Imaginings
stories, creative nonfiction, poetry, and other imaginative accounts of the natural world
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Making Tracks: Teresa Spezio
By Teresia Spezio As a child, I had first-hand experience with air and water pollution. I grew up in the city of Pittsburgh, which was once the steel making capital of the United States. I remember trips on the Parkway East with my family driving past the Jones & Laughlin primary steel mill where men…
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The Brewing Boom of the Middle Ages
By Richard W. Ungar Until 1200, beer brewing in Europe was largely a small-scale affair. Hops soon changed that. Based on practices in Bremen and other ports along the North Sea coast of Germany, a seemingly minor change laid the foundation for a booming industry in Renaissance Europe, one with a scale and reach unmatched…
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Q&A with Jessica J. Lee
For this Bookshelf post, we asked author and RCC alumna Jessica J. Lee a few questions about her work and her 2017 book, Turning: A Swimming Memoir. What is the subject of your book and how did it come about? Turning is a hybrid work of nature writing and memoir, following a year I spent…
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The Reinheitsgebot: Between German Consumer Culture and the European Market
By Robert Terrell On 15 July, 1987, West German federal president Richard von Weizsäcker received a letter from one Andreas Z., which began: “Much has been written about the Reinheitsgebot lately.€
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Saturday Morning’s Politics of Seeing
Nancy Jacobs, Professor of History at Brown University, Rhode Island (USA), provides a rich and personal account of practicing interdisciplinary research. On a field trip to uncover knowledge and beliefs about the African grey parrot in Cameroon, Nancy worked together with her brother (an experienced birder) and her field assistant (an ornithologist), gaining deep insights…
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Review of “Disrupted Landscapes: State, Peasants and the Politics of Land in Postsocialist Romania” by Stefan Dorondel
by Marco Armiero Marco Armiero is director of the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. This post originally appeared on Entitle Blog – A Collaborative Writing Project on Political Ecology and is reposted with kind permission of the author. How many times have we repeated to each other that there is…
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Empire in a Bottle: Tales of a Beer Historian
By Malcolm F. Purinton “Why don’t you write your literature review about alcohol?€ my African colonialism professor asked me during my master’s degree. “I can do that?!€ I replied. The possibility of researching and writing on the history of beer and alcohol was, honestly, mind-blowing.
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Bookshelf Special Feature Part 2: National Park Science
A Review of National Park Science: Jane Carruthers’ Magnum Opus by Bernhard Gißibl * Part 1 features Jane Carruthers’ introduction to her book and a comment by Libby Robin. A full review of National Park Science by Bernhard Gißibl will appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Environment and History. Jane Carruthers’ National Park Science is the first comprehensive…