Ellen Stroud

Reflections from Six Feet Under the Field: Dead Bodies in the Classroom

MY STUDENTS laugh at death. They find it funny how frequently I work dying and dead bodies into our discussions, and are amused by my apparent obsession with body disposal and decay. In my urban environments class, we read about cemeteries and morgues; in my U.S. environmental history survey, we study epidemics and mortality rates; we even work death into my water history course, looking at the problem of corpse disposal after catastrophic floods. My students and I approach these gruesome topics with glee, because they ground us, quite literally, in environmental history. The role of live humans in environmental history is often unclear; dead people, by contrast, are dirt.

It is in death that human bodies most clearly become components of their environments—as organic material, as commodities, and as health hazards. Dead bodies are material, organic things as well as people, and as things, they have been a resource for business entrepreneurs, a focus of environmental health concerns, and a subject of political conflicts over the location of burial sites. In figuring out how to tell the environmental history of a dead body, my students and I move closer to figuring out what "environmental history" is and should be.¹

The undergraduates who sign up for my courses at Oberlin College usually arrive in the classroom quite confident that they already know what environmental history is. Until I begin confusing them, they are sure that environmental history is the history of the environmental movement. Or the history of environmental politics. Or perhaps more broadly, the history of bad things people have done to nature, and the noble few who have tried to make them stop. Maybe, if pressed, my students would include histories of natural things in their definitions: trees, rivers, wolves.

Figure 1. Symbols of Birth and Death
This photograph was taken in an old Mennonite cemetery in Philadelphia in the summer of 2002. A year later, the baby swing was still hanging from the tree amidst the gravestones, most of which are 150 to 200 years old.
Photograph by William H. Stroud, Penguin Photo, Inc.

But environmental history is more than that. At its best, it helps us understand the interactions between the natural and the social worlds, and in so doing, illuminates aspects of political, social, and economic history that we otherwise would not have seen and perhaps would not have thought to look for. How we go about doing that is not always clear, which is why my students get confused on our first day of class, and if I'm lucky, stay that way through midterms. Our central puzzle in class is definitional: What are we studying?

My students have good company in their confusion. The field as a whole struggles with definitions—what counts, what doesn't, in what direction we should be headed. Many of us return time and again to a handful of articles to try to figure out for ourselves and to explain to students what defines our work and sets it apart from that of other historians. Three of the most widely used are the 1990 roundtable on environmental history from the Journal of American History, in which many of the leaders of our field take a stab at definitions; the 1998 historiographical essay by Mart Stewart in The History Teacher, which sets out a taxonomy of the field; and William Cronon's 1992 essay titled "Kennecott Journey," which tells a multi-layered environmental history of an Alaskan town as a way of illustrating the potential of environmental analysis.²

I begin my courses with these articles, using them to explore what are generally understood to be the three branches of the field: the material (how did nature change?); the intellectual (how did ideas about nature change?); and the social and political (how did interactions between people and their dynamic environments change?). These branches inform each other and overlap, but introducing them as distinct can be useful in helping students sort out the different levels on which environmental analysis can operate.

It takes a little while, but once we've read a few of the classics in environmental history, including Cronon's Changes in the Land and Worster's Dust Bowl, my students have got it. They can see the three layers, the range of works that are environmental history, and the many ways in which attention to the role of the environment can lead us to histories that are richer and more complex. They are inspired and intrigued by how Cronon's readings of pollen levels in soils lead to a better understanding of Native American land-use patterns, and by how Worster's analyses of farm policies and economic structures illuminate the human causes of the "natural" disaster of the dirty thirties. They have become persuaded that environmental history can offer them much more than heroic stories of environmental politics or poetic tales of nature.³

But then my students start their own research projects, and they are lost again. A line of students await my office hours as they realize that, on a practical level, they still don't understand what makes something "count" as environmental history. Can a project on tuberculosis, or a cemetery, or a highway be environmental history? Can it somehow not be environmental history? What counts? What does not? And why?

This struggle is a crucial moment in our class, and it leads us not only to better research but also to better critiques of our course readings and more interesting class discussions. What we discover is that questioning what is in and what is out is not merely some sort of disciplinary gatekeeping. Rather, my students have shown me that wrestling with the definitions encourages us to ask better questions. That is what makes this an intellectual puzzle worth working through.

And here is where death comes in handy. There are many ways to study dead bodies, and trying to figure out what the peculiar take of an environmental historian should be is both intriguing and useful. What are dead bodies made of? Are dead bodies today made of different things than they used to be? How have the ways people have thought about the nature of dead bodies affected what they have done with the bodies, where they have put them, and how the corpses have or have not decomposed? How have changes in refrigeration technology, embalming techniques, and cremation practices affected the biological and chemical composition of human remains and the attendant health concerns and disposal challenges? And what is it that makes these questions the stuff of environmental history—their concern with the material body? with ecological systems? with the ever-fuzzy boundary between nature and artifice?

A student of mine had an epiphany in class last term. In the middle of lecture, he blurted out: "I finally get it! Environmental history isn't a topic, it's a methodology!" That's not quite right. I'd be hard pressed to define a particular methodology that my fellow environmental historians and I all share. Yet my student was on the right track. The best environmental history is not defined purely by subject matter (and perhaps not by subject matter at all), but by approach. But we're still figuring out what that approach is.

There is a parallel here to the field of women's history. Early scholarship in that field was concerned primarily with women as subjects, producing histories of great women, invisible women, women in the home and women in politics—putting women into and alongside the master narratives of the discipline. But as the field matured, it became more engaged with gender as a category of analysis, leading to histories that not only added women to stories, but transformed our understanding of the past. Environmental history is ready for a similar transformation. What we need are not more histories of yet another forest, river, or wolf population (and I say this as someone who is finishing a book on forests), but works that use the insights developed in earlier histories of forests and rivers and wolves to tell us things we did not yet know about political history, about economic history, about social history, about History writ large.

Can we possibly consider the environment a category of analysis in anything close to the same way we think about gender? I have been convinced that all history is gendered history. Is all history environmental history? I remain skeptical. But many environmental historians argue that history that pays no attention to space, to place, to nature, to ecological connections, is by definition misunderstanding the past in ways that matter fundamentally. They have my attention, because they are challenging us to think more broadly about the transformative explanatory potential of our work.

Most recently, Ted Steinberg advanced this argument in the June 2002 American Historical Review and in his new book Down to Earth, in which he examines the importance of nature and the environment to histories of everything from the American Civil War to Disney World. But we still have a long way to go. Far from being able to ask political historians, social historians, and economic historians to always ask our questions, we're only just beginning to take ourselves seriously in this claim—what does it look like to approach all historical questions as environmental historians?⁴

Eric Klinenberg, in his 2002 book Heat Wave, offers a clue. Rather than accepting city officials' explanations that the 1995 Chicago heat wave was a "natural" disaster, he investigates the social causes of heat-related deaths and the environmental implications of political decisions. Most of the people who died in the heat wave were older people who lived alone, but keeping the focus on each individual in each apartment misses the broader story. The environments in which those apartments were located made the difference between life and death. Was there a barbershop with air conditioning down the street? Was it safe for an older woman to wait for an air-conditioned bus alone? Would anyone think to look in on an old man who lived by himself? Klinenberg's careful attention to environment (and not just the heat) demonstrates that the crisis was not brought about by weather, but by choice.⁵

What I find most intriguing about the questions posed by Klinenberg is the emphasis his analysis suggests placing on the human body in environmental history. Bodies don't immediately seem like the stuff of our field, but trying to figure out how they might be is one way to explore the potential of the kinds of questions we ask. How, exactly, have human bodies been connected to and influenced by their environments? Can we think about people as actual, literal, ecological components of their environments? If so, will that change our telling of histories?

We have begun to see some scholarship on the body in environmental history. Most of this new work has been in the intellectual and political branches of the field, from scholars who ask how ideas about the nature of bodies have changed over time, and how those ideas have influenced people's interactions with nature. Christopher Sellers was one of the first environmental historians to move in this direction, in his article "Thoreau's Body: Towards an Embodied Environmental History." In that piece, though, Thoreau's body remains almost entirely metaphorical: Sellers asks us to consider how Thoreau's particular social and physical place in the world affected his understanding of and influence on nature.⁶

Conevery Bolton Valencius, in her new book Health of the Country, and Linda Nash, in her recent article in Environmental History, continue in the metaphorical and intellectual vein. Both authors investigate how people's ideas about health, about the functioning of bodies, and about the environmental causes of disease influenced ideas about nature and the shaping of landscapes: Settlers drained swamps, planted trees, and irrigated fields to create what they believed would be healthier places for human bodies.⁷

Neil Maher, in another recent article in Environmental History, brings us closer to the material body itself. He argues that gendered understandings of both the environment and of people's bodily experiences within it affected definitions of citizenship, the shape of political programs, and transformations in landscapes during the 1930s. Bodies changed, too: Skinny, unhealthy boys were transformed into strong, robust men through their work in the Civilian Conservation Corps—and their labor, their manliness, and the nature they were reshaping (and which was reshaping them) were all constructed as central to the health of a nation in crisis. Without understanding bodies and their environments, we cannot fully understand the New Deal.⁸

The most exciting environmental histories of the body take the materiality even further, considering the human body as a chemical and biological component of larger environments. Nancy Langston's research, for example, ties physical changes in some fish populations to rising levels of hormones in rivers near cities, which she then links to patterns in the use of synthetic chemicals, possibly including birth control pills. Chemicals enter the human body, are processed, expelled, flushed into the rivers, and then enter the bodies of fish. Human bodies are part of an ecological cycle: There are environmental consequences and environmental histories of eating a hamburger, of washing with soap, of taking medicine. Considering bodies as material components of changing environments, as Langston does, reveals surprising connections between such seemingly disparate developments as the liberating medical advance of the birth control pill and dramatic changes in the bodies of fish.⁹

Such thoughts about the body are bringing environmental history and the history of public health ever closer, as demonstrated by Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner in their new book, Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution. In this history of the lead and vinyl industries, Markowitz and Rosner draw explicit connections between industrial pollution, political maneuvering, and the changing material composition of human bodies, demonstrating that our bodies are quite literally and dramatically shaped by those with power over our environments. The writings of Markowitz, Rosner, and Langston tell us things we should know—but did not—about the world we have built. They are reshaping what we understand to be the most important questions about the American past.¹⁰

My students at Oberlin are helping me as I struggle to incorporate these scholars' new insights into my own research. As an experiment, I offered a first-year seminar in the fall of 2002 on "The Body in Environmental History." I wasn't sure how students fresh out of high school would approach these questions of discipline and definition, and I was skeptical about the possibilities the topic offered for first-year research. But my students proved my skepticism unnecessary, and instead helped move my own thinking forward.

All through the course—in our reading, writing, and research—we struggled to focus on all aspects of the definitional question: How is what we are doing environmental history of the body? Where is the environment? Where is the history? And where is the body? The students' research topics ranged from tattoo art to tuberculosis to the disposal of cremation ash, and they enthusiastically wrestled with their sources and methodologies.

Tuberculosis was one of the more straightforward topics, though my student found it an interesting challenge to remain focused on the body, rather than the disease. At first, her research centered on how ideas about nature and disease influenced the development of sanitariums in the nineteenth century as pastoral retreats from the bad air of cities. But as she kept pressing herself to place material bodies firmly in the center of her story, she focused her research on determining which bodies benefited most from the retreats. Many of the sickest patients lacked the social networks and financial security to weather an extended absence from home and work. They found the cure both less accessible and less beneficial when taken. A retreat to nature, she found, cured more wealthy bodies than poor ones.¹¹

The student working on tattoo art found it much easier to keep bodies at the center of his story; environment was trickier. Ultimately, he concentrated on the changing technologies of tattoo art, arguing that new machinery, new dyes, and new techniques of design made the art form safer, more accessible, and ultimately more acceptable for more kinds of bodies—no longer a marker of a particular class or job. His examination of environment remained largely metaphorical. He examined how the information that a tattoo relays about a body's proper place in space and society has changed over time.¹²

It was the paper about the disposal of cremation ash that truly approached a leap to a material environmental history of the body. In the course of her research, my student investigated the changing composition of cremation ash in the United States—she wanted to know, for example, if there was more mercury in the ash today, from dental fillings. She also examined changing ideas about disposal of ash, which she hypothesized were related to increasing percentages of Americans choosing cremation, which might then be connected to increasingly scarce space in traditional cemeteries. She had difficulty tracking down the detailed sources she had hoped to find, and her final paper ultimately took a less material approach, focusing instead on the increased acceptance of cremation as a body disposal option in the twentieth-century United States. But some of our best class discussions were inspired by her initial hypothesis: As the composition of bodies being burned changed, and as cremation became more common, what had been seen as a cleaner, more earth-friendly form of body disposal requiring little formal regulation became instead an environmental hazard.¹³

Gruesome, but intriguing. And it is in large part the combined insights of such student researchers, together with the work of Nash, Valencius, Sellers, Maher, Langston, Markowitz, and Rosner, that now push my own research in new directions. My students' work asks me to think hard about how changes in ideas about nature, in technologies of interacting with nature, and in the material nature of both bodies and their larger environments all shape the social and political worlds in which we live.

In my new research on dead bodies, I am trying to stay focused on those big questions, asking not just what an environmental history of the dead body would be, but why anyone ought to care. That seems to me the crucial point. Just because there is an environmental history of dead bodies doesn't mean it is worth telling. Do we learn anything significant about American history by examining dead bodies as parts of their environments? The closer I look, the more I think we might.

I began my dead body project while I was researching the successful protests to close the Trinity Church Crematorium, which operated in Harlem from the 1970s until the early 1990s. Initially, I was looking at the crematorium protests as merely another campaign against another polluting industry in a neighborhood with more than its share of toxins. But the protests were not just about bodies being burned. They were about the burning of specific bodies—modified bodies. The protesters argued that these bodies were literally toxic waste—they had too much mercury in the teeth, for example, and too many batteries in the pacemakers left in the chests. Though the specifics of their complaints were difficult to substantiate, their central insight was true, and surprising: Many dead bodies are toxic. And this very real, material problem reveals much about the history of health care, about the political geography of Manhattan, and about assumptions about the "nature" of human bodies.¹⁴

Figure 2. The Life of Death.
Oberlin math major Samuel Marcus has been documenting the life of Death ("he's just this guy") since the fall of 2000. See more of Death at http://www.deathgetsawebsite.com, where Marcus describes his project as "an instrospective look on western theophilosophical archetypes and metaphysical models in the context of anthropomorphic societal constructs."
Artwork by Samuel Marcus

The crematorium story led me to follow the journey of other dead bodies in Harlem. I am still in the beginning stages of the project, but the line of inquiry is leading me in some interesting directions. I knew, for example, that African Americans of means had lavish funerals in Harlem in the twenties. I didn't know until I began reading obituaries that afterward, their bodies often were sent south for burial, a fact that raises new questions about social and financial connections to the South, about access to land for burial in the North, and about changing technologies of transportation and body preservation, allowing for shipping over distance.¹⁵

As I continue my work on dead bodies, I find that I ask the most interesting questions when I press myself in the same ways that my students and I press each other in class. How is this project environmental history? What is the role of nature in my story? In what ways am I concerned with changing ideas about nature? About material changes in nature? About the political and social implications of the interactions between those changes? Some day, my students and I may decide that all history is environmental history, but for the moment, it is the question that intrigues us. Figuring out what counts as environmental history—for me, and for my students—is not about gatekeeping. It is about pressing ourselves to use the insights of environmental history in new ways.

Ellen Stroud is an assistant professor of history at Oberlin College, where she is finishing a book on the connections between urbanization and reforestation in the northeastern United States before turning her full attention to dead bodies. Some of the trees are dead, too.

Notes

For helpful comments and advice on this essay, I would like to thank Elizabeth Blackmar, Christopher Capozzola, Michael Fisher, Martha Jones, Neil Maher, Heather Miller, Adam Rome, Ellen Wurtzel, and Zachary Schrag. I also would like to thank David Kamitsuka and the Oberlin College First Year Seminar Program, and the members of my first body seminar: Emily Doubilet, Martha Friedman, Elia Gilbert, Miriam Lakes, Stacey Litner, Kate Lurain, Elana Riffle, Bea Rommel, Jimmy Rosenheim, Ben Sinclair, Lauren Stensland, Gus Visscher, and Ellie Wallace.

^1.� Ann Fabian suggested such lines of analysis in her plenary session address at the 2002 meeting of the American Society for Environmental History in Denver.

^2.� William Cronon, "Kennecott Journey: The Paths Out of Town," in Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America's Western Past, ed. William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), 28–51; Mart A. Stewart, "Environmental History: Profile of a Developing Field," History Teacher 31 (1998): 351–68; Donald Worster, Alfred Crosby, Richard White, Carolyn Merchant, William Cronon, and Stephen J. Pyne, "[Environmental History Roundtable]," Journal of American History 76 (1990): 1087–1147.

^3.� William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983); Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).

^4.� Ted Steinberg, "Down to Earth: Nature, Agency, and Power in History," American Historical Review 107, (2002): 798–820; Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature's Role in American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

^5.� Eric Klinenberg, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

^6.� Christopher Sellers, "Thoreau's Body: Towards an Embodied Environmental History,"Environmental History 4 (1999): 486–514.

^7.� Linda Nash, "Finishing Nature: Harmonizing Bodies and Environments in Late Nineteenth-Century California,"Environmental History 8 (2003): 25–52; Conevery Bolton Valencius, The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land (New York: Basic Books, 2002).

^8.� Neil Maher, "A New Deal Body Politic: Landscape, Labor, and the Civilian Coservation Corps,"Environmental History 7 (2002): 435–61.

^9.� Nancy Langston, "Gender Transformed: Endocrine Disruptors in the Environment," in Seeing Nature Through Gender, ed. Virginia Scharff (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003), 129–166.

^10.� Gerald E. Markowitz and David Rosner, Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

^11.� Martha Friedman, "Class, Tuberculosis, and the Sanitarium Movement," final paper for FYSP 132, Oberlin College, Fall 2002, author's files. Friedman's work draws on both primary and secondary sources, including Barbara Bates, Bargaining for Life: A Social History of Tuberculosis, 1876–1938 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992).

^12.� Paul Visscher, "The Tattoo Renaissance: From Marginal to Mainstream," final paper for FYSP 132, Oberlin College, Fall 2002, author's files. Visscher's work relies heavily on secondary sources, including Margo DeMello, Bodies of Inscription: A Cultural History of the Modern Tattoo Community (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000).

^13.� Miriam Lakes, "Cremation: Changing Environmental Perspectives," final paper for FYSP 132, Oberlin College, Fall 2002, author's files. Lakes uses a variety of primary and secondary sources, including Stephen Prothero, Purified by Fire: A History of Cremation in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

^14.� Environmental and Consumer Affairs Committee Resolution Re: Trinity Church Crematorium, 17 October 1991, from New York City Community Board 9 records, October 1991; Nick Ravo, "Residents Say Sewage Is Not the Only Smell," New York Times, 18 August 1991, 1:32; Letter from New York State Senator Franz S. Leichter to constituents, 18 September 1991, from New York City Community Board 9 records, October 1991; "Trinity Crematorium Burns Out in Harlem," Crain's New York Business 2 October 1992, clipping from the "Cemeteries" Vertical File, New York City Municipal Reference Library. The protesters voiced fears about the incineration of pacemakers despite the 1981 passage of a law in New York State requiring that bodies delivered to crematoria be certified as battery-free. See McKinney's Session Laws of New York, 204th Regular Session, 1981, Chapter 903. Such laws are now widely in place in the United States and elsewhere, but there continue to be occasional reports of bodies exploding during cremation when doctors neglect to remove the devices. See, for example, Camillo Fracassini, "Blasted Are the Pacemakers," Scotland on Sunday, 19 May 2002, 14; and David Rider, "How Cremation is Supposed to Work," The Ottawa Citizen, 21 February 2002, A10.

^15.� See, for example, the obituary for Doris Heard, New York Amsterdam News, 14 March 1923, 9, whose body was sent to Georgia; the obituary for Anthony John Evans, New York Amsterdam News, 21 March 1923, 9, whose body was sent to North Carolina; the obituary for Mack C. Gholson, New York Amsterdam News, 11 April 1923, 9, whose body was sent to Virginia; and the obiturary for John W. Jones, New York Amsterdam News, 18 April 1923, 9, whose body was sent to Florida. For a general discussion of African American funeral traditions, see Karla F. C. Holloway, Passed On: African American Memorial Stories (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002).

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.