Environmental History

William Gardener investigates the history of American flora and finds among its contributions to the health and happiness of Europe the not inconsiderable commodities of maize, the potato, rubber, tobacco, and quinine.

Historians are becoming more ambitious in the breadth and depth of their coverage. Is there a danger that this will reduce the role of humans to a bit part? Not necessarily, says Paul Dukes.

William Seymour describes how a large area of Dorset and Wiltshire, abounding in deer, was hunted by King John and granted to Robert Cecil by James I.

James Marshall-Cornwall describes a Tudor adventure, ultimately unsuccessful: Willoughby perished on the Kola peninsula; Chancellor reached Moscow and was received by Ivan the Terrible.

Bartram, like his father, was an eminent naturalist from Philadelphia. J.I. Merritt III describes how his extensive travels in the American South inspired, among others, both Coleridge and Wordsworth.

Alan Haynes describes how this ‘wondrous, violent motion’ caused widespread alarm and produced a flood of moral and religious homilies.

A fashionable parade and a scene of sporting contests, St James’s Park was first enclosed by Henry VIII. Marjorie Sykes describes the history of the park, including how James I kept a menagerie and aviary there, to which Charles II added pelicans.

During the 1850s, writes W. Bruce Lincoln, an intrepid Russian traveller penetrated hitherto almost unknown territory, making large collections of botanical and geographical specimens, and exploring twenty-three difficult mountain passes.

In the late eighteenth century, writes Ray Swick, Americans began to settle in huge aromatic forests across the Appalachians.

Since before Roman times, writes Marjorie Sykes, pearl-fishing has been practised in North Wales, Cumberland and Perth.