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from the editor
| NOW THAT ARTICLES carry abstracts on the title page, the Editor's Note is no longer needed to convey in-depth information about each issue's contents. I do, however, intend to continue to use this page as a forum for introducing the articles and for discussing journal-related matters. |
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All of the articles in this issue focus on underappreciated and underexplored aspects of the environmental history field. They all also touch on labor issues, directly or indirectly. Gunther Peck's "The Nature of Labor" offers a comprehensive analysis of the interactions (or lack thereof) between labor history and environmental history, and suggests ways for future researchers to bridge the gaps between the two fields. Mark Hersey's "Hints and Suggestions to Farmers" highlights the environmental dimension of George Washington Carver's writings and activities, a dimension that most previous researchers have missed. As Hersey points out, many of Carver's "hints and suggestions" were designed to persuade rural southern laborers to pursue sustainable agricultural methods. William Husband's "Correcting Nature's Mistakes" draws on children's literature to explore the multiple dimensions of environmental pedagogy in the Soviet Union before and during the Stalinist era. As he notes, most children's stories of this era were simplified versions of the propaganda directed at the proletariat, but there was always a "little corner of freedom" (to borrow Doug Weiner's apt phrase) where writers could tell more complicated stories about human/nature interactions without falling victim to censorship. Joy Parr's "Smells Like?" focuses on the role of the olfactory sense in establishing and reinforcing public perceptions about environmental risks and dangers. Like Peter Coates's "The Strange Stillness of the Past" (October 2005 issue) Parr's essay reminds environmental historians of the need to pay closer attention to the senses as they craft their stories. Finally, Benjamin Weil's "Conservation, Exploitation, and Cultural Change" uses The Indian Forester (the official journal of the British colonial administration) to retrace the evolution of Indian forest policy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and to draw broader conclusions about British colonial forestry. As Weil notes, India was the main testing ground for British forestry theory: for better and worse, policies that developed there tended to spread quickly to Britain's other colonies around the globe.
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THE FIRST "SOURCES" essay was well received, so I plan to publish more in future issues. If you are utilizing an unusual source that is of potential value to environmental historians, I urge you to send either a short synopsis or a completed manuscript to me as soon as possible (eheditor@ucsc.edu). The target length for a "Sources" submission is around 1,000 to 1,500 words (roughly the same as for a "Gallery" submission), but longer ones are welcomed as well. Graphics are optional for "Sources" essays, but I encourage you to submit at least one image because they are often useful for illustrating your main points. Feel free to use your own research as an example, but be sure to point out ways that your source material (or your approach to the sources) can be used more broadly by other researchers.
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| THE ANNUAL ASEH and FHS conference is one of the best places to identify work that might be considered for future issues of Environmental History. I encourage panelists to submit their papers for consideration once they have turned them into polished articles. I also encourage conference participants to let me know about any papers they feel should be published in Environmental History. I will then contact the authors directly and ask them to consider submitting their papers to the journal. |
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MARK CIOC
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