As the river rises: Cahokia’s emergence and decline linked to Mississippi River flooding
Sediment cores from two lakes in the Mississippi floodplain show that Cahokia, the largest prehistoric settlement in the Americas north of Mexico, emerged during a period when there were few severe floods on the river and that its decline and abandonment coincided with the return of large floods.
What historians have to say about global warming
The public discussion of global warming can feel very stuck at times. An innovative course at Washington University in St.
Louis offers a way forward by making available the efforts of historians
to integrate natural history and human history over the past 40 years.
Taught by Venus Bivar, PhD, assistant professor of history in Arts & Sciences, it is an
introduction to a discipline called environmental history, with a
special focus on climate change.
Early pioneers sought ‘healthy’ places to live, 19th-century writings reveal
Valencius unearths a common theme among early settlers in *The Health of the Country*.Poring over stacks of yellowed aging letters and other documents from the 19th century while researching American western expansion, Conevery Bolton Valencius, Ph.D., an environmental historian at Washington University in St. Louis, noted a common theme. Assessments of the “sickliness” or “health” of land pervade settlers’ letters, journals, newspapers and literature from that time. Valencius says that the numerous references throughout 19th-century writings to “healthy country,” “sickly” countryside, or “salubrious” valleys reveal the importance settlers placed on the connections between their bodies and their land. One of the main criteria for choosing where to farm and where to raise a family for the early settlers was whether or not the area would be a healthy place to live.