Rooting History to a Place: Place- and Water-Based Approaches to Environmental History

AHA Session 155
Friday, January 5, 2024: 3:30 PM-5:00 PM
Cyril Magnin I (Parc 55, Fourth)
Chair:
Douglas C. Sackman, University of Puget Sound
Panel:
Carmen Bolt, American University
Alexander Luckmann, University of California, Santa Barbara
Kristina Shull, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Ramya Swayamprakash, Grand Valley State University
Comment:
Douglas C. Sackman, University of Puget Sound

Session Abstract

This roundtable will analyze how histories and historians are rooted to places and bodies of water. Using our collective research and teaching as a starting point, we seek to understand how historians–broadly conceived–have centrally involved and investigated places. Participants – ranging from advanced graduate students, early-career scholars to more experienced professors – will discuss their experiences with a wide array of research and teaching methods across the United States. In so doing, we hope to enrich the conversation about water and place in environmental history. The goal of this roundtable is to explore the ways a range of historians–with their particular vantage points–conceive of, use, and employ place centered narratives.

From the Southwest United States, to the midwest and the American South, we cover a large swathe of geography and history. Our questions and analyses connect water and place to infrastructure creation, climate change, borders, and immigration as well as a variety of historical methods and pedagogical approaches, all as environmental historians and storytellers bound in a place. Our aim is to foster a discussion on the materiality and centrality of place in environmental history research and practice by exploring questions such as:

  • What does it mean to be an environmental historian rooted in place? What sort of ideas, topics, themes, make place-based environmental histories unique?
  • Can we offer methodological interventions, especially co-creating narratives?
  • How can our research inform our pedagogy and vice versa?
  • What new skills or tools can we use to develop place-based environmental histories?
  • What stories do rivers, lakes, creeks, and reservoirs tell?
  • How can we better understand human history through the lens of the environment, and vice versa?

Alexander Luckmann, A Place Between Nature and Artifice: Robert Stacy-Judd at Lake Mead, 1938-1939

Kristina Shull, Climate Refugees in the City of Creeks: Charlotte Histories, Just Futures

Carmen Bolt, The Routine and the Extreme: A Critical Environmental History of Water in Washington, D.C.

Ramya Swayamprakash, Keeping With Place, Moving with Time: Reflections on the Grand River, Michigan.

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