Washington University Press Search Results Page

Capturing Glaciers

A History of Repeat Photography and Global Warming

By Dani Inkpen
Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

Photographs do not simply speak for themselves. Their meanings are built through interpretive frameworks that shift over time. Today, photographs of receding glaciers are one of the most well recognized visualizations of human-caused climate change....

The Toxic Ship

The Voyage of the Khian Sea and the Global Waste Trade

By Simone M. Müller
Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

In 1986 the Khian Sea, carrying thousands of tons of incinerator ash from Philadelphia, began a two-year journey, roaming the world's oceans in search of a dumping ground. Its initial destination and then country after...

Charged

A History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future

By James Morton Turner
Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

**Finalist for The Cundill History Prize 2023**

To achieve fossil fuel independence, few technologies are more important than batteries. Used for powering zero-emission vehicles, storing electricity from solar panels and wind turbines, and revitalizing the electric...

People of the Ecotone

Environment and Indigenous Power at the Center of Early America

By Robert Michael Morrissey
Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

In People of the Ecotone, Robert Morrissey weaves together a history of Native peoples with a history of an ecotone to tell a new story about the roots of the Fox Wars, among the most...

Seeds of Control

Japan’s Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea

By David Fedman
Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

Japanese colonial rule in Korea (1905–1945) ushered in natural resource management programs that profoundly altered access to and ownership of the peninsula’s extensive mountains and forests. Under the banner of "forest love," the colonial government...

Fir and Empire

The Transformation of Forests in Early Modern China

By Ian M. Miller
Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

A CHOICE OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE The disappearance of China’s naturally occurring forests is one of the most significant environmental shifts in the country’s history, one often blamed on imperial demand for lumber. China’s early modern...

Communist Pigs

An Animal History of East Germany's Rise and Fall

By Thomas Fleischman
Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

The pig played a key role in the German Democratic Republic's attempts to create a modern, industrial food system built on communist principles. By the mid-1980s, East Germany produced more pork per capita than West...

Debating Malthus

A Documentary Reader on Population, Resources, and the Environment

By Robert J. Mayhew, Paul S. Sutter

For centuries, thinking about the earth's increasing human population has been tied to environmental ideas and political action. This highly teachable collection of contextualized primary sources allows students to follow European and North American discussions...

Wetlands in a Dry Land

More-Than-Human Histories of Australia's Murray-Darling Basin

By Emily O'Gorman
Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

In the name of agriculture, urban growth, and disease control, humans have drained, filled, or otherwise destroyed nearly 87 percent of the world’s wetlands over the past three centuries. Unintended consequences include biodiversity loss, poor...

Footprints of War

Militarized Landscapes in Vietnam

By David Andrew Biggs
Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

When American forces arrived in Vietnam, they found themselves embedded in historic village and frontier spaces already shaped by many past conflicts. American bases and bombing targets followed spatial and political logics influenced by the...

Bringing Whales Ashore

Oceans and the Environment of Early Modern Japan

By Jakobina K. Arch
Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

Japan today defends its controversial whaling expeditions by invoking tradition—but what was the historical reality? In examining the techniques and impacts of whaling during the Tokugawa period (1603–1868), Jakobina Arch shows that the organized, shore-based...

Cultivating Nature

The Conservation of a Valencian Working Landscape

By Sarah R. Hamilton
Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

Winner of the 2019 Turku Book Award from the European Society for Environmental History The Albufera Natural Park, an area ten kilometers south of Valencia that is widely regarded as the birthplace of paella, has...

The Organic Profit

Rodale and the Making of Marketplace Environmentalism

By Andrew N. Case
Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

Where did the curious idea of buying one’s way to sustainability come from? In no small part, the answer lies in the story of entrepreneurial health reformer J. I. Rodale, his son Robert Rodale, and...

Seismic City

An Environmental History of San Francisco's 1906 Earthquake

By Joanna L. Dyl
Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

On April 18, 1906, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake shook the San Francisco region, igniting fires that burned half the city. The disaster in all its elements — earthquake, fires, and recovery — profoundly disrupted the urban...

Smell Detectives

An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America

By Melanie A. Kiechle
Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

What did nineteenth-century cities smell like? And how did odors matter in the formation of a modern environmental consciousness? Smell Detectives follows the nineteenth-century Americans who used their noses to make sense of the sanitary...

Defending Giants

The Redwood Wars and the Transformation of American Environmental Politics

By Darren Frederick Speece
Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

Giant redwoods are American icons, paragons of grandeur, exceptionalism, and endurance. They are also symbols of conflict and negotiation, remnants of environmental battles over the limits of industrialization, profiteering, and globalization. Since the middle of...

The City Is More Than Human

An Animal History of Seattle

By Frederick L. Brown
Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

Winner of the 2017 Virginia Marie Folkins Award, Association of King County Historical Organizations (AKCHO) Winner of the 2017 Hal K. Rothman Book Prize, Western History Association Seattle would not exist without animals. Animals have...

Environmental Justice in Postwar America

A Documentary Reader

By Christopher W. Wells, Paul S. Sutter

In the decades after World War II, the American economy entered a period of prolonged growth that created unprecedented affluence—but these developments came at the cost of a host of new environmental problems. Unsurprisingly, a...

Driven Wild

How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement

By Paul S. Sutter
Foreword by William Cronon

In its infancy, the movement to protect wilderness areas in the United States was motivated less by perceived threats from industrial and agricultural activities than by concern over the impacts of automobile owners seeking recreational...

Making Climate Change History

Documents from Global Warming's Past

By Joshua P. Howe, Paul S. Sutter

This collection pulls together key documents from the scientific and political history of climate change, including congressional testimony, scientific papers, newspaper editorials, court cases, and international declarations. Far more than just a compendium of source...