Environmental History: Profile of a Developing Field

In the last twenty-five years, and especially in the last ten years, environmental history in the United States has become a recognized field with a strong core of both individual and institutional support. An increasing number of historians are specializing in it. Graduate students can now study with prominent environmental historians in Ph.D. programs at several institutions and can earn a doctorate in the field. The number of academic conferences focused on environmental studies and history have proliferated in the 1990s. Whatever the questions and orientation of study, historians who study and teach the history of the role and place of nature in human life are working in a dynamic, rapidly changing field that also continues to be connected to public concerns. The field has grown primarily because it is useful. These questions and issues press upon environmental historians with urgency not just because they emerge out of, or impinge only upon, strategies of scholarship and careers, but because they are connected to concerns about our relationship to the physical world that sustains us all

Re-Greening the South and Southernizing the Rest

As the environmental history of the South is exposed and recovered, and historians explain more fully the intimate relationship between agriculture, agrarian and pastoral sensibilities, the history of slavery, and the physical environment of the South, we may discover that the South is instead out in front, waiting for the rest of America to catch up. Environmental historians of other regions in the United States, or indeed environmentalists in general who are seeking a usable past, may once again find a great deal to learn from historians of the South

Policies of Nature and Vegetables : Hugh Anderson, the Georgia Experiment, and the Political Use of Natural Philosophy

In 1737, Hugh Anderson, a Scottish gentleman of liberal education who had come to the new colony of Georgia with his family two years earlier, joined his voice to those already complaining to the colony\u27s governing body. In so doing, he also attacked the Trustees\u27 plan for the colony and their land and labor regulations. Correspondence was the common medium in the eighteenth century for communication, for the diffusion of information, and for establishing, reinforcing, or questioning social, political, and economic relationships. Like the other colonists, Hugh Anderson used the letter of petition as a medium of protest. But Anderson\u27s voice was also distinctive among the Georgia colonists, especially in his letters to the leading Trustee in England, Sir John Percival, Earl of Egmont, for its use of both language and concepts from natural philosophy and natural history to organize and to express his discontent

Cultivating Kudzu: The Soil Conservation Service and the Kudzu Distribution Program

Kudzu (Pueraria lobata; formerly jR thunbergiana) , which had been cultivated in Japan for centuries, made its appearance in the United States in 1876 at the Japanese pavilion at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition and was introduced to southerners at the Japanese pavilion at the New Orleans Exposition of 1884-1886. Because of its luxuriant, rapid growth, broad and layered leaves, and lovely purple or magenta wisteria-like flowers, it soon gained popularity as a shade plant and became known as the porch vine. By early in this century, some farmers were growing kudzu as a forage crop, mainly because of the indefatigable efforts of C. E. Pleas, a farmer of Chipley, Florida. Pleas noticed that the kudzu that escaped from his shade planting was being eaten with relish by his goats, pigs, cows, and even his large free-ranging flock of chickens. After successful experiments with the kudzu as a forage crop, Pleas began pitching its virtues and selling rootstock through the mails, and in 1925 he praised the plant with a pamphlet, Kudzu - Coming Forage of the South. Unfortunately, the virtue that the vine\u27s promoters praised most highly, its vigor and rapid rate of growth, soon revealed itself a virtue in excess. By the 1950s, foresters and highway engineers were complaining that wherever it was planted, the vine grew upward or outward at the rate of sixty to a hundred feet a season. The new king of the South, as it turned out, had faint restraint, and the ground cover that the Soil Conservation Service only a few years before had celebrated as a solution to erosion - and social and economic - problems had become a pest. The U.S. Department of Agriculture removed kudzu from its list of acceptable cover crops for its Agricultural Conservation Program in the 1950s

Review of: The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism

Aaron Sachs’s impressive study of Alexander von Humboldt’s influence on nineteenth-century American explorer-scientists reexamines terrain long familiar to historians of science and of exploration. It also advances a post-postcolonial perspective on Humboldt’s influence in the United States that is ultimately an argument about the history of environmental thought and activism in America in general

Lessons From the First Comprehensive Molecular Characterization of Cell Cycle Control in Rodent Insulinoma Cell Lines

OBJECTIVE—Rodent insulinoma cell lines may serve as a model for designing continuously replicating human β-cell lines and provide clues as to the central cell cycle regulatory molecules in the β-cell

Population-based type-specific prevalence of high-risk human papillomavirus infection in Estonia

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Effective prophylactic vaccines are available against human papillomavirus (HPV) types 6, 11, 16, and 18 which are licensed for routine use among young women. Monitoring is needed to demonstrate protection against cervical cancer, to verify duration of protection, and assess replacement frequency of non-vaccine types among vaccinated cohorts.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Data from a population-based study were used to assess the type-specific prevalence of HPV in a non-vaccinated population in Estonia: 845 self-administered surveys and self-collected vaginal swabs were distributed, 346 were collected by mail and tested for HPV DNA from female participants 18-35 years of age.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The overall HPV prevalence (weighted estimate to account for the sampling method) in the study population (unvaccinated women aged 18-35) was calculated to be 38% (95% CI 31-45%), with estimated prevalences of high- and low-risk HPV types 21% (95% CI 16-26%), and 10% (95% CI 7-14%), respectively. Of the high-risk HPV types, HPV 16 was detected most frequently (6.4%; 95% CI 4.0-9.8%) followed by HPV 53 (4.3%; 95% CI 2.3-7.2%) and HPV 66 (2.8%; 95% CI 1.3-5.2%).</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>We observed a high prevalence of total and high-risk type HPV in an Eastern European country. The most common high-risk HPV types detected were HPV 16, 53, and 66.</p

The Human Intestinal Microbiome: A New Frontier of Human Biology

To analyze the vast number and variety of microorganisms inhabiting the human intestine, emerging metagenomic technologies are extremely powerful. The intestinal microbes are taxonomically complex and constitute an ecologically dynamic community (microbiota) that has long been believed to possess a strong impact on human physiology. Furthermore, they are heavily involved in the maturation and proliferation of human intestinal cells, helping to maintain their homeostasis and can be causative of various diseases, such as inflammatory bowel disease and obesity. A simplified animal model system has provided the mechanistic basis for the molecular interactions that occur at the interface between such microbes and host intestinal epithelia. Through metagenomic analysis, it is now possible to comprehensively explore the genetic nature of the intestinal microbiome, the mutually interacting system comprising the host cells and the residing microbial community. The human microbiome project was recently launched as an international collaborative research effort to further promote this newly developing field and to pave the way to a new frontier of human biology, which will provide new strategies for the maintenance of human health