Adam M. Sowards, Author at Adam M. Sowards

Passenger Pigeons, Democracy, and a Future to Seize

7AprilAdam M. Sowards1 CommentUncategorizedaldo leopold, passenger pigeon

Martha, the last passenger pigeon, died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. Forty-three years later, in 1947, a monument memorialized the extinct pigeons in Wyalusing State Park in Wisconsin at the confluence of the Mississippi and Wisconsin Rivers, just south of Prairie du Chien. The state’s most famous conservationist, Aldo Leopold, reflected on the bird

Giving Up the Ghosts

4FebruaryAdam M. Sowardseducationghosts, higher education, learning, risks, teaching

Sometimes I think of the ghosts, the spectral traces of students whose lives changed along these same paths and in these very buildings. Thinking of my own college years, I remember walking with roommates and thinking about the future we were forging. We didn’t know what that might be but were sure it was

Calling Things Truly

28JanuaryAdam M. Sowardshistoryhistory, privilege, rebecca solnit, stories, truth

I’m not sure any writer stimulates me like Rebecca Solnit. Her dead-aim truth telling and her exquisite control of language serves up so many reminders and inspirations. In “Silence Is Broken,” an early essay in The Mother of All Questions, Solnit writes: The task of calling things by their true names, of telling the truth

On Historical Thinking; Thinking about Technology

21JanuaryAdam M. Sowardshistoryadam greenfield, native american, plains, technology

Three facts: I am teaching Native American history as a standalone course for the first time. According to many, history (or the humanities more broadly) is not especially relevant today or for the future. Technologies are rearranging our daily lives in fundamental ways I want to connect these points. Start at the end. I’ve

Dispossession in a Minute: On Shifting Perspectives

14JanuaryAdam M. Sowardshistorydispossession, history, maps, native american

The visualization unfolds briskly, envelops the continent with a relentlessness that shocks. Almost an entire continent consumed in a century; from Native land to a nation’s land, sped up to a minute. The continent is eaten away as if by acid, the edges crumbling like old letters long stored in an archive unable to

On Creativity and History, or Imagining an Unimaginable Future

7JanuaryAdam M. Sowardshistoryclimate change, creativity, future, history, michael chabon, rebecca solnit, wendell berry

[sharethis-inline-buttons] In 1978, in a fit of optimism that civil rights had arrived and would never retreat, the southern writer Walker Percy, told a Georgia audience, Like most great historical changes, the change happens before our inkling of it and before its consequences begin to dawn on us. His shortsightedness on race in America notwithstanding,

David Brooks and the Myth of Pre-Political Land

26AugustAdam M. Sowards2 Commentsenvironment, historydavid brooks, environmental history, environmental justice, environmental racism

Friday, at the New York Times, David Brooks waded into environmental history. I haven’t seen environmental historians reacting to his column, “This American Land,” which is a curiosity, since our field rarely appears on the Times Op-Ed page. We should weigh in. Brooks observes two things worth noting. First, most presidents, he claims, experienced deep

Adam M. Sowards

historian & writer

Author Archives: Adam M. Sowards