Environmental History

A photograph taken during the Great Depression prompts Roger Hudson to re-evaluate Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Victorian Methodists, writes Stuart Andrews, carried on the keen interest in scientific subjects that had once been shown by John Wesley.

Burke and Wills crossed the continent of Australia; but, writes S.H. Woolf, tragedy marked their way back.

In the age of the Encyclopaedists, writes Wilfrid Blunt, Linnaeus applied his great classifying talents to the world of plants.

William Gardener assesses the handiwork of Sir William Jackson Hooker and John Lindley.

Although “renowned for their interest in profits and dividends,” the Directors of the East India Company encouraged their servants to explore the field of natural history; Mildred Archer describes how British naturalists, when recording their researches, often employed a staff of gifted Indian artists.

The inward movement of European peoples and the southward migration of Bantu tribes supply the key to South African history and, write Edna and Frank Bradlow, to the problems that confront the country today.

On November 17th, 1874, when Henry Morton Stanley marched away from Bagamoyo on what was to be his greatest exploring achievement, he was retracing his own steps of 1871 along the well-worn caravan route used by Burton and Speke in 1857; by Speke and Grant in 1860, and, writes C.E. Hamshere, many Arab traders before them.

A geological discovery in the 1820s, writes A.D. Orange, altered the views of scholars upon the Mosaic story of the Creation and the Flood.

Louis C. Kleber describes how the United States purchased Alaska from the Russian Government at a price of just two cents an acre.