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An account of German environmentalism that shows the influence of the past on today's environmental decisions. Germany enjoys an enviably green reputation. Environmentalists in other countries applaud its strict environmental laws, its world-class green technology firms, its phase-out of nuclear power, and its influential Green Party. Germans are proud of these achievements, and environmentalism has become part of the German national identity. In The Greenest Nation? Frank Uekötter offers an overview of the evolution of German environmentalism since the late nineteenth century. He discusses, among other things, early efforts at nature protection and urban sanitation, the Nazi experience, an...
In the summer of 1783, an unusual dry fog descended upon large parts of the northern hemisphere. The fog brought with it bloodred sunsets, a foul sulfuric odor, and a host of other peculiar weather events. Inspired by the Enlightenment, many naturalists attempted to find reasonable explanations for these occurrences. Between 8 June 1783 and 7 February 1784, a 27-kilometer-long fissure volcano erupted in the Icelandic highlands. It produced the largest volume of lava released by any volcanic eruption on planet Earth in the last millennium. In Iceland, the eruption led to the death of one-fifth of the population. The jetstream carried its volcanic gases further afield to Europe and beyond, whe...
One of the largest estuaries on the North Atlantic coast, Narragansett Bay served as a gateway for colonial expansion in the seventeenth century and the birthplace of American industrialization in the late eighteenth. Christopher Pastore presents an environmental history of this watery corner of the Atlantic world, beginning with the first European settlement in 1636 and ending with the dissolution of the Blackstone Canal Company in 1849. Between Land and Sea traces how the Bay’s complex ecology shaped the contours of European habitation, trade, and resource use, and how littoral settlers in turn reconfigured the physical and cultural boundaries between humans and nature. Narragansett Bay ...
"Regina Kunzel here draws upon previously unseen case files to argue for a much subtler understanding of how 20th-century LGBTQ Americans conceived of themselves and the diagnoses they received from psychiatrists, showing the ways in which they assimilated, accommodated, challenged, rejected, and rearticulated the judgment that they were sick. She argues that, as central as psychiatry was to LGBTQ identity, the discipline's own expanding claims to authority were anchored in its assertion of expertise over gender and sexual difference. That is, shrinks told people they were sick; but in both acquiescing to and resisting this diagnosis, those people showed that shrinks were powerful"--
Environmental challenges are defining the twenty-first century. To fully understand ongoing debates about our current crises—climate change, loss of biological diversity, pollution, extinction, resource woes—means revisiting their origins, in all their complexity. With this ambitious, highly original contribution to the environmental history of global modernity, Frank Uekötter considers the many ways humans have had an impact on their physical environment throughout history. Ours is not a one-way trajectory to sudden collapse, he argues, but rather death by a thousand cuts. The many paths we’ve forged to arrive in our current predicament, from agriculture to industry to infrastructure...
Introduction: political roles for fish populations -- The fishing empires of the Pacific: the Americans, the Japanese, and the Soviets -- Islands and war -- Manifest destiny and fishing -- Tariffs -- Industrialization -- Treaties -- Imperialism -- Enclosure -- Conclusions: updating the best available science
This ethnography explores the political quandaries and personal dilemmas that refugee supporters—volunteers and NGO employees—in Slovakia face while working with their target group. Operating in a refugee-hostile political and public climate, they navigate scarce or absent refugee care infrastructures and strict supervision by state authorities. Building on extensive participant observation in three different refugee support organizations, the book shows how moral codes and emotional templates shape the implementation of refugee support, structuring encounters and clashes between refugees, helpers, and bureaucrats. The ethnography illustrates how, despite a plenitude of divergent constra...
For roughly the first decade after the demise of the GDR, professional and popular interpretations of East German history concentrated primarily on forms of power and repression, as well as on dissent and resistance to communist rule. Socio-cultural approaches have increasingly shown that a single-minded emphasis on repression and coercion fails to address a number of important historical issues, including those related to the subjective experiences of those who lived under communist regimes. With that in mind, the essays in this volume explore significant physical and psychological aspects of life in the GDR, such as health and diet, leisure and dining, memories of the Nazi past, as well as identity, sports, and experiences of everyday humiliation. Situating the GDR within a broader historical context, they open up new ways of interpreting life behind the Iron Curtain – while providing a devastating critique of misleading mainstream scholarship, which continues to portray the GDR in the restrictive terms of totalitarian theory.
Moritz Föllmer traces the history of individuality in Berlin from the late 1920s to the construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961. The demand to be recognised as an individual was central to metropolitan society, as were the spectres of risk, isolation and loss of agency. This was true under all five regimes of the period, through economic depression, war, occupation and reconstruction. The quest for individuality could put democracy under pressure, as in the Weimar years, and could be satisfied by a dictatorship, as was the case in the Third Reich. It was only in the course of the 1950s, when liberal democracy was able to offer superior opportunities for consumerism, that individuality finally claimed the mantle. Individuality and Modernity in Berlin proposes a fresh perspective on twentieth-century Berlin that will engage readers with an interest in the German metropolis as well as European urban history more broadly.
Hispanic Engineer & Information Technology is a publication devoted to science and technology and to promoting opportunities in those fields for Hispanic Americans.