On Creativity and History, or Imagining an Unimaginable Future

[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

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

The Doctor’s Connections Fifty Years On

I always picture him struggling with the oil painting as he made his way through the lobby of New York’s Biltmore Hotel. But the physician thought it important to bring a bit of home with him, a proxy for the actual wilderness he left behind. After all, he traveled all that way–from the flat-bottomed floor of Skagit Valley to the skyscrapered heights of Manhattan–to protest on the mountains’ behalf, to tell Kennecott Copper that the heart of Glacier Peak Wilderness Area was no place for a mine. 

In latest skirmish of western land wars, Congress supports mining and ranching

Adam M. Sowards, University of Idaho

Republicans in Congress are enthusiastically using the Congressional Review Act to overturn regulations finalized during the last weeks of the Obama administration. One measure on their list is the Bureau of Land Management’s new Planning 2.0 rule, which is designed to improve BLM’s process for making decisions about ranching, energy development and other uses of public lands. The House has already voted to repeal the rule, and the Senate is likely to follow.

(pre)Occupations

Legacies produce all places. As a historian, I am perhaps more sensitive to that than most. I see multiple pasts, multiple narratives everywhere I turn, stretching from the immediate present back through years, decades, even millennia. The evidence is all around us if we UVic Welcome Signbother to look and listen. Yet, reconciling the successive, overlapping, or competing pasts in one place can confound the historically inclined. It did me on a visit to the University of Victoria.