So that just dropped out of the picture. PR: Do you remember the moment that go you started on this research? What were the first steps?
I interrupted it with a seminar paper I did in my first year that became the book called Changes in the Land. But when I designed the Chicago project initially it was under the sign of Frederick Jackson Turner, and it was with me as something called a western historian.
So I obscured the fact that this question about city and country had something to do with environment and nature. It was all about, in effect, turning Turner on his head and thinking about the frontier in urban terms rather than in rural terms.
I wrote the first two chapters—the booster chapter and the railroad chapter—and in the meantime, after publishing Changes in the Land, I became well-known as an environmental historian and I was working on this huge book about Chicago that had nothing to do with environmental history, or at least I had hid everything that was about the environment.
So I lost faith in the book. There was a three- or four-year interval when I was starting teaching and doing other things, and I just did not believe the Chicago book was what I wanted to be doing. And, since it was my Yale Ph. And I then sat down and wrote the prologue. And the prologue actually was Bill Cronon persuading himself that the book was worth writing and reframing it as environmental history. So the prologue had as its purpose the repurposing of a western history—a traditional frontier study—into an environmental history.
That solved the problem and enabled me to write the book. WC: I knew I wanted to do city-hinterlands, and the Canadians had already done Montreal, the grand kahuna for early Canadian history. I wanted to be a western historian, so the other obvious candidates were St. Over the last twenty years Bill Cronon has donated an extraordinary amount of time to professional organizations. He has served on numerous prize and membership committees.
He has been generous with his time, and his colleagues have long trusted his judgment. The series was and remains a great success. It has produced a succession of prize-winning, influential books. Making the series successful and promoting its authors demanded time and effort that could have gone into his own scholarship.
Many admittedly do not have the talent for it, but most realize that there are few things that the profession rewards as poorly. Cronon founded the series and has long supervised it to advance the field and help younger scholars. In a sense, the series became an extension of his graduate teaching, not because he treated his authors as graduate students, but because in both his teaching and his editing he saw scholarship as at least in part a collaborative enterprise.
Bill Cronon began attracting graduate students early in his career, and he attracts them still. They have been as remarkable a group as the cohort with whom he studied in graduate school. Despite the notorious 8 a. What set Bill apart for his graduate students was less his scholarship—Yale and Wisconsin are full of distinguished scholars—than that he taught graduate students the skills other professors assumed the students were just supposed to master by themselves. When he ran research seminars, he taught them how to choose a topic, one that was doable as well as compelling.
He taught them how to teach and how to write. They regarded him as a legendary lecturer, and he is, but he treated lecturing as an art, not a gift. It, like other aspects of teaching, could be learned. One of his former students, herself as graceful an essayist as any historian writing, credits him with raising the quality of not just her writing but also the writing in the profession as a whole.
Writing is an art, but the product is also a commodity, one necessary to get a job, advance in the profession, and to communicate knowledge. For her, Bill Cronon proved a font of practical knowledge and connections. As Cronon helped build the field, there was some confusion in the early years, even among practitioners, as to whether environmental history was the scholarly arm of the environmental movement.
Its thesis did not surprise anyone familiar with his work. By concentrating on wilderness preservation, he argued, environmentalism failed to value, and protect, the more accessible natural world of our everyday lives. The article produced howls of rage and rabid denunciations. When the full version of the essay appeared in Uncommon Ground, a volume that he edited from work produced during the Irvine seminar, the outrage was rekindled.
The volume was critical of environmentalists and environmentalism. He criticized not what environmentalists had done but what the movement had failed to do: the problems it failed to address, and the constituencies it both failed to serve and needlessly alienated. The essays were written when everyone presumed the Clinton administration would push environmental reform and they were an attempt to contextualize, critique, and shape those reforms, but they came out after the Republican takeover of Congress in the fall of They felt betrayed.
For most of those present, the meetings emphasized how uncommon the ground between scholarship and popular environmentalism had become, but Cronon went in another direction.
Without retracting his own critique of wilderness, he joined the Governing Council of the Wilderness Society, on which he serves to this day, and he also serves on the Board of Directors of the Trust for Public Lands. The evenhandedness, the willingness, indeed sometimes eagerness, to listen to critics—at least thoughtful ones—has always been a mark of his scholarship, teaching, and writing. Bill Cronon, like most environmental historians, remained at heart a materialist, but he recognized the force of the challenge the linguistic turn represented and the real strengths of its argument.
The definition of the human that Cronon most often cites is that humans are storytelling animals. And as he has repeatedly told audiences, what historians do is tell stories with morals about the past.
That he was a member of the geography department as well as the history department was an acknowledgment of something that had been apparent since Changes in the Land. Environmental geographers regarded that book as something they could have written. Not all of them, of course. The book was attacked as well as admired, but this only further underlined the centrality of the book to the discipline. It mattered. Bill has maintained an office on the Madison campus in Science Hall, home to the Geography Department, where he has nurtured many students.
He is the first historian most geographers think of when they think of history. Leaving Yale was not easy. He was very close to Howard Lamar, and Yale did everything it could to keep him.
New Haven was full of friends, colleagues, and wonderful students, but to his family it never seemed like home. Madison was home. Both he and his former wife, Nan Fey, wanted to raise their children, Hilary and Jeremy, near their families.
It was not just personal. Community and service drew him back to Madison. It was not that he was not an effective teacher and scholar at Yale.
He was. It was not that he could not affect local and national affairs from there. He could. It was that Yale, in a sense, could never engage him as much as the University of Wisconsin and Madison. Follow wcronon. Favorite Quotations. Course website. Address: Curriculum Vitae pdf Website. My teaching and research specializations focus principally on the environmental history, landscape history, and historical geography of North America, concentrating mainly on the United States with a secondary interest in Canada.
0コメント