Earth Month 2024

Earth Month takes place during April every year, with Earth Day falling on 22 April. First held in 1970, EARTHDAY.ORG’s annual campaign aims to “diversify, educate and activate the environmental movement worldwide”, and focuses this year on Planet vs. Plastics. Since the 1960s and 70s, more and more historians have been asking how previous generations used and inhabited their own environments, how the environment has shaped human history, and how people in the past dealt with ecological crises such as those we are facing today. At the History Faculty Library, we have put up a display of books that cover environmental history from recycling in the eighteenth century to slavery in the American South.

As well as physical books, we have lots of e-resources on the topic of environmental history across the world. These are available online to Oxford University members on SOLO – just make sure you’re signed on with your ‘Single Sign-On’. Click on the book cover below to access the SOLO record. Many more e-resources and physical books can be found on SOLO by searching for ‘environmental history’ or by following the links above.

When smoke ran like water : tales of environmental deception and the battle against pollution Ecological imperialism : the biological expansion of Europe, 900-1900 The Oxford handbook of environmental history Global environmental history : 10,000 BC to AD 2000 Environment and history (journal) Environmental history (journal) An environmental history of the Middle Ages : the crucible of nature From the Ground Up : Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement

History Day 2021 on 4 November

[re-blogged from https://historycollections.blogs.sas.ac.uk/programme/]

History Day 2021 on a background an early printed map

History Day 2021 will take place on Thursday, 4 November 11am-4.30pm. It will be held online in Zoom.

History Day brings together students, researchers and anyone with an interest in history with professionals from archives, libraries, publishers and other organisations with history collections from the UK and beyond. It is a free annual one-day event that is created collaboratively between the Institute of Historical Research and Senate House Library.

History Day 2021 has an environmental history theme. It will explore collections that capture the experiences of ordinary people, collectors and scientists, looking at nature, landscape, climate change and much more. View the programme.

You will also be able to explore content from a great variety of libraries, museums, galleries, archives and history organisations.

Sign up here and enjoy your day!

New: Journal for the History of Environment and Society, 1, 2016-

JHES coverThe new Journal for the History of Environment and Society, 1, 2016- (ISSN 2506-6730) is now listed on SOLO and OU eJournals but is of course freely available at http://www.brepolsonline.net/loi/jhes.

open accessThis is a double-blind peer-review Open Access journal, distributed by Brepols.

It “aims to be a leading on-line and open-access magazine that covers various aspects of environmental history in the broadest sense of the word. Emphasis is upon studies which focus on the historical relations between environmental changes and the social-historical context. Interregional and international comparative articles are getting special attention.

Geographically, the journal is primarily – but not exclusively – focusing on NW-Europe including areas that had historical relations with that broad region. Articles with a more general geographic scope can also be published in the Journal.”

See http://jheswebsite.com/mission.html for more details.

You can set up Table of Content (ToC) alerts and RSS feeds provided by Brepols.

Content of Vol. 1 (2016)

  • Maïka De Keyzer, All we are is dust in the wind: The social causes of a “subculture of coping” in the late medieval covers and belt
  • Ivan Hoste, Denis Diagre-Vanderpelen, Belgian botany in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: from plant hunting to nascent nature conservation
  • Peder Roberts, Dolly Jørgensen, Animals as instruments of Norwegian imperial authority in the interwar Arctic
  • Frank Uekötter, City meets Country: Recycling ideas and realities on German sewage farms