Environmental Studies

From the Physical-to-Digital Archive and Back: A Gale Fellow’s Account of Trials and Errors

by

│By Vanessa Bateman, ESEH-Gale Fellow│

When I received the 2024/2025 ESEH-Gale Non-Residential Fellowship in Digital Environmental History I was just starting the early stages of my first solo book project. I had done enough research to develop my book’s main themes, structure, and research questions, but I had not started the writing process because I still had some gaps to fill.

As someone new to the Digital Humanities (DH), I applied to the Gale Fellowship because I wanted to learn how DH methodologies could elevate my research and eventually expand my output beyond a traditional academic book. As a Gale Fellow, I received training in different research and analysis methods that could be achieved in Gale Digital Scholar Lab, and access to the Gale Primary Sources.

Below I share an account of how I had to problem solve and pivot my research in the digital space, and some findings I made that will be useful in the future. Sharing moments when research didn’t go according to plan, I believe, is just as important as a polished finished project.

Read more

Global Development and Humanitarian Aid: The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, 1919-1997

by

│By Clem Delany, Acquisitions Editor, Gale Primary Sources│

Note: Links to documents in this blog post will be provided on publication of the digital archive.

Like many people in the UK, my first experience of humanitarian appeals was through charity campaigns at school or through Blue Peter. The first one I strongly recall is sending care packages to Romania. Famine in Ethiopia and the need for wells in Africa also loom large in my memories of this era; if Matt Baker told me to give money I said how much (up to a limit of £2)?

Years later, studying history at University, I took a module on the Greek famine of 1941-1942. It was something I had known nothing about, illustrated with stark numbers of Axis requisitions, of the dead and the starving, and by accounts from survivors.

Primary sources for situations such as famines can be a real challenge for scholars; data is shaky, accounts are limited. Few people in a famine zone are there to count heads or write a dissertation; they are either struggling to survive the disaster or there to provide aid.

Read more

Applying Animal Theory to Gale’s National Geographic Virtual Library

by

| By Jessica Crawley, Gale Ambassador at Lancaster University |

National Geographic is not only a non-profit organization, but also a media company that has taken the printing world by storm. Readers have been using the National Geographic Magazine to scratch that adventurous itch since the magazine’s first publication in 1888, quite literally placing a gateway to the non-human world at the fingertips of human hands. The magazine has sold millions of copies in 40 different languages to date, pairing fascinating visuals with a layman-friendly tone, making it the perfect companion for any reader with an interest in science, wildlife, and exploration.

Read more

Sacred Returns: The American Bison, Prophecy and History  

by

│By Lindsay Whitaker-Guest, Associate Editor│

In June 2024, an extremely rare white bison (buffalo) calf was sighted in Yellowstone National Park causing great excitement amongst visitors, wildlife researchers, and most significantly local Native American people.

The birth is ecologically and culturally important, but above all symbolises the momentous recovery of the American bison, which according to Native American traditions is an indication of a brighter future. But why has the birth of this adorable creature been so celebrated? And what might this mean for the future of the American bison?   

Read more

New Environmental History Archive: Colonial Policy and Global Development, 1896-1993

by

│By Clem Delany, Acquisitions Editor, Gale Primary Sources│

On sitting down to write a brief explanation of what environmental history is, I have spent the last twenty minutes staring into space thinking about Pando. Pando is, as I’m sure the sophisticated and well-travelled audience of this blog will know, the largest and heaviest living organism on earth. Pando covers 100 acres and is around 10,000 years old. That means that when Pando first began its long, slow life, there were woolly mammoth and sabre-toothed cats still living, although increasingly finding their parties a little light on company.

Pando is a tree. It is a quaking aspen in Utah; in appearance it is over 45,000 individual quaking aspens, but below ground it has a single root system. Each ‘tree’ is a clone of its neighbours, a stem of one single organism. And it is on my mind because I am trying to think of a pithy way to describe environmental history, an area of study where many different disciplines and topics meet, connected at their roots as different expressions of one phenomenon: human interaction with the natural world.

Read more

The First Module in Gale’s Environmental History Series – Conservation and Public Policy in America, 1870-1980

by

│By Lindsay Whitaker-Guest, Associate Editor│

In the summer of 2023, four alarming global climate records were broken: the hottest day on record globally; the hottest June on record; the warmest global ocean temperatures in May, June, and July; and the lowest recorded level of Antarctic sea-ice. One could not turn on the television or look at a news website without seeing images of harrowing wildfires in Europe, Hawaii and Canada or the devastating typhoon in East Asia. As I sat sweltering on a Sardinian beach during heatwave Charon in late July, my thoughts echoed those from all over the globe, is the Earth now in a climate crisis? And how did we get here?  

Read more