Lake Baikal and the World Water Crisis

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Water, Culture, and Society in Global Historical Perspective II

This conference is the second of two, linked international conferences focused on the provision, management, use, and cultural meanings of water and its relationship to patterns of human culture, politics, technology, and socio-economic organization across geographies and chronologies. The conference will focus on two distinct themes: "Cultures of Water" and "The Effluent Society." The first conference will took place in mid-May 2016 and focused on the intersecting topics of Water and Power" and "Controlling Water." Through these four themes our program spans a broad range of vital and interconnected topics posed by "water." The conferences, held at the Mershon Center at the Ohio State University, will be run as workshops with papers distributed in advance to ensure the most productive discussions. Papers will be published either in edited volumes or special issues of environmental history journals."Water" constitutes a multi-faceted topic of overwhelming historical and contemporary significance. Water defines every aspect of life: from the ecological to the cultural, religious, social, economic, and political. Without the molecule H20, life as we understand it would cease to exist. Water remains at the center of human activity: in irrigation and agriculture; waste and sanitation; drinking and disease; floods and droughts; religious beliefs and practices; fishing and aquaculture; travel and discovery; scientific study; water pollution and conservation; multi-purpose dam building; in the setting of boundaries and borders; politics and economic life; and wars and diplomacy. Water also plays an important symbolic role in works of literature, art, music, and architecture, and it serves as a source of human beauty and spiritual tranquility.Mershon Center for International StudiesOhio State University College of Arts and HumanitiesEast Asian Studies Center, The Ohio State UniversityCenter for Slavic and East European Studies, The Ohio State UniversityThe Institute for Korean Studies, The Ohio State UniversityHistory Department, The Ohio State UniversityEnvironmental Studies Network, The Ohio State UniversityThe Sustainable and Resilient Economy Discovery Theme at Ohio StateRussian, East European, and Eurasian History Seminar, The Ohio State UniversityA Northeast Asia Council Japanese Studies Grant (Association for Asian Studies)Academia Sinica (Taipei)Shanghai Jiao Tong Universit

Peasant settlers and the ‘civilizing mission’ in Russian Turkestan, 1865-1917

This article provides an introduction to one of the lesser-known examples of European settler colonialism, the settlement of European (mainly Russian and Ukrainian) peasants in Southern Central Asia (Turkestan) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It establishes the legal background and demographic impact of peasant settlement, and the role played by the state in organising and encouraging it. It explores official attitudes towards the settlers (which were often very negative), and their relations with the local Kazakh and Kyrgyz population. The article adopts a comparative framework, looking at Turkestan alongside Algeria and Southern Africa, and seeking to establish whether paradigms developed in the study of other settler societies (such as the ‘poor white’) are of any relevance in understanding Slavic peasant settlement in Turkestan. It concludes that there are many close parallels with European settlement in other regions with large indigenous populations, but that racial ideology played a much less important role in the Russian case compared to religious divisions and fears of cultural backsliding. This did not prevent relations between settlers and the ‘native’ population deteriorating markedly in the years before the First World War, resulting in large-scale rebellion in 1916

Dry days down under: Australia and the world water crisis

  For several years now, Australia, the driest inhabited continent, has been suffering perhaps the worst drought in its recorded history. Amidst disappearing rivers and empty dams, farmers have watched their fields go barren and their livestock perish, while urban dwellers face greater and greater restrictions on water use. Terrible wildfires have swept through the country, scorching millions of acres of land. The drought is challenging Australians\u27 very idea of who they are as a people and their faith in the future. Australia is hardly alone with these problems, as much of the globe struggles with insufficient, polluted, oversubscribed, and increasingly expensive water. How successfully Australia responds to its current water woes will offer an important road map for others around the world. In this paper, historian Nicholas Breyfogle, puts the current Australian drought into historical perspective.   Origins is a free, non-commercial publication from the Public History Initiative and eHistory in Ohio State University\u27s History Department. Each month, an academic expert analyzes a particular current issue - political, cultural, or social - in a larger, deeper historical context. In addition to the analysis provided in each month\u27s feature, Origins also includes podcasts, images, maps, graphics, timelines, and other material to complement the article. Image: Mundoo / flick

Heretics and colonizers: Religious dissent and Russian colonization of Transcaucasia, 1830-1890

This dissertation examines the settlement of Russian religious dissenters (Dukhobors, Molokans, and Subbotniks) in Transcaucasia from 1830 to 1890. During this period, tsarist officials promoted the relocation of sectarians (sektanty) to Transcaucasia--to the exclusion of other Slavs--in an effort to isolate their heretical infection from Orthodox Russians. Using previously unexamined archival materials written by the settlers themselves, this study explores Russian frontier colonization at ground level. It examines the migration experience, investigates the role of the periphery in nineteenth-century Russian history, and sheds light on the development of the Russian Empire. Since religious non-conformists comprised the majority of Russian migrants, this dissertation also discusses questions of popular religiosity and the role of religion in Russian society and polity. Whereas existing scholarship describes Russian empire-building as a bilateral encounter between state representatives and indigenous peoples, this study demonstrates that Russian colonists played a vital role in constructing Imperial Russia as a multi-ethnic, multi-confessional entity. The sectarian-settlers influenced Russia\u27s imperial enterprise through their interactions with tsarist authorities, local inhabitants, and Transcaucasia\u27s ecology. Tsarist officials were obliged to rely on these pernicious heretics to administer the region because there were so few other Russians in Transcaucasia. Paradoxically, these pariahs came to be considered model colonists. The dissertation also asserts that a primary effect of Russian imperial expansion was to provide arenas on the frontier in which Russians (in this case religious dissenters) were able to forge alterative existences-- new worlds --beyond those possible in the central provinces. The Transcaucasian frontier proved a fertile ground for contesting labels, manipulating categories, and refashioning notions of self and community. Distant from central power, and in dynamic interaction with a wide array of non-Russian peoples, the sectarians constructed and solidified new religious beliefs, social structures, economic practices, cultural systems, and identities. The use of non-conformists as colonizers loosened traditional links between Orthodox Christianity and Russian ethnicity, redefining Russian nationality