Panel on Environmental History and Early America in Boston, 6 Mar.

In Tuesday, 6 March, the Massachusetts Historical Society will host a panel discussion on the topic “Common Spaces: Environmental History and the Study of Early America.” This session is a crossover event for two of the society’s seminar series, the Boston-Area Early American History Seminar and the Boston Environmental History Seminar.

The seminar description says:

This panel takes the opportunity to bring the fields of environmental and early American history into closer conversation. Environmental historians are concerned with concepts such as ecological imperialism and non-anthropocentric empires, built and natural environments, controlling and organizing space, and the relationship between borders and frontiers. How does or might this influence scholarship on early America? How can work on early American history enrich environmental historians’ understanding of empire, metropoles and borderlands, movement and colonization?

Panelists will be:

• Christopher Pastore, State University of New York at Albany
• Nancy Shoemaker, University of Connecticut at Storrs
• Conevery Valencius, Boston College
• Matthew McKenzie, University of Connecticut at Avery Point, moderator

This seminar starts at 5:15 P.M. at the Massachusetts Historical Society, 1154 Boylston Street in Boston. It is free and open to the public, but the society asks people to reserve space so they know how many seats will be needed.

For no particular reason, here’s a graph from the Google Books Ngram Viewer showing how the occurrence of the phrases “Atlantic world,” “built environment,” and “environmental history” changed between 1930 and 2008.