What Is Environmental History?

Resource: Learning Materials

Environmental historians provide a unique approach and perspective regarding socio-environmental (S-E) understanding. Because available data to evaluate historical questions are sparse, environmental historians frequently use multiple sources of data to help triangulate results and validate conclusions. Furthermore, they utilize both social and natural science data to evaluate the influence of the environmental factors on historical events and narratives. 

In this video, Dr. Sam White explains what environmental history and climate history mean, and how they came to be. History, like most areas of the social sciences, traditionally overlooked the natural world and its role in human affairs. Most historians, even into the late 20th century, remained deeply skeptical of environmental explanations for historical change. The environmental movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, followed by rising concern over global warming, helped generate a subfield of researchers working at the interface of past human and environmental change, and of written and physical evidence. To conclude, Dr. White provides a case study of environmental history in practice, with his research on the Ottoman Empire.  

  • About the Presenters
    Sam White has light brown hair and brown eyes, with brown classes where a button up shirt with a sweater on top

    Sam White

    Professor of Political History

    Dr. Sam White is a professor of political history at the University of Helsinki. Prior to that he was a professor of environmental history at the Ohio State University.  His research specializes in historical climate reconstruction and impacts, combining physical and written evidence.  He has published various articles on climate, disease, and animals in human history, co-edited the first major textbook in climate history, and written two monographs: The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe...

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    Sam White has light brown hair and brown eyes, with brown classes where a button up shirt with a sweater on top

    Sam White

    Professor of Political History

    Dr. Sam White is a professor of political history at the University of Helsinki. Prior to that he was a professor of environmental history at the Ohio State University.  His research specializes in historical climate reconstruction and impacts, combining physical and written evidence.  He has published various articles on climate, disease, and animals in human history, co-edited the first major textbook in climate history, and written two monographs: The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe's Encounter with North America (Harvard University Press, in review).  With Dagomar Degroot, he is the co-founder and director of the Climate History Network.

Presenters
Sam White, University of Helsinki
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