New Scholarship

Abstract

Previous article FreeNew ScholarshipNew ScholarshipPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreTHE FOREST HISTORY SOCIETY (FHS) maintains an extensive database of published sources related to environmental history. The “new scholarship” section of this journal includes just a selection of the new information that the FHS library adds each quarter. The library indexes all entries in the database by topic, chronological period, and geographic area. The library staff will gladly provide additional information about items you see in this section or information on other topics from the database. They are happy to respond to requests for full bibliographies or lists of archival collections for specific research projects.The unabridged version of this New Scholarship section is searchable as part of the research databases on our website at www.foresthistory.org. The compiler also welcomes information about relevant publications that the staff may have missed, including books, theses, and dissertations. The compiler particularly welcomes copies of relevant articles. The use of brackets in the following citations indicates that although the publication did not include the information, the compiler has added it. Contact us by mail at New Scholarship, Forest History Society, 2925 Academy Rd., Durham, NC 27705, USA, by telephone at 919-682-9319, or by email: [email protected]orgBOOKS Acker, Antoine. Volkswagen in the Amazon: The Tragedy of Global Development in Modern Brazil. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017. xiv + 314 pp. Illustrations, maps, bibliography, index. Details the history of the cattle ranch on the Amazon frontier in Brazil run by Volkswagen from 1973 to 1987. Examines how this ranch was backed by the Brazilian government, its destructive impacts on the environment, and the ultimate failure of the project.Alvarez, C. J. Border Land, Border Water: A History of Construction on the US-Mexico Divide. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2019. 301 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. A history of construction projects along the border region between the United States and Mexico from the late nineteenth through the early twenty-first centuries. Details the private individuals, organizations, and government officials who constructed waterworks, transportation systems, and immigration enforcement structures along the border.Black, Megan. The Global Interior: Mineral Frontiers and American Power. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018. 348 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. Details the history of how the United States Department of the Interior has constantly supported and projected American power from the late nineteenth through the early twenty-first centuries. Looks at settler colonialism in the American West, mining operations on Indigenous lands, offshore drilling, international natural resource surveys, and much more.Daggett, Cara New. The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. x + 268 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. Looks at how the nineteenth-century study of thermodynamics was deployed as an imperial science to govern fossil fuel use, labor, and colonial expansion. Explores how these early resource-based concepts of power emerging during the Industrial Revolution were linked to Western capitalist domination and the politics of industrialized work.Estes, Nick, and Jaskiran Dhillon, eds. Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019. ix + 420 pp. Illustrations, index. Examines the Indigenous resistance movement united against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline through the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. Looks at those working to protect the environment and support grassroots organizing. Contributors reflect on Indigenous history and politics as well as on the movement’s significance.Gifford, John. Pecan America: Exploring a Cultural Icon. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2019. 199 pp. Illustrations, bibliography. Explores the story of the pecan tree and its nuts as a native agricultural crop as well as a cultural icon that is symbolic of America. Discusses in detail the historical significance of the pecan in American society, how and where it is grown, how it is marketed based on demand, its nutritional benefits, and its place in folk art and culture.Holleman, Hannah. Dust Bowls of Empire: Imperialism, Environmental Politics, and the Injustice of “Green” Capitalism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. xvii + 231 pp. Notes, index. Explores the nexus of drought, erosion, and economic depression in the United States southern plains during the 1930s, which came to be known as the Dust Bowl. Reexamines the global socio-ecological and economic forces of settler colonialism and imperialism that precipitated the acceleration of ecological degradation.Homburg, Ernst, and Elisabeth Vaupel, eds. Hazardous Chemicals: Agents of Risk and Change, 1800–2000. New York: Berghahn Books, 2019. xiv + 407 pp. Illustrations, maps, index. Investigates the emergence of specific toxic, pathogenic, carcinogenic, and ecologically harmful chemicals from 1800 to 2000 as well as the scientific, cultural, and legislative responses they have prompted. Considers both the natural and social contexts in which the histories of each chemical have unfolded.Kallis, Giorgos. Limits: Why Malthus Was Wrong and Why Environmentalists Should Care. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2019. 154 pp. Notes. Author reexamines the legacy of reverend-economist Thomas Robert Malthus, separating limits and scarcity, two notions that have long been conflated in both environmental and economic thought. Explores limits as a choice that confronts us rather than a property of nature to be deciphered by scientists.Kirchhof, Astrid Mignon, and J. R. McNeill, eds. Nature and the Iron Curtain: Environmental Policy and Social Movements in Communist and Capitalist Countries, 1945–1990. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019. vi + 312 pp. Tables, notes, index. Contrasts communist and capitalist countries with respect to their environmental politics in the context of the Cold War from 1945 to 1990. Explores similarities and differences among nations with different economic and political systems and also highlights connections between environment movements in Eastern and Western Europe.Livingston, Julie. Self-Devouring Growth: A Planetary Parable as Told from Southern Africa. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. xiii + 160 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. Author demonstrates that, while consumption-driven growth may seem to benefit a particular area, it can produce other negative consequences that ripple throughout the wider world. Looks at how fundamental needs for water, food, and transportation in locations such as Botswana can also threaten catastrophic environmental destruction.Moore, Amelia. Destination Anthropocene: Science and Tourism in the Bahamas. Oakland: University of California Press, 2019. xiii + 195 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. Explores an experimental form of tourism to the Bahamas developed in the name of sustainability. Author discusses how the Bahamas is rebranding itself in response to the rising threat of global environmental change, including climate change.Nokkentved, Niels Sparre. To Think Like a Mountain: Environmental Challenges in the American West. Pullman: Washington State University Press, 2019. xiii + 244 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. Looks at contemporary environmental challenges affecting the American West, including discussion of the historic exploitation of natural resources in the region. Essays examine cultural conflicts over resource extraction, threats to watersheds, wolf recovery, impacts of livestock grazing, the importance of forest fires, the decline of the timber industry, and many more topics.Pearson, Byron E. Saving Grand Canyon: Dams, Deals, and a Noble Myth. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2019. xxii + 344 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. Details the history of efforts to build dams on the Colorado River in the area of the Grand Canyon. Chronicles Colorado River water development and the creation of the National Environmental Policy Act as well as exploring the enduring myths surrounding the work of the Sierra Clubs to halt dam construction in the 1960s.Posnett, Edward. Strange Harvests: The Hidden Histories of Seven Natural Objects. New York: Viking, 2019. 323 pp. Illustrations, maps, index. An exploration of various far-flung locales on the planet that examines the histories of seven wonders of the natural world: eiderdown, edible birds’ nests, civet coffee, sea silk, vicuna fiber, vegetable ivory, and guano. Looks at how these natural commodities are imbued with myth, tradition, folklore, and ritual, forming part of a shared identity and history.Pyne, Stephen J. Fire: A Brief History. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019. xvii + 216 pp. Illustrations, maps, bibliography, index. Explores the history of fire in detail, from its origins before humans up to the twenty-first century; it discusses how it was used in aboriginal societies, in agriculture, in rituals and ceremonies, the ways in which it shapes our landscapes, its use as a form of technology, and, finally, how humans have been interacting with fire through the centuries.Saitua, Iker. Basque Immigrants and Nevada’s Sheep Industry: Geopolitics and the Making of an Agricultural Workforce, 1880–1954. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2019. 300 pp. Bibliography, index. Explores the history of Basque immigration to the rangelands of Nevada and the interior West from the 1880s to the 1950s. Focuses on Basque sheepherders, looking at the challenges they faced as a result of the new landscape and how they went from a marginalized labor group to a desirable, high-priced workforce.Sheflin, Douglas. Legacies of Dust: Land Use and Labor on the Colorado Plains. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019. xiv + 406 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. Looks at the Dust Bowl of the 1930s and how the drought and economic devastation brought farmers and government officials together to help maintain agricultural production on the Colorado plains. Focuses on the period from 1929 to 1962, looking at how federal support, combined with local initiative, brought about a broad conservation regime that facilitated production and helped thousands of farmers sustain themselves.Smedley, Tim. Clearing the Air: The Beginning and the End of Air Pollution. London: Bloomsbury Sigma, 2019. 320 pp. Bibliography, index. Author examines and investigates the global issue of air pollution. Uses scientific studies along with personal interviews to explore the fight against air pollution in cities such as Delhi, Beijing, London, and Paris. Includes discussion of historical background, highlighting historical changes in behavioral patterns and health data.Smith, Jordan Fisher. Engineering Eden: A Violent Death, a Federal Trial, and the Struggle to Restore Nature in Our National Parks. New York: The Experiment, 2019. xxiii + 388 pp. Illustrations, maps. Details the death of Harry Eugene Walker after being attacked by a grizzly bear in Yellowstone National Park in 1972 and the ensuing civil trial brought against the Department of Interior for alleged mismanagement of the park’s grizzly population. Includes a new foreword by Jack E. Davis.Spears, Ellen Griffith. Rethinking the American Environmental Movement post-1945. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2020. xiii + 274 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, index. Examines the environmental movement from the post-World War II period through the early decades of the twenty-first century, looking at the movement within the context of broader social justice activism. Provides a succinct overview of American environmentalism, outlining key events, figures, and strategies.Struzik, Edward. Firestorm: How Wildfire Will Shape Our Future. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2019. xiii + 257 pp. Illustrations, notes. A detailed examination of wildfires in the age of climate change. Includes discussion of historic fires and the evolution of firefighting policy. Looks at how rising temperatures, stronger winds, and drier lands are leading to destructive wildfires and how forest management policy must continue to adapt and evolve.Taliaferro, John. Grinnell: America’s Environmental Pioneer and His Restless Drive to Save the West. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2019. xvi + 606 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. A detailed biography of George Bird Grinnell (1849–1938), revealing how his work sparked the American conservation movement. Details his life and work as anthropologist, historian, naturalist, and writer. Through numerous expeditions to the American West, Grinnell began advocating for wildlife protection, forest reserves, national, parks, and more.Taylor, Joseph E. III. Persistent Callings: Seasons of Work and Identity on the Oregon Coast. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2019. viii + 219 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, notes, index. Provides a history of life in Nestucca Valley, a small watershed in far western Oregon, dominated by farming, fishing, and logging. Details life in the area from aboriginal times to the twenty-first century, documenting seasonal labor, relationships between work and identity, and the resilience of rural economics in the face of climate shifts, industry consolidation, and more.Thomson, Jennifer. The Wild and the Toxic: American Environmentalism and the Politics of Health. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. xii + 202 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. Explores the political, social, and intellectual developments that gave rise to the multiplicity of claims and concerns about environmental health over the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Looks at the environmental lobby, environmental justice groups, radical environmentalism, and climate justice activism, revealing how different forms of activism focused on issues related to human health.Warde, Paul. The Invention of Sustainability: Nature and Destiny, c. 1500–1870. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. x + 407 pp. Bibliography, index. Traces the emergence of the idea of sustainability, exploring its links to hopes for growth and the destiny of expanding European states from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. Looks at issues related to economic development and agricultural improvement as well as ideas about forestry, climate, soil science, and more. ARTICLES Alvarez, C. J. “Police, Waterworks, and the Construction of the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1924–1954.” Western Historical Quarterly 50 (Autumn 2019): 233–56. Examines four major early twentieth-century building projects along the United States-Mexico border: the straightening of the Rio Grande around El Paso and Ciudad Juárez; the assemblage of the first large-scale border fence; the fabrication of early Border Patrol watchtowers; and the construction of the Falcon Dam. These were the first major efforts to transform the international divide through the built environment, and looking at them together helps to generate new ways of linking border and environmental history.Biess, Frank, et al. “Public Health in a Radioactive Age: Environmental Pollution, Popular Therapies, and Narratives of Danger in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1949–1970.” Central European History 52 (March 2019): 45–64. Reveals how West German citizens learned that radiation exposure pervaded their society in the postwar period. This was the result of atomic testing as well as medical treatment, workplace exposures, and radium consumer goods. Details how, by the 1970s, West German citizens had recast nuclear radiation from a technological wonder or health aid into a public health hazard.Bonan, Giacomo. “Natural Time and Bureaucratic Time: State Building, Forests and Environmental Conflicts in the 1800s.” Environment and History 25 (August 2019): 421–50. Author analyzes the reactions of some alpine communities to state intervention in Europe during the years following the implementation of Napoleonic reforms. The lens through which these interactions are observed is that of the valorization of forest resources, which were the economic center of alpine communities and, at the same time, a strategic issue for state authorities.Brett, André. “Railways and the Exploitation of Victoria’s Forests, 1880s-1920s.” Australian Economic History Review 59 (July 2019): 159–80. Details how railways made a large contribution to the expansion of the economy in Victoria, Australia, around the turn of the twentieth century as well as how the railways enabled and drove environmental change during this time period. Focuses on forest industries, looking at railway demand for timber in construction and maintenance. This demand led to a bitter dispute in the 1890s between the Railways Department and the Conservator of Forests, George Perrin, over timber cut on state land and resulted in an uneasy co‐existence after the turn of the century.Bronstein, Judith, et al. “Franks, Locals and Sugar Cane: A Case Study of Cultural Interaction in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem.” Journal of Medieval History 45 (July 2019): 316–30. This study examines influences and cultural interactions between Frankish settlers and the local populations in the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem through the prism of sugar cane, a local food crop unfamiliar to many crusaders and Latin settlers. Explores the extent to which the Latin population was influenced by, and influenced, their new environment and the local inhabitants during the medieval era. After acquainting themselves with the new land and its products, the Franks became largely involved in the production of sugar, one of the kingdom’s most lucrative cash crops, which brought significant technological developments and changes in the lives of local inhabitants.Fur, Gunlög, et al. “Different Ways of Seeing ‘Savagery’: Two Nordic Travellers in 18th-Century North America.” History of the Human Sciences 32 (October 2019): 43–62. Looks at the work of Andreas Hesselius and Pehr Kalm, who both spent time in eastern North America during the first half of the eighteenth century. Both came with an ardent desire to observe and learn about the natural environment and the inhabitants of the region. Reveals that, while Hesselius and Kalm arrive at similar descriptions of plants and other-than-human beings by employing different methodologies, when it comes to describing Indigenous peoples their respective methodologies lead to radically different approaches, with Hesselius writing them into history, while Kalm relegates them to ethnology in the sense of savage “peoples without histories.”Ghosh, Tirthankar. “Historicizing Earthquake and Cyclones: Evolution of Geology and Cyclonology in Colonial India.” Indian Historical Review 46 (June 2019): 22–40. Explores the ideologies behind the colonial policy regarding the mitigation of earthquakes and cyclonic hazards in nineteenth and twentieth-century India. Critically examines the geological and cyclonological developments in colonial India as part of the disaster mitigation process and thereby explores the colonial attitude toward natural disasters.Johnson, Matthew P. “Swampy Sugar Lands: Irrigation Dams and the Rise and Fall of Malaria in Puerto Rico, 1898–1962.” Journal of Latin American Studies 51 (May 2019): 243–71. Details the impacts of water-engineering projects on the spread of malaria in Puerto Rico during the early twentieth century. Between 1910 and 1914, the Puerto Rican Irrigation Service built three large dams to water sugarcane fields owned by US companies. The new canals and holding ponds created ideal breeding grounds for malaria-carrying mosquitoes, and demand for fieldworkers encouraged greater numbers of Puerto Ricans to work and live near these mosquito swarms. Malaria rates soared as a result, and it was not until the 1940s and 1950s that health officials were able to control and eliminate malaria.Karskens, Grace. “Fire in the Forests? Exploring the Human-Ecological History of Australia’s First Frontier.” Environment and History 25 (August 2019): 391–419. Discusses historian Bill Gammage’s landmark book The Biggest Estate on Earth, in which he argues that before the arrival of white settlers, the whole Australian continent was a manicured cultural landscape, shaped and maintained by precise, deliberate, and repeated fires. Looks at how Gammage has also polarized debates on fire regimes, especially the extent to which fire really did shape every corner of the continent, and the related assertion that contemporary ecologies are the result of the cessation of fire since 1788.Laurian, Lucie. “Planning for Street Trees and Human-Nature Relations: Lessons from 600 Years of Street Tree Planting in Paris.” Journal of Planning History 18 (November 2019): 282–310. Examines the planting of regularly spaced and low-diversity rows of trees along sidewalks in Western cities, for the purposes of providing shade, pleasant pedestrian environments, and other ecological benefits. Explores the origin of this surprisingly stable practice by exploring the last six hundred years of street tree planting in Paris. Reveals how Paris’s iconic tree-lined boulevards have influenced streetscapes worldwide.Malloy, Kevin, and Derek Hall. “Medieval Hunting and Wood Management in the Buzzart Dykes Landscape.” Environment and History 25 (August 2019): 365–90. Looks at research into the design, construction, and function of medieval park landscapes through archaeological methods in Scotland. Discusses the results of excavations at the site of the Buzzart Dykes in Perthshire. The authors evaluate the modern interpretation of the enclosure as a medieval park used for hunting and present evidence for additional economic utilization that revolved around wood management.Müller, Simone M. “Hidden Externalities: The Globalization of Hazardous Waste.” Business History Review 93 (Spring 2019): 51–74. This article focuses on chemical retailers Jack and Charles Colbert to show both the externalization processes linked to the greening of US industry through stricter consumer and environmental protection regulations and the limitations of nationally framed environmentalism targeting businesses in a global market. Details how during the 1970s and 1980s, the Colberts traded chemicals that the US Environmental Protection Agency had banned for use in the United States, exporting them legally to countries where the material was still a permitted commodity.Murray, Stephen. “The Politics and Economics of Technology: Bankside Power Station and the Environment, 1945–81.” London Journal 44 (July 2019): 113–32. Examines the history of Bankside B power station, a controversial postwar addition to London’s cityscape built on a sensitive riverside site opposite the City of London. Technology ameliorated the environmental impact of the station but engendered adverse long-term issues. From the late 1950s, the pollution from Bankside became increasingly intolerable in the context of London’s improved air and river quality; yet economic factors precluded further technological mitigation solutions prior to the station’s closure in 1981.Muscolino, Micah S. “Woodlands, Warlords, and Wasteful Nations: Transnational Networks and Conservation Science in 1920s China.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 61 (July 2019): 712–38. Investigates the production of conservation science at nodes of transnational networks of encounter through an examination of field studies conducted during the mid-1920s in North China’s Shanxi province by the American forester and soil conservation expert Walter C. Lowdermilk with his student, colleague, and collaborator Ren Chengtong. Even in the politically fragmented China of the 1920s, their research on deforestation, stream flow, and erosion benefited from alliances with Shanxi’s regional power holder, Yan Xishan, and produced environmental knowledge that furthered the agenda of harnessing natural resources to strengthen the state.Nyambara, Pius S., and Mark Nyandoro. “‘Tobacco Thrives, but the Environment Cries’: The Sustainability of Livelihoods from Small-Scale Tobacco Growing in Zimbabwe, 2000–2017.” Global Environment 12 (September 2019): 304–20. Focuses on smallholder flue-cured tobacco growing in Zimbabwe. Observes that the post-independence government made concerted efforts to promote small-scale tobacco farming through the land resettlement program and the provision of incentives for increasing agricultural output as well as accelerated black farmers’ involvement in the growing of commercial crops, notably tobacco and cotton. While tobacco and some tobacco growers appeared to thrive, the environment suffered.Ohman Nielsen, May-Brith, and Anne Mette Seines. “Poison to the Beasts: Changing Poisons and Poisoning Practices in Campaigns to Kill Norwegian Birds and Mammals, 1845–1967.” Environment and History 25 (August 2019): 321–64. Details the history of deadly poison use in Norway between 1845 and 1967 to kill and eradicate unwanted rats, predators, and crows. Examines the main types of poisons used, the main methods of poison administration, and the legislation covering the poisoning practices in regard to the various species as well as negotiations over the killing methods and wildlife eradication programs.Robischon, Marcel. “Environmental and Cultural History of the Death’s Head Hawkmoth.” Environment and History 25 (August 2019): 451–74. A cultural history of the Acherontia atropos, or Death’s Head Hawkmoth, a large, migratory sphingid moth that has played a significant symbolic role in literature and the arts in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Presents a case in which environmental change due to a new crop also leads to a cultural change in the example of a new iconic animal symbol emerging in the arts.Rome, Adam. “DuPont and the Limits of Corporate Environmentalism.” Business History Review 93 (Spring 2019): 75–99. Examines the sustainability push of DuPont over the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In 1989, Edgar Woolard began his tenure as chief executive of the chemical giant DuPont by calling for a new “corporate environmentalism.” Looks at how DuPont has not only become more environmentally sustainable but also maintained a poor environmental record in some areas. Provides insights into the difficulties of greening an established industrial enterprise as well as the mixed financial consequences.Rüdiger, Mogens. “From Coal to Wind: How the Danish Energy Policy Changed in 1990.” Scandinavian Journal of History 44 (September 2019): 510–30. In March 1987, the Brundtland Report was published by the United Nation’s World Commission on Environment and Development. The recommendations of the report contributed worldwide to raising awareness of climate change, and the Danish government revised its energy planning. This article delves into this crucial change and, in doing so, suggests a historical answer to the question of why Denmark became one of the leading nations in transforming the energy sector from a power supply based on fossil fuels to a power generation system using a high percentage of renewables.Sieber, Renée, and Victoria Slonosky. “Developing a Flexible Platform for Crowdsourcing Historical Weather Records.” Historical Methods 52 (July-September 2019): 164–77. Reveals how useful climatological data can be found in historical documents, such as observatory registers, newspapers, ships’ logs, and private diaries. The authors present a citizen science application for transcribing Canadian weather registers from the late nineteenth century. The application is designed to engage citizen scientists with the historical record, respond to archival requirements, and fulfill the needs of the modern climate research community.Soens, Tim, et al. “Seawalls at Work: Envirotech and Labor on the North Sea Coast before 1800.” Technology & Culture 60 (July 2019): 688–725. Examines the history of the building of seawalls to cope with flood risk in the coastal wetlands of the North Sea area. The author challenges dominant narratives on the history of seawalls as inevitably evolving toward the rigid infrastructures we know today. Explores how seawalls responded to changing and varying socio-spatial realities throughout history.Spary, E. C. “On the Ironic Specimen of the Unicorn Horn in Enlightened Cabinets.” Journal of Social History 52 (Summer 2019): 1033–60. Author takes a material culture approach to the fate of the unicorn in the natural history collection of the age of enlightenment. Explores the interplay between unicorn horns, narwhals, rhinos, and other kinds of horn present in eighteenth-century French natural history collections, revealing that, in fact, unicorns never disappeared from the cabinet but, rather, presided over new narratives of what the Enlightenment was about. Also argues that this change in the status of unicorns was associated with changing patterns of the global whaling industry, which made narwhal horns widely available to Europeans and saw the narwhal become a natural historical object.Tucker, Jennifer. “Dangerous Exposures: Visualizing Work and Waste in the Victorian Chemical Trades.” International Labor and Working-Class History 95 (Spring 2019): 130–65. A study of the historical responses to industrial pollution and its social costs in Cheshire, Great Britain, and the towns of Widnes and St. Helens, where many of the world’s first chemical factories and towns were created in the nineteenth century. Explores the role o