During the COVID-19 pandemic, video games offered Nat Mesnard and many others an escape from isolation. But the false promise of endless productivity in factory building games like Satisfactory ensnared them in a myth of capitalist “progress.”
Tea gardens in West Bengal are steeped in legacies of British colonialism. Chandreyi Sengupta, Mrinmoyee Naskar, and Debajit Datta trace the lingering social and environmental impacts of the 19th-century plantation system.
A poetic and visceral narrative of salt mining in Gujarat, India, Divya Victor’s Kith calls attention to the lives and deaths of salt farmers.
Dr. Shona Jackson discusses labor in the Caribbean and the need for radical, collective labor histories that include Creole groups and Indigenous peoples.
The Dole pineapple plantation has a destructive history of transforming the Hawaiian Islands. Mallory Huard describes how that continues today in the tourism industry.
From toxic street slush to plowed-in cars, winter can be frustrating. But it doesn’t have to be. A historian uncovers 19th-century lessons for working with—not against—the snow.
Environmentalists played a disturbing role in the Adirondacks’ prison-building boom. As the state now shutters many of those facilities, we’re at risk of forgetting that.
When fur, lumber, and salmon ruled the Northwest frontier, Hawaiian labor was at the heart of it all. An environmental historian retells the story of 19th-century Oregon and British Columbia from a trans-Pacific perspective.
We need to expand our ideas of nature to include the battlefield. A historian explains why we should view soldiers’ daily lives as part of the natural world.
A recent book shows Chicago’s turn-of-the-century black and immigrant laborers embraced the great outdoors. Did they have any other choice?
