Pacific Historical Review 

About: Pacific Historical Review is an academic journal. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Politics & China. It has an ISSN identifier of 0030-8684. Over the lifetime, 3090 publication(s) have been published receiving 15689 citation(s).

American Environmental History: The Development of a New Historical Field

Abstract: OVER THE LAST hundred years some of the classic works in American history have dealt with the relationship between the natural environment and American society, but environmental history as a distinct field is a far more recent development. Early works on the environment clustered in western history. Frederick Jackson Turner in "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" and Walter Prescott Webb in The Great Plains made the physical environment central to their analyses. Later, James Malin rejected the often crude environmental determinism of Webb and Turner, and attempted instead to engage in an ecological analysis which stressed the complexity and interdependency of the relationship between human social institutions and nature. Malin is a likely founder of modern environmental history, but he himself disclaimed the description of his work as ecological history. After Malin, direct examination of the historical relationship between society and the natural environment languished. Western history itself declined in influence during the 1960s, and although younger scholars within the field continued to do significant work on environmental topics, western histo-