Historians and Nature

Projektleitung: Prof. Dr. Ursula Lehmkuhl

During the last 20 years we have seen a number of important and sometimes even drastic transformations in the relations between humanity and the natural world. Thinking about nature has changed and so has academic dealing with nature.  "Doing history" has changed since the environment and nature have become foci of historical concern. How constitutive are particular social-spatial-historical configurations for particular historical practices in the natural workd? What difference do space and geographical location make to an understanding of processes and events in the human world? And what exactly is nature's role as an active participant in historical processes? These and other questions are dealt with in the papers published in "Historians and Nature". The papers are the result of three days of intensive interdisciplinary and transatlantic exchanges between scholars and scientists from a broad range of different disciplines: biology, cultural studies, geography, ecology, early modern history, social and economic history, diplomatic history and also environmental history proper. 

Publications

Lehmkuhl, Ursula (2016): Good Land – Bad Land: Ecological Knowledge and the Settling of the Old Northwest, 1755-1805, in: Experiences, Actors, Spaces: Dimensions of Settler Colonialism in Transnational Perspective, Ed. Eva Bischoff (Special Issue: Settler Colonial Studies, Bd. 1, 2016).

Lehmkuhl, Ursula (2012): Umwelt/Umweltgeschichte, in: Wilfried Loth, Jost Dülfer (Hrsg.), Dimensionen Internationaler Geschichte, München: Oldenbourg Verlag, 233-250.

Lehmkuhl, Ursula (2009): Die Erschließung des amerikanischen Westens. Der amerikanische Grenzraum – die frontier als Region, Prozess und Mythos. In: fundiert, Das Wirtschaftsmagazin der Freien Universität Berlin. Berlin 2009, 61 – 67 (www.fu-berlin.de/fundiert).

Lehmkuhl, Ursula (ed.) (2007): Historians and Nature: Comparative Approaches to Environmental History, Oxford, New York: Berg Publisher (co-edited with Hermann Wellenreuther).

Lehmkuhl, Ursula (2007): Historicizing Nature: Time and Space in German and American Environmental Historiography, in: History and Nature: Comparative Approaches to Environmental History, eds. U. Lehmkuhl / H. Wellenreuther (Oxford, New York: Berg Publishers, 2007), 17-44.

Lehmkuhl, Ursula (2007): Die Historisierung der Natur: Zeit und Raum als Kategorien der Umweltgeschichte, in: Umweltgeschichte, Ed. Bernd Herrmann (Göttingen: Universitätsverlag Göttingen), 121-139.

Lehmkuhl, Ursula (ed.) (2002): Umweltgeschichte – Histoire totale oder Bindestrich-Geschichte? (transl. Environmental History – Histoire totale or hyphenated history?), Vol. 4 "Erfurter Beiträge zur Nordamerikanischen Geschichte", Universität Erfurt (co-edited with Stefanie Schneider).