Northscapes

History, Technology, and the Making of Northern Environments

Edited by Dolly Jørgensen & Sverker Sörlin
Categories: History, Regional & Cultural Studies, Northern & Polar Studies, Environmental & Nature Studies, The Natural World, Environmental History, Geography, Historical Geography, Science, Technology & Society, World History
Publisher: UBC Press
Hardcover : 9780774825719, 324 pages, November 2013
Paperback : 9780774825726, 324 pages, July 2014
Ebook (PDF) : 9780774825733, 324 pages, November 2013
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Table of contents

Introduction  Making the Action Visible, Making Environments in Northern Landscapes / Dolly Jørgensen and Sverker Sörlin

Part 1: Exploring the North

1 “A Cruel Climate without Any Kind of Art”: European Natural History and the Northern Nature of the Other Pacific, 1740-1840 / Ryan Tucker Jones

2 How Fossils Gave the First Hints of Climate Change: The Explorer A.E. Nordenskiöld’s Passion for Fossils and Northern Environmental History / Seija A. Niemi

3 Technological Heroes: Images of the Arctic in the Age of Polar Aviation / Marionne Cronin

Part 2: Colonizing the North

4 Mounds, Middens, and Social Landscapes: Viking-Norse Settlement of the North Atlantic, c. AD 850-1250 / Jane Harrison

5 In Search of Instructive Models: The Russian State at a Crossroads to Conquering the North / Julia Lajus

Part 3: Working the North

6 Traversal Technology Transfer: The Transfer of Agricultural Knowledge between Peripheries in the North / Jan Kunnas

7 The Sheep, the Market, and the Soil: Environmental Destruction in the Icelandic Highlands, 1880-1910 / Anna Gudrún Thórhallsdóttir, Árni Daníel Júlíusson, and Helga Ögmundardóttir

8 More Things on Heaven and Earth: Modernism and Reindeer in Chukotka and Alaska / Bathsheba Demuth

9 A Touch of Frost: Gender, Class, Technology, and the Urban Environment in an Industrializing Nordic City / Simo Laakkonen

Part 4: Imagining the North

10 North Takes Place in Dawson City, Yukon, Canada / Lisa Cooke

11 Iceland and the North: An Idea of Belonging and Being Apart / Unnur Birna Karlsdóttir

Epilogue  The Networked North: Thinking about the Past, Present, and Future of Environmental Histories of the North / Finn Arne Jørgensen

Selected Bibliography

List of Contributors

Index

Northscapes presents the North as a set of unique, dynamic environments, constantly changing as they are shaped by human societies and their technologies.

Description

This book argues that the unique environments of the North have been born of the relationship between humans and nature. Approaching the topic through the lens of environmental history, the contributors examine a broad range of geographies, including those of Iceland and other islands in the Northern Atlantic, Sweden, Finland, Russia, the Pacific Northwest, and Canada, over a time span ranging from CE 800 to 2000. Northscapes is bound together by the intellectual project of investigating the North both as an imagined and mythologized space and as an environment shaped by human technology.