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Copyright of Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Technikgeschichte is the property of Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Historische Zeitschrift is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Drawing on historical medical, scientific, and psychological publications, this article of fers a brief history of the idea of the »threshold«, insofar as it has been applied to smells and smelling. It follows two genealogies of smell-related thresholds, firstly backwards from 1980s cultural history, via 1930s sociology and psychoanalysis, to 1840s psychophysics, and then forwards from psychophysics, via fin-de-siècle experimental psychology, to 1980s environmental governance. Responding to concerns about the epistemological utility of smelling in the eighteenth century, the nineteenth century witnessed attempts to render olfaction amenable to measurement, quantification, and visualization. Experimental psychologists aimed to construct pure noses and pure smells through experimental assemblages that used physical thresholds to give validity to the idea of olfactory thresholds. Since the 1950s these assemblages have been leveraged in regulating odor pollution. However, as in the case of environmental governance, the laboratory-origins of olfactory thresholds should give pause to smell studies scholars who seek to deploy the concept as an analytical tool or form of narrative emplotment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of GAIA: Ecological Perspectives for Science & Society is the property of Oekom Verlag GmbH and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Österreichische Wasser- und Abfallwirtschaft is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article focuses on general history of economic development in the Austrian federal state of Tyrol during the twentieth century. It mentions development characterized by the transition from a traditional agrarian economy to a modern service economy, which to a great extent was determined by the expansion of tourism. It also mentions narrative of an economic "success story" with high living standards actually pertains to the majority of the population.

Copyright of Neue Politische Literatur is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Technikgeschichte is the property of Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The main theme of the text is the wartime and postwar history of the area of the German Nazi extermination camp Treblinka II, seen from the perspective of the production of landscape – with a special focus on the identity aspect, i.e. the nationalization of nature and the naturalization of the nation. The argument refers to imaging conventions of nature and ethnographic photography, like the German Heimatphotographie and the Polish Fatherland Photography, that go along with landscape production. This paper also touches upon the issue of classification as the principle organizing the workings of the human mind as well as the uses made of classification in terms of cognition and identity – up to and including the deadly consequences thereof. Another crucial point of reference is the history of the herbarium as a form of organizing knowledge (Maria Sibylla Merian, Rosa Luxemburg, Szymon Syreński) and its connections with the visual arts (Krzysztof Jung, Alina Szapocznikow). The rich iconography illustrates the analyzed representation patterns, with particular focus on the axiosemiotics of Polish antisemitism, going back to its elitist forms in Jagiellonian Poland. The text summarizes fifteen years of the author’s work on Herbarium, a photographic project carried out on the site of the former German Nazi extermination camp Treblinka II.

ABSTRACT: The paper begins with a general discussion on hunting. It is divided into four main parts, discussing about the effect of hunting on environment and ecology in Ancient, Medieval, Colonial and Independent India. Across all the ages, hunting wild animals has been an important activity for the royals and nobles. In ancient India, only Ashoka took some initiatives at protecting the animals and environment. The portion on Medieval India mainly focusses on the Mughals and their hunting styles. In the colonial period, mastery over nature was thought of as a part of mastery over India. Both British officials and Indian princes unabatedly shot many animals, which ultimately led to the extinction of cheetah in India. In the part on Independent India, the efforts by Indira Gandhi like the ‘Wildlife Protection Act’ in 1972, Project Tiger and its effects have been given. In conclusion, the need to conserve our wildlife is briefly cited with reference to a few high-profile cases of hunting in India even after it was outlawed.

This article discusses the knowledge of meadows and pastures in the southeastern Alps in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It analyses the court records of one seigneury, rent-rolls (Urbare) of five seigneuries, and personal notes of one landlord. By placing this information into the context of additional sources, it manages to offer a partial reconstruction of the traditional ecological knowledge of farmers in the past as well as the knowledge of landlords or seigneury officials about grasslands, although the knowledge analyzed was predominately communicated orally. The article also addresses the dynamic development of farmers' traditional ecological knowledge, evidence for landlords' or seigneury officials' familiarity with agricultural publications, and the interest of these last two groups in agricultural practices, environmental conditions, and the changes they underwent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, science diplomacy has become a hot topic in international affairs, and is now also emerging as one of the most vibrant subfields within International History. This article examines newer historical research that addresses the history of science diplomacy or offers fruitful avenues for such a history. The review identifies three broader trends in current scholarship: a focus on universities and foundations as transnational actors of science diplomacy, a shift of interest towards the ways transnational flows of knowledge were organized and managed politically during the Cold War, and an increasing overlap of global environmental history with the histories of science and knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While "sustainability" was the key term of environmental history during the last decades, the concept of the "Anthropocene", borrowed from geology, has come to challenge the notion of an ecological equilibrium. Historians have begun to scrutinise how the irreversible shift to a new geological epoch is intertwined with social phenomena on many different levels from economic development to narratives of progress. In course of this debate, the question of how to overcome the nature-culture dichotomy, one of the central theoretical concerns of environmental history, has again provoked new interest. In the end, the current controversies crystallise around how the epochal environmental shift marked by the "Anthropocene" is judged and how the challenges that humanity is facing can be coped with. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Forschungen zur Volks- und Landeskunde is the property of Romanian Academy Publishing House / Editura Academiei Romane and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

For a long time, economic historians have depicted farmers using artificial fertilisers and pesticides as innovative entrepreneurs who made an important contribution to the growth of the economy. However, with the rise of environmental history, pesticide- using farmers became a symbol for endangering the environment as well as the health of consumers. Based on primary sources, this contribution asks how the farmers themselves perceived the availability and application of synthetic pesticides. It further analyses the constraints and options the actors in this field were faced with in the three decades after World War II. Unlike the highly specialised scientists who were either vehemently for or against the application of pesticides in agriculture, farmers, functioning in a sense as applied scientists, developed a decidedly pragmatic approach towards the new pesticides. These products they treated hardly differently from other auxiliary material they had access to. Apart from a few organic growers who refused completely to apply pesticides, almost all farmers who survived the fierce survival struggle within agriculture made use of pesticides on their farms. Pesticides proved to be an adequate medium for replacing increasingly scarce and expensive labour as well as of meeting new quality standards defined exclusively by the needs of the supermarkets and the demands of consumers. While farmers had to decide whether or not to use pesticides on their farms, they had little options not to apply them if they wanted to survive as farmers in a society which increasingly perceived living organisms as uniform phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of disasters is no longer a new area of research. In the last two decades several new studies have been published in contexts of environmental, cultural and social history. Yet most of these approaches did not draw much attention and remained in the shadow of their own fields. Therefore, this article focuses on the most recent studies and tries to examine their connectivity to broader areas of research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By the 1570’s, Potosí, and its silver, had become the hub of acommodity revolution that reorganized Peru’s peoples and landscapes to serve capital and empire. This was a decisive moment in the world ecological revolution of the long seventeenth century. Primitive accumulation in Peru was particularly successful: the mita’s spatial program enabled the colonial state to marshal a huge supply of low-cost and tractable labor in the midst of sustained demographic contraction. The relatively centralized character of Peru’s mining frontier facilitated imperial control in a way the more dispersedsilver frontiers of New Spain did not. Historical capitalism has sustained itself on the basis of exploiting, and thereby undermining, a vast web of socio-ecological relations. As may be observed in colonial Peru, the commodity frontier strategy effected both the destruction and creation of premodern socio-ecological arrangements.

At the beginning of the 14th century the large estates of the bishopric of Winchester in Southern England were directly managed by the bishop's administration. The yearly demesne accounts of this direct management were written down in the Winchester Pipe Rolls. These accounts are unique documents of the late medieval agricultural economy in England. The paper critically examines references to weather in the Pipe Rolls during the time of the Great Famine (1313-1317). This famine was partly caused by weather induced harvest failures. The references that the local reeves made in the accounts explain reduced incomes and increased expenditures. They only appear in certain sections of the accounts and among various other explanations. They are clearly the result of the communication between the local officials and the central administration in Winchester. While their value for the scientific reconstruction of past weather events is rather questionable, they shine a light on the ways weather could be used as an argument in the 14th century. They are therefore important sources for assessing the relevance of environmental impacts on the English society. So far, British scholarship has focused on law and war as explanations for change during the 14th century and neglected natural impacts such as adverse weather conditions, famines, infectious diseases and the plague. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Space, and access to resource deposits in particular, is a central theme of studies in economic history. However, new approaches to the theory of space that highlight the relations between people, places and things as constituents of multiple and dynamic spaces, have so far rarely been systematically applied to questions relating to resource economies. By referring to spaces of resource extraction as 'sites', this introductory article develops the notion that spaces in which resources are accessed, distributed and consumed are not a fixed and pregiven category, but exist in dynamic spatial relations. These spatial relations can be made up of perceptions and images, such as geological knowledge or spheres of interests, social structures, such as in the distribution of real-estate property and in power relations, or they can be established by the expansion of infrastructures and by terms of trade. They also pertain to the physical properties of the resources themselves, especially when considering the environmental impact of extraction. All of these spatial relations are highly variable and change historically in interdependence with the dynamics of resource extraction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyses how the salt mining districts of a geographically small but politically divided region covering alpine stretches of today's Austria and Germany are represented in late 17th century topographical literature. The way these districts are described and depicted in texts, maps and images of the famous 'Topographia Germaniae', published by Matthäus Merian the Elder and his successors, deepens our understanding of the construction of regionality and the role of materiality and human economic practices in this construction process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Toponyms of the East African coast present a recorded illustration of the multicultural environment of the Indian Ocean in its western part. A number of historical locations have been identified on the basis of modern or archaeological evidence corresponding to place names found in the written sources ranging from Antiquity to the contemporary era. From the Horn of Africa to the Swahili coast to Mozambique, the East African coast has been marked by a certain geographical stability of urban centres and port locations. Some of the modern cities still carry the names first recorded in the 10th century C.E., while some medieval toponyms may be correlated to locations first listed in ancient Greek sources. The present paper will examine two examples from the extensive toponymical record for the East African coast. The major cultural traditions related to the place names and their recorded history in the written sources of the past centuries are generally known. Medieval Arabic sources provide the bulk of written information about the region in the pre-Portuguese era. The paper acknowledges some differences between the evidence of academic Islamic geography and the information provided by Arab travellers and navigators. The sources reveal a degree of stability in the inventory of the recorded place names despite the historical changes on the coast. Analysis reveals a complex picture of historical and language-based patterns of knowledge transmission in the trans-cultural oceanic environment.

In the European historiography on social inequality one aspect is strikingly missing: the ecological aspect. Therefore, this paper introduces the concept of "environmental justice" to the discussion. The concept originally stems from a US-social movement that emerged in the 1980s. Today, "environmental justice" is at the same time a social claim, a political principle, as well as an academic concept. While the concept entered the discourse of several academic disciplines from sociology to public-health studies, it is still seldom used in European historiography. This paper argues that "environmental justice" can be employed as an analytic category especially in economic, social, and environmental history, while at the same time being able to connect these disciplines. With the example of the introduction of centralised water infrastructures in European cities, the article explores difficulties and potentials of an application of the "environmental justice"- concept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a report from a July 16-17, 2015 conference in Munich, Germany on the history of human-animal relations and the environment hosted by the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. Topics of presentations delivered included the extinction of the native birds of Hawaii, German environmental history research, and the flooding of animals' ecosystems.

The article presents a report from a June 19-20, 2015 conference in Mainz, Germany on the early modern urban history of Frankfurt am Main, Germany hosted by the history department of the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz university. Topics of presentations delivered included the history of religious conflict and relations in Frankfurt am Main, the city's environmental history with a focus on its water supply, and the sensory history "turn".

The article presents a report from a June 29 to July 4, 2015 conference in Budapest, Hungary on the history of science and urban history hosted by the Pasts, Inc. Center for Historical Studies at Central European University. Topics of presentations delivered included the environmental histories of cities, the role of geological, mineralogical, and physical knowledge in the mapping and representation of Paris, France, and the history of human zoos.

The article presents a report from an April 24-25, 2015 conference in Gießen, Germany on the history of Belavežskaja Pušča (Białowieża Forest) national park in Poland. Topics of presentations delivered included Eastern European environmental history, the categorization of Białowieża as old-growth forest, and the living conditions for people and plants in Białowieża under Nazi occupation.