William Cronon

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William Cronon (2007)

William 'Bill' J. Cronon (born September 11, 1954 in New Haven , Connecticut ) is an American environmental historian .

Since 1992 he has held an endowed professorship for history , geography and environmental sciences, named after Frederick Jackson Turner , and since 2003 the Vilas research professorship at the University of Wisconsin – Madison . In 2012 he was President of the American Historical Association and served as Past President of its leadership in 2013 .

education

He earned his doctorate at Jesus College of the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar . Cronon had a BA (1976) from the University of Wisconsin – Madison and an MA (1979) M.Phil. (1980) and PhD (1990) from Yale University .

In July 1985 he received a MacArthur scholarship and a Guggenheim scholarship in 1994 . Cronon was an advisor to Wayne Pacelles at Yale University in the 1980s . He is on the Board of Directors of the Public Land Trust and advises The Wilderness Society . In 1999, Cronon was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society , followed by admission to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006 . For 2017 he was awarded the Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Award and he was inducted into the British Academy .

Researches

Cronon is best known as the author of Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England . The book is based on a term paper for Edmund S. Morgan at Yale. Cronon sees the concept of property as a central factor for economic and ecosystems and assigns the Indians an active role in shaping their environment.

His essay, The Trouble with Wilderness , in the New York Times traces the idea of wilderness throughout American history. According to Cronon, it is an ideal, a longing for people who have never had to make a living directly from nature. He pointed out that almost all so-called wilderness areas have been used by humans at all times and have been influenced to a greater or lesser extent. In his view, a categorical separation of humans and nature is a dangerous ideology for the future of nature conservation. A policy of total reserves would alienate people even more from nature and prevent them from developing an ethically and ecologically correct, sustainable use of the wilderness.

With the book Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1991) he won the 1992 Bancroft Prize . It is considered a groundbreaking work in American environmental history. He broadened the perspective of the subject from observations of fields and forests to the intensive connection between town and country. According to Cronon, Chicago capitalism reshaped the entire agrarian Midwest. Among other things, he describes how wheat was initially offered as general cargo in hand-made sacks by farming families and finally became a standardized economic good as silo goods. The associated changes resulted in profound changes in both the city and the landscape.

Controversy over austerity blog

In 2011 there were substantial protests over budget cuts in the state of Wisconsin. Cronon started a blog called Scholar as Citizen . He criticized, among other things, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which had served the governor as a lobby organization against the public service unions. The Wisconsin Republican Party requested email from Cronon's university account through a FOIA request. Some of the emails filtered by search terms were handed over by the university. Cronon complained, among other things, in a comment for The New York Times about the actions of Governor Scott Walker and called for better protection of academic freedom . Internet news and entertainment magazine Salon ironically described him as Wisconsin's most dangerous professor .

Publications (excerpt)

  • Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England , 1983; 20th anniversary edition, Hill & Wang, 2003.
  • Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West , WW Norton, 1991. ISBN 978-0-393-30873-0
  • Telling Tales on Canvas: Landscapes of Frontier Change . In: Discovered Lands, Invented Pasts: Transforming Visions of the American West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
  • A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative . Journal of American History 78: 4 (March, 1992), pp. 1347-1376.
  • The Uses of Environmental History . (Presidential Address, American Society for Environmental History), Environmental History Review , 17: 3 (Fall 1993), pp. 1-22.
  • Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature . WW Norton, 1995, ISBN 978-0-393-31511-0 .
  • The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature . Environmental History , 1 (1) (Jan. 1996), pp. 7-28.
  • Only Connect…: The Goals of a Liberal Education . The American Scholar , (Autumn, 1998), pp. 73-80.
  • Why the Past Matters . Wisconsin Magazine of History , 84: 1 (Autumn 2000), pp. 2-13. Awarded the William Best Hesseltine 2000–2001.
  • The Riddle of the Apostle Islands: How Do You Manage a Wilderness Full of Human Stories? . Orion (May-June 2003), 36-42.
  • The Densest, Richest, Most Suggestive 19 Pages I Know . Environmental History , 10 (4) (Oct., 2005), pp. 679-681.
  • Storytelling . (AHA Presidential Address), The American Historical Review (2013) 118 (1): 1-19.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d An Environmentalist on a Different Path; A Fresh View of the Supposed 'Wilderness' and Even the Indians' Place in It . In: New York Times . April 3, 1999. Accessed 2009-07-23.
  2. ↑ Directory of Elected Council Officers at the AHA  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. .@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.historians.org  
  3. ↑ a b Old Members News and Notes . In: The Jesus College Record . , P. 48.
  4. ^ William Cronon scholarship entry in the database of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
  5. ^ Elections to the British Academy celebrate the diversity of UK research. British Academy , July 21, 2017, accessed July 21, 2017 .
  6. ^ Anthony Grafton: Wisconsin: The Cronon Affair . In: The New Yorker , News Desk . March 28, 2011. Retrieved October 23, 2013.
  7. ^ John Gardner: William Cronon and academic freedom . In: The Guardian . April 1, 2011. Retrieved April 4, 2011.
  8. ^ Leonard, Andrew (March 25, 2011) Wisconsin's most dangerous professor , Salon.com

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Cronon, William
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Cronon, Bill; Cronon, William J.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American environmental historian and author
DATE OF BIRTH September 11, 1954
PLACE OF BIRTH New Haven , Connecticut, United States