towards the flames, and stood looking on with silent grief, which was only interrupted by the cries and shrieks of women and children calling on the saints and angels for succor, whenever the earth began to tremble, which was so often this night, and indeed I may say ever since, that the tremors, more or less, did not cease for a quarter of an hour together. I could never learn that this terrible fire was owing to any subterranean eruption, as some reported, but to three causes, which all concurring at the same time, will naturally account for the prodigious havoc it made. (Modern History Sourcebook, Fordham Univ.)

As of now, there is no telling what the long-term implications of the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami will be. What sort of additional reports will be relayed from those who survived it? How will we understand it differently in days and years to come, after considerable reflection and after the damage is assessed? How will victims make sense of it? What will be it's global impact?

Ken Burns's National Parks and John Muir

Randall Stephens

Ken Burns's new, epic documentary The National Parks runs a whopping 12 hours. Reviews have been largely positive. Hank Stuever weighs in at the Washington Post:

As usual, Burns is best with history and certain feeling for the past. Segments on the creation of the "park ranger" are suffused with nostalgic stoutheartedness -- the invention of a magnetic, enduring icon. Also as usual, Burns is worst at relating the then to the now. "The National Parks" lets its story peter out in the late 20th century, relying on home movies to get across what it's like for tens of millions of present-day visitors. Underneath its wonder, 'The National Parks' is really about how Americans learned (or failed to learn) proper stewardship of nature. Here, the acoustic guitar is really cranked up. Burns does that when he wants to indicate despair, guilt, importance.

John Muir features heavily in the first installment, which aired on Sunday. Muir's eccentric, novel life, and his significant impact on later environmentalists gets the full Burns treatment.

Donald Worster's essay "John Muir and the Religion of Nature" appeared in the the April 2009 issue of Historically Speaking (available on Project Muse here). "Muir did more than find a home in the mountains," writes Worster. "He also found there a new religion: the religion of nature. If he didn’t single-handedly invent it, he, more than anyone else, was responsible for propagating its message far and wide. Like Moses or Buddha, Martin Luther or Mary Baker Eddy, he was a prophet, a creative spiritual leader responding to his times with a vision of ultimate meaning and purpose."

In the same issue Donald Yerxa interviewed Worster on his Muir biography and spoke to Worster about some of the broader historical themes related to this fascinating American naturalist.

Donald A. Yerxa: What drew you to write a biography of John Muir? Donald

Worster: There was a mix of reasons, some personal, some scholarly. The scholarly side is that there has not been a full-blown comprehensive study of the man’s life since the 1940s. There have been a number of books on Muir, but their authors didn’t draw extensively on archives and letters, or they haven’t told the full scope of Muir’s life or tried to put it into the context of his times. For all of us in environmental history, John Muir is such a crucial figure. To know him and understand him better seemed to be an important contribution to that part of our history. On the personal side—and this does get personal—I suppose as one gets older, you start looking back on your life and thinking about where you’ve been and the turns in the road your life has taken and how you got to where you are, for good or bad. In other words, you get into a biographical mood. I had been drawn to a couple of people in recent years, John Wesley Powell and John Muir. Both of them grew up, as I did, in evangelical, Protestant, midwestern American families. Muir was even closer to my roots. I had a Scottish grandmother who was a Campbellite, part of the same religious tradition Muir grew up in. So I’ve always felt an affinity for him, and I wanted to understand his life along with my own life a little better.