SPECIAL ISSUEAndrea Westermann & Christian Rohr (Eds.): Climate and Beyond. The Production of Knowledge about the Earth as a Signpost of Social Change
The recent historicization of today’s climate-related studies and concerns has been invigorating the history of the earth and environmental sciences. Much of the new work comes from environmental historians. In environmental history, the desire to learn more about society by analyzing its ‘other’ side – nature and the environment – has long been a driving force. Environmental historians often deal with the same topics as historians of the geosciences: the climate, rivers, oceans, mountains, the atmosphere, natural resources, or nuclear waste storage. In doing so, they very successfully extract the stories and images society has and creates of itself or the basic principles of its economic and political organization by examining a society’s relationship to its natural environment.
In a similar approach, this HSR Special Issue “Climate and Beyond” aims to explore the history of the earth sciences: What does the production of geoscientific knowledge tell us about the social world generating and demanding this knowledge? What can we learn about societies, their norms and collective mentalities from analyzing how people dealt with planet earth, its history, climate, surface patterns, or the mechanisms underlying its dynamic structure?
The collected articles suggest that environmental history and the history of the earth and environmental sciences are now converging in three fields of research: analyzing the politics of deep time, reconstructing the making of natural disaster knowledge, and exploring the national and transnational devices and strategies of earth governance established in the twentieth century.
Furthermore, this HSR contains a Mixed Issue.
Abstracts of all contributions are available on our website <http://www.gesis.org/hsr/>. For orders, please contact <hsr-order@gesis.org>.
CONTENTS
SPECIAL ISSUE - Climate & Beyond
Andrea Westermann & Christian Rohr Climate and Beyond. The Production of Knowledge about the Earth as a Signpost of Social Change. An Introduction. p. 7.
Matthias Dörries Politics, Geological Past, and the Future of the Earth. p. 22.
Christoph Rosol Hauling Data. Anthropocene Analogues, Paleoceanography and Missing Paradigm Shifts. p. 37.
Bernhard C. Schär Earth Scientists as Time Travelers and Agents of Colonial Conquest. Swiss Naturalists in the Dutch East Indies. p. 67.
Lorena B. Valderrama Seismic Forces and State Power: The Creation of the Chilean Seismological Service at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century. p. 81.
Kerry Smith Earthquake Prediction in Occupied Japan. p. 105.
Brian Rumsey From Flood Flows to Flood Maps: The Understanding of Flood Probabilities in the United States. p. 134.
Andrea Westermann Geology and World Politics: Mineral Resource Appraisals as Tools of Geopolitical Calculation, 1919-1939. p. 151.
Perrin Selcer Fabricating Unity: The FAO-UNESCO Soil Map of the World. p. 174.
Christian Kehrt Gondwana’s Promises. German Geologists in Antarctica between Basic Science and Resource Exploration in the Late 1970s. p. 202.
Elena Aronova Environmental Monitoring in the Making: From Surveying Nature’s Resources to Monitoring Nature’s Change. p. 222.
Naomi Oreskes How Earth Science Has Become a Social Science. p. 246.
Ola Uhrqvist One Model to Fit All? The Pursuit of Integrated Earth System Models in GAIM and AIMES. p. 271.
MIXED ISSUE
Jørgen Møller, Alexander Schmotz & Svend-Erik Skaaning Economic Crisis and Democratic Breakdown in the Interwar Years: A Reassessment. p. 301.
Paul Puschmann, Nina Van den Driessche, Per-Olof Grönberg, Bart Van de Putte & Koen Matthijs From Outsiders to Insiders? Partner Choice and Marriage among Internal Migrants in Antwerp, Rotterdam & Stockholm, 1850-1930. p. 319.