British electrification began in the 1880s but it was the late 1920s before the 'GridIron' was constructed providing the capacity for uniformly accessible electricity. This enabled electricity to touch people's lives in the intimacy of their own homes, and provided cheaper electricity to workplaces, causing a shift from local suppliers to national coordination. Consequences for pollution, its visual impact on rural and urban landscapes, and an unparalleled and rapid intrusion on property rights were considered at the time. It was these effects that were the most controversial, although the damage through fossil fuels was arguably much greater with hindsight. The provision of electricity across the whole country took decades and was subject to exogenous pressures and was influenced by individuals, institutions and innovations. Electrification generally, and the Grid in particular has received scant attention from historians, especially regarding its environmental and social impacts and the fuel it consumed. This work tells the story of electricity as a commodity; initially sold by hundreds of individual companies operating generating stations providing a local electrical supply, and how this slowly transformed into a nationally coordinated system. The Grid, a vast network of towers and cables, transmitted bulk electricity generated by large power stations burning enormous quantities of coal. This work considers how this affected the environments in which people lived and worked and how these changes impacted the 'natural' environment. This work has only just begun to explore the changes that electricity brought spatially and how it impacted lifestyles and working methods. It explores how change was negotiated by actors and considers 'unintentional conservation', brought about by a drive to continuously improve efficiency and which occurred before the need for such environmental protection was well understood.

While multiple questions drive this project, one fundamental query lays at its center. How did American approaches to mortality, their own and others, during the early national period (roughly 1770 to 1850) shape both their understanding of themselves and their environment? The answer to that question exposes a distinct set of values revolving around preparation for death, and acknowledgment and respect for their own (and others mortality), which Americans imbibed from various and disparate sources. More specifically, the first half of the project examines how the letters they wrote and read, the sermons they listened to, the mourning rituals they practiced, the burial grounds they utilized, and the novels and poetry they consumed all combined to create a shared knowledge base and approach to death during the early republic. Uniquely, these principles found strength through a conscious linking of mortality to the natural world. Americans understood their own death as part of a larger, both positive and negative, perfected natural system created and perpetuated by God. The American approach towards mortality, however, was not static and the nineteenth century bore witness to the emergence of a sentimentalized, sanitized, and less human inclusive vision of mortality during 1830s and beyond. Ironically, nature remained central to the way Americans experienced death, however, in a consciously aesthetic, romantic, controlled manner. It is written into the present where rolling and manicured lawns combine together with still ponds to create bucolic scenes of peaceful rest among scenes of beauty. The old, grim, but no less natural lessons of worms, dirt, decay, and dissolution no longer hold sway, ignoring the vital and humbling connection between human bodies and the natural world that was understood in the early republic. This shift (and the focus of the second half of the dissertation), was spurred on by numerous interrelated but distinct factors ranging from urban growth, disease, foreign immigration, and changing cultural sentiments. Americans during the 1830s, 40s, and 50s redefined their relationship to death and in doing so consciously turned away from a vibrant, dynamic, and humbling vision of mortality grounded in the natural world.

<p> “Perceiving Mindscapes: An Intellectual History of Transnational Development of Landscape Architecture in France and the United States, 1852-1894” traces the landscape architecture thought of several key individuals as their thoughts occurred in a network of park development between France and the United States. This study contributes to the history of parks, constructed or preserved, and their perceived impacts on humanity. Specifically, I examine the writings of Frederick Law Olmsted, Calvert Vaux, Adolphe Alphand, Édouard André, and Maurice de Vilmorin. All landscape architects and Vilmorin, a horticulturalist, wrote professing a proclivity to aiding city dwellers (directly or indirectly) by designing urban parks for recreational use. I contend that these landscape architects designed urban parks with their perceived notions of what city dwellers may have needed or wanted, without the ability of knowing or addressing these needs or wants. By tracking these designs internationally, I note how French and American landscape architects enabled one another to rapidly develop landscape architecture around the concepts of internal ailments, aesthetics, pragmatism, and longevity.  </p>

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of History / James E. Sherow / This project examines ecological change in Lake Huron during the nineteenth and twentieth century and investigates the causative role of the commercial fisheries in that change. The repeated failures of various regional and international efforts designed to improve management of the lake’s fisheries are also examined. The fundamental argument is that economic considerations were the primary motivations for policy development related to the Great Lakes fisheries. Historically management programs and legislation were shaped by local and regional economic interests. The central focus of this project is Lake Huron. Anthropogenic changes in that lake’s environment dramatically affected the lives and relationships of its non-human inhabitants. The same changes also transformed relationships among human beings who relied on the lake’s resources. Commercial fishermen who operated in the waters of both the United States and Canada relied on the lake for their livelihood, but as the twentieth century commenced the supply of marketable fishes decreased. Competition accelerated and fishermen introduced new technologies and increased their quantity of fishing gear in an effort to maximize their catches in response to fluctuating returns. Economic considerations were of primary concern to both fishermen and government bureaucrats. Lake Huron’s status as an international borderland further complicated the situation. Analysts in both the United States and Canada recognized the dramatically changing conditions of the lakes as reflected through the woes of the commercial fishery. Nonetheless, the germane state, provincial and national governments repeatedly failed in their attempts to develop a cooperative management plan. By the second half of the twentieth century Lake Huron’s embattled biome stood in stark contrast to the once seemingly endless numbers of fishes and flora that sustained the lake’s web of life for hundreds of years.

This study examines changing conceptions of the Southern Gulf Islands, an archipelago on the coast of British Columbia, through the twentieth century. By drawing on ideas put forward by government officials, journalists, residents, and travellers it develops an explanation for how and why a conception of the Gulf Islands as a ‘special’ or ‘unique’ pastoral landscape emerged as a result of interactions between individuals and groups, and their political, social, economic, and physical environments. It then examines how these ideas in turn influenced the development of land-use policies and programs, and in particular how an innovative, overarching planning commission called the Islands Trust emerged in 1974 as a mechanism devoted to limiting development and defending the Islands as a pastoral landscape of leisure. More than reflecting such a pastoral depiction of the Islands, the initiatives undertaken by the newly formed Trust ascribed to the idea that a defining lifestyle, characterized by arcadian pursuits such as mixed farming, boutique logging, handicrafts, or the arts, was legitimate for such a landscape. By embracing such a conception of the Gulf Islands’ environment, the Islands Trust endeavoured to preserve and create this landscape through an agenda that supported farmland, forest, and open space retention, and encouraged those activities deemed to be in keeping with the unique ‘character’ of the Islands. The initial work of enshrining the pastoral ‘character’ of the Islands into land-use planning policies and programs by the Trust laid a framework for ongoing efforts to shape the landscape, economy, development, and identity of the region into the present day. / Graduate / 0334

This dissertation argues the foundation of Spain's first national park, the Parque Nacional de la Montaña de Covadonga, was the culmination of a four-century-long historical development in which Spaniards redefined the manner in which they conceived of and interacted with nature. The establishment of the Parque Nacional de la Montaña de Covadonga resulted from two different historical processes, the formation of empirical science in Spain and the pursuit of noble hunting, which converged in the late nineteenth-century in the form of species protection and the environmental conscience it reflected. This environmental conscience permeated discourses on Spanish reinvigoration including those of nobleman, sportsman, and politician Pedro José Pidal y Bernaldo de Quirós whose own articulation of this environmental consciousness materialized in the form of the Parque Nacional de la Montaña de Covadonga which legislatively meshed species and landscape protection for the first time in Spain in 1916.

This dissertation argues the foundation of Spain's first national park, the Parque Nacional de la Montaña de Covadonga, was the culmination of a four-century-long historical development in which Spaniards redefined the manner in which they conceived of and interacted with nature. The establishment of the Parque Nacional de la Montaña de Covadonga resulted from two different historical processes, the formation of empirical science in Spain and the pursuit of noble hunting, which converged in the late nineteenth-century in the form of species protection and the environmental conscience it reflected. This environmental conscience permeated discourses on Spanish reinvigoration including those of nobleman, sportsman, and politician Pedro José Pidal y Bernaldo de Quirós whose own articulation of this environmental consciousness materialized in the form of the Parque Nacional de la Montaña de Covadonga which legislatively meshed species and landscape protection for the first time in Spain in 1916.

Environmental history recorded in sediments can reconstruct estuarine water quality metrics, such as dissolved oxygen, through the use of geochemical and biological proxies. I collected sediment cores from two locations in the Coos Bay Estuary, at South Slough and Haynes Inlet, spanning from ~1680 AD to the present. To address the historical record of water column oxygen in the estuary I measured a suite of geochemical proxies including organic matter, magnetic susceptibility, and redox-sensitive metals to calibrate against a detailed 15-year record of dissolved oxygen. High visual correlation of these proxies and recent water quality supports the interpretation of long-term water quality from sediment cores. Finally, my semi-quantitative analysis describes a complex history where potential low water quality has increased at South Slough, while decreasing or staying stable at Haynes inlet over the last 300 years, though erosion indicators profoundly increase at both sites across the Euro-Amercian settlement horizon. This history was explained in terms of changing land use (logging, splash dams) effects on erosion and organic matter loading, oceanic vs terrestrial water sources, and the role of the dredged Coos Bay channel affecting the replenishment of estuary water.

This dissertation provides an ecocritical history of Robinson Forest, a southern Appalachian forest owned by the University of Kentucky. The objective of this dissertation is to examine the literary, environmental, and cultural history of Robinson Forest from its geologic formation to the present, paying particular attention to the production of Robinson Forest as a discrete space with evolving, contested articulations of meaning and value. It begins by tracing the natural history and Native American use of the old-growth forest before chronicling the massive environmental disruption of clear-cutting the forest during the 1910s by the Mowbray & Robinson Lumber Company of Cincinnati. Then, it explores the university's ownership of the forest through its research agenda and natural resource speculation, while also tracing student and environmental protest about the university's use of the forest. Specifically, this dissertation examines the work of foresters and academic researchers, lawyers and creative writers, university administrators and environmental activists whose labor has led to an array of literary productions - deeds, newspapers, academic publications, legal decisions, poems, non-fiction essays - that convey competing understandings and articulations of the forest's value: ecological, aesthetic, monetary. By probing these conflicting values, it complicates the progressive narratives of science, higher education, public policy, and environmentalism throughout the 20th and into the 21st Century. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that throughout the 20th Century, the university has repeatedly closed off the forest from "the people" of eastern Kentucky that the donor directed the land to serve. In the 21st Century, then, the university, with assistance from "the people," will need to rearticulate its use of the forest, encouraging the long-term economic, environmental, social, and cultural sustainability of Robinson Forest.

This dissertation, "Camille Was No Lady But Katrina Was A Bitch: Gender, Hurricanes & Popular Culture," uses the history of the hurricane naming process to compare the shifting environmental, scientific, and cultural changes taking place throughout the world during the twentieth century. It argues four major points: first, once gender is assigned to an object and adopted publicly en mass, it cannot be removed. Second, hurricane names have segregated hurricanes from other natural disasters in public consciousness. From "witches" and "bitches" to "monsters" and "menaces," the hurricane in popular memory calls forward explicitly gendered imagery; earthquakes, typhoons, dust bowls, plagues of insects, and other natural disasters do not carry the same sort of gendered associations. Third, by tracing the development and acceptance of the U.S. state-implemented hurricane naming process, it is possible to trace the spread of American gendered terms throughout the world. As illustrated throughout, gendered American meteorological terms are also found in global references to storms proving that hurricane names and descriptions are a form of both ecological and soft-power cultural imperialism. Finally, and most importantly, the socio-political implications tied to name and descriptive choices used with hurricanes have had a profound impact on storm perception globally. Introduced in 1954 by the U.S. Weather Bureau as a female-only hurricane naming system, hurricane names were rapidly adopted by other countries under U.S. meteorological control in the post-World War II era. With fears over Cold War politics both abroad and at home, the feminized hurricane was not just a weapon of mass destruction to be harnessed but also a potential tool of cultural domination through descriptive means. By the 1970s, with a discussion of feminism worldwide, references to the female-named storms helped produce dualistic images of "stormy women" and the "Women's Lib Storm" that were politically useful to men and the state when they felt threatened by feminism. Meanwhile, today's references to Hurricane Katrina, and later Sandy, as a "bitch" on Twitter reappear in blogs around the world. Due to this, the feminization of hurricanes has created and sustained a misogynistic, pervasively American form of vilification of women in media portrayals that continues to this day. / acase@tulane.edu