Tag Archives: Steven Stoll

The Students of The Mannion Society

The Mannion Society was established by the History Department to encourage outstanding students’ development as researchers. The students are given a chance to work more closely with a member of the faculty in cultivating their research and formulating a well written argument. These students have entered the program with a topic of interest in mind and, while a majority of the research and planning is done independently, they have the guidance and support of Dr. Steven Stoll, the students’ professor of history. The students in this year’s program have written to tell us about their original work. Continue reading

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Challenging Assumptions: A Conversation with Steven Stoll

Profesor Steven Stoll

Professor Steven Stoll

Steven Stoll became a member of the Fordham History Department in 2008.  His classes and research focus on the history of capitalism and environmental history and more specifically how these two topics intersect. Stoll’s work is extremely relevant today as politicians and scientists debate climate change; activists and industry clash over fracking; California struggles through drought; and farmers raise ethical concerns about GMOs. But what is environmental history? For Stoll, environmental history is the story of how humans have changed the planet, how societies have lived well (or not so well) with the environment, and how different societies at different points in time have thought about ‘nature’.  He explained that people’s ideas about the Earth and the environment have changed drastically over the last 400 years. Stoll said, “Students, and a lot of other people, look at New York City and how we live today—the kinds of houses we live in, the kinds of energies and conveniences we have—and though they know it hasn’t always been this way, they assume that all of this is normal, that things are supposed to be this way.. I try to show them that our way of life has existed for an astonishingly short period of time. To me, the most exciting use of history is to take ideas that people think are universal or derived from ‘nature’ and reveal their recent origins.”  

 

Steven Stoll giving a lecture at Yale University entitled "The Captured Garden: Substance Under Capitalism" in 2013. The lecture is available as a video on the Yale University Website.

Steven Stoll giving a lecture at Yale University entitled “The Captured Garden: Substance Under Capitalism” in 2013. The lecture is available as a video on the Yale University Website.

                   Professor Stoll questions the notion of progress, his views are in direct opposition to what most of his students and readers learned growing-up in Western society. Walt Disney World’s Carousel of Progress celebrates progress without any critical examination and perpetuates the idea that each new technological advancement is an inevitable improvement to society.  However, Stoll argues that there is no “spirit of progress embedded in human history” driving technological change. He explains that technological progress “occurs for very specific reasons, but always because someone invents something that fulfills a social goal.” What constitutes progress depends on who benefits from technological change, he says. Stoll encourages his students and readers to step outside of their lives and experiences to critically examine the world.  

 

                   He laughed good naturedly while saying, “My courses are about how everything we know comes out of the past, just like any other historian.” His course on North American environmental history is not just abstract topics (like the nature of progress) but covers people, inventions, and events like the Erie Canal, the construction of American railroads, the fate of the passenger pigeon, the Ice-Age migration of American-Indians, and the history of industrialization. He explores the interaction between capitalism and the environment in his two books The Fruits of Natural Advantage: Making the Industrial Countryside in California and Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth- Century America.

Larding the Lean Earth by Steven Stoll published in 2002

Larding the Lean Earth by Steven Stoll published in 2002

 Stoll is currently working on his fifth book, which focuses geographically on the Appalachian Mountains. “At first, I didn’t really know what I wanted to say about it, honestly. It’s a big and complicated place. But I knew I wanted write about how the people who lived in the mountains lost their land, how mountain people who lived in log cabins became coal miners, not necessarily by choice, but how the industry and the state transformed their environment and forced them into wage work as the only way to make a living.” In his book on Appalachia, Stoll examines how ‘mountain people’ lived independently with their own system and means of survival and the factors led to the destruction of this way of life. He also explores aspects of mountain society itself, like population growth and environmental erosion, and also how society changed when “capital came into the mountains.” The book covers Appalachia between the Whiskey Rebellion and the Great Depression.

            Long after speaking with Dr. Stoll my brain was stuck on the slice of avocado I had with my lunch. Who grew this avocado? Who owned the land it was grown on? Who, if anyone, owned the genetic code in the seeds? Who picked and packaged this fruit? What are the conditions under which they work? If it was a California avocado, how much water did it take to grow this fruit? Who has the ‘right’ to water during a shortage,? It was just an avocado, which I had eaten so many                                                                            times before but now it was so much more than that.

 

If you’re interested in Steven Stoll’s work you can read his article “No Man’s Land” published online in the Orion Magazine, as well as his two books The Fruits of Natural Advantage: Making the Industrial Country Side in California and Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America. And, of course, be on the look-out for his upcoming monograph on Appalachia.

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“Multiple Enclosures” Two Day O’Connell Event on Land and Capital, May 5-6

Save the Date (Two Day Final)

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The Legacy of Robert Moses: History’s Panetta, Stoll, and Wakeman Weigh In

Moses Event

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“No Man’s Land” by Steven Stoll

Steven Stoll, Professor of History here at Fordham University specializing in environmental history and the history of capitalism and agrarian societies, recently published “No Man’s Land” in the Orion Magazine.

Professor of History at Fordham University, Steven Stoll

 Steven Stoll, Professor of History at Fordham University

The article, which you can read here, explores how issues relating to  private property, land rights, local interests, and agriculture can often intersect.  Stoll begins the article relating the case of the South Central Farm in Los Angeles. The plot of land was seized by the city of Los Angeles in 1986, however the community resisted the plan to build an incinerator on the site. The plan folded and the land then came under the control of the Harbor Department. In 1994 the Harbor Department invited the local food bank to use the land to construct a community garden. “But in 2001, one of the prior owners filed a lawsuit against the city. The property had never been used to build the incinerator, and so, he argued, Los Angeles had no reason to seize it. The city settled the case in 2003 by selling the fourteen acres back to the prior owner.” The gardeners, who were then accused of squatting, refused to leave the land. In 2003 police arrested forty people, the farm was bulldozed, and the land remains vacant. Stoll writes, “In the case of the South Central Farm, ownership for profit triumphed over use for subsistence, which, of course, is the way of the world.”

To read the rest of Stoll’s article visit the Orion Magazine website.

Steven Stoll has also published Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America (2002) and The Great Delusion (2008). He is currently working on a monograph about losing land and livelihood in Appalachia.

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