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Gary B. Cohen Distinguished Lectureship in History

 

In a lecture based on the opening chapter of the book he is writing on the history of Portage, Wisconsin, environmental historian William Cronon meditates on the role of memory and storytelling in the complicated ways human beings construct their individual and collective sense of place.  A natural ecosystem or an abstract geographical space becomes a human place, he argues, through the endless accretion of narratives that render that place meaningful for those who visit or live in it.  Portage is an especially interesting community in which to explore this idea, since it was the home town of Frederick Jackson Turner, the American historian who authored the famous “frontier thesis.”  It was also the town into whose hinterland John Muir migrated as an eleven-year-old boy from Scotland, and the town where Aldo Leopold’s “Shack,” famed subject of the book A Sand County Almanac, is located. Although virtually unknown to most Americans, few places have played so central a role in shaping our national ideas of nature.

 

William Cronon studies American environmental history and the history of the American West.  He is the Frederick Jackson Turner and Vilas Research Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  Cronon’s work seeks to understand the history of human interactions with the natural world: how we depend on the ecosystems around us to sustain our material lives, how we modify the landscapes in which we live and work, and how our ideas of nature shape our relationships with the world around us.  Cronon has authored Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (1983), which was awarded the Francis Parkman Prize of the Society of American Historians and Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1991). Nature’s Metropolis was awarded the Bancroft Prize for the best work of American history and the George Perkins Marsh Prize from the American Society for Environmental History, and many other awards.

 

The History Graduate Student Association is pleased to welcome Professor Cronon as the inaugural lecturer of the Gary B. Cohen Distinguished Lectureship in History.

 

Made possible by the generous support of the Gary B. Cohen Distinguished Lectureship in History Fund, the USC Dornsife Department of History, and The Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. Thanks to the History Graduate Student Association for organizing this event. (Poster design by Yesenia Navarrete Hunter)

 

 

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