Are there better ethics than hope? Two scholars with new books about the author of Walden reflect on Henry David Thoreau’s environmental ethic, flirtations with despair, and anarchist politics.
Three decades after the 1988 Seoul Olympics, what lessons has the South Korean government learned about redevelopment and the Olympic Games?
What does the scientific study of biological diversity have to do with the history of U.S. imperialism in the Caribbean? Just about everything, says the author of a new book on American field stations in the tropics.
When students critique outdoor fashion on campus, their views reveal gendered, ethnic, and regional stereotypes at play in the local meaning of international brands.
To be outside the “home” was a dangerous place to be in Gilded Age America. Richard White tells the story of how the modern nation reluctantly came into being alongside the environmental crisis of the late nineteenth century.
In the 1940s and 1950s, atmospheric studies of Canada’s Arctic North were defined by technological failure. Edward Jones-Imhotep tells the story of the Cold War from a new vantage point—that of an “unreliable nation.”
The Smithsonian’s fish collection preserves not just specimens but the labor and knowledge of immigrant fishermen on the California coast.
In 1922, 16 states and 137 cities followed Daylight Saving Time—and the rest of the country did not. Repealing Daylight Saving Time only made the map of national temporal borders more complex, causing heartbreak and confusion at the border.
Making things right in the face of climate change demands that colonialism, race, and gender take center stage in the story of capitalism.
Nancy Jacobs’ new book uncovers how African birders and vernacular birding knowledge helped build European imperial science.
