Is _Environmental History_ in Decline?

16 08 2011

The American Historical Review was the most cited journal in history in 2010, garnering one in every eight citations to a history journal in 2010, according to a Journal Citation Reports analysis of references to 1,000 articles from 43 history journals. Read more here.

Does anybody know why the impact factor for the journal Environmental History peaked in 2006? Environmental history is one the hottest fields in history, so I would be curious to know why citations of articles in that journal have fallen so dramatically since 2006. Have other journals in the field of environmental history appeared? Or is there less interest in environmental history? I’m not an expert on this field, although I am a sympathetic observer, so I would be interested to know what the heck is going on.

Background: Copublished by the American Society for Environmental History and the Forest History Society in association with Oxford University Press, Environmental History is the successor publication to the journals of the two organizations, Environmental History Review and Forest & Conservation History. Environmental History Review was published from 1976 to 1989 as Environmental Review. Forest & Conservation History was published from 1957 to 1958 as the Forest History Newsletter, from 1959 to 1974 as Forest History, and from 1975 to 1989 as the Journal of Forest History.


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HBC Records as a Source for Studying the History of Climate Change

26 09 2009

In this video of a presentation he gave in October 2008, historian George Colpitts of the University of Calgary discusses how the records kept in the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives can be used to study the history of climate in Canada.  The records kept by the trading posts and ships of the Hudson’s Bay Company have been used by many different types of Canadian historians (economic historians, gender historians, Native Land Claims researchers). Now they are being used by environmental historians working on the very important topic of historical climate change.

HBC Ships in Hudson Strait, Summer 1819

HBC Ships in Hudson Strait, Summer 1819

Colpitts gave this presentation at the Canadian Climate History workshop at the University of Western Ontario. You can watch the other presentations here.

Image Source: Library and Archives Canada.


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New Nature’s Past Podcast

21 09 2009
Logo of the Nature's Past Podcast

Logo of the Nature's Past Podcast

The ninth episode of  Nature’s Past, the podcast produced by NiCHE, the Network in Canadian History & Environment is now available here. This episode that looks at environmental history graduate studies in Canada.  Previous episodes can be downloaded from the NiCHE website.

The podcaster, Sean Kheraj, is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of History at the University of British Columbia. He has previously written about the environmental history of Vancouver’s Stanley Park. Currently, he is researching a new project on the history of urban animals in Canada.

The monthly Nature’s Past podcasts are a way of keeping abreast of the rapidly growing field of Canadian environmental history.  The podcasts are similar in format to a CBC Radio One documentary and feature interviews with scholars in the field talking about their research. They are designed to appeal to both academic historians and ordinary Canadians who are interested in the environmental history of their country.


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