Martin Melosi

University of Houston | U of H, UH · Department of History

In history, cities and nature are often treated as two separate fields of research. »Concepts of Urban-Environmental History« aims to bridge this gap. The contributions to this volume survey major concepts and key issues which have shaped recent debates in the field. They address unresolved questions and future challenges. As a handbook, the collec...

Houston began the twentieth century as a small cotton port linked to the Gulf of Mexico by a ship channel. It became an important center of oil production and refining before World War II, a leading producer during the war and its aftermath, and the global capital of energy focusing on technological innovation, refining, and petrochemicals as the w...

For millennia, urban centers were pivots of power and trade that ruled and linked rural majorities. After 1950, explosive urbanization led to unprecedented urban majorities around the world. That transformation—inextricably linked to rising globalization—changed almost everything for nearly everybody: production, politics, and daily lives. In this...

Fossil fuels propelled industries and nations into the modern age and continue to powerfully influence economies and politics today. As Energy Capitals demonstrates, the discovery and exploitation of fossil fuels has proven to be a mixed blessing in many of the cities and regions where it has occurred. With case studies from the United States, Cana...

Origins of the Field Major Debates Themes and Topics Future Research References

The Modern Environmental MovementThe Johnson AdministrationKey Players in the Johnson AdministrationNew Conservation in CongressAgent OrangeConclusion References

As an essential resource, water has been the object of warfare, political wrangling, and individual and corporate abuse. It has also become an object of commodification, with multinational corporations vying for water supply contracts in many countries. In Precious Commodity, Martin V. Melosi examines water resources in the United States and addres...

San Jose, located in Santa Clara County, California-the "Valley of Heart's Delight" and then "Silicon Valley"-became an incorporated city in 1850, the same year that California entered the Union. San Jose was the state's first capital and now is the third largest city in the state and the tenth most populous in the country. For the first several ye...

This paper explores how historians and others continue to create a barrier between the natural world and the city, and why the so-called declensionist narrative-humans as agents of harmful physical change-still dominates our understanding of the urban environment. It suggests several ways to reconsider the declensionist narrative; to evaluate the c...

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Technology and Culture 47.1 (2006) 224-226 Mira Engler teaches landscape architecture at Iowa State University. But Designing America's Waste Landscapes will appeal to an audience beyond her own discipline. She effectively demonstrates "that rejected landscapes can tell us as much as cherished landscapes, that landscapes at the extremes, both loved...

For much of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, urban Americans acquired water through their own devices, from water merchants, or from public wells. Beginning in the 1830s, many cities and towns developed centralized water systems managed and owned by municipalities. Until the late twentieth century, while water always had been treated...

On August 27, 2001, Department of Interior designated the Fresno Sanitary Landfill as a National Historic Landmark. The next day, Secretary Gail Norton "temporarily" rescinded the designation, claiming that the department was not aware of the landfill's Superfund status. For many people, the naming of a landfill as an historic landmark seemed ludic...

The electronic version of this book has been prepared by scanning TIFF 600 dpi bitonal images of the pages of the text. Original source: Effluent America : cities, industry, energy, and the environment / Martin V. Melosi.; Melosi, Martin V., 1947-; xiii, 325 p. ; 24 cm.; Pittsburgh :; This electronic text file was created by Optical Character Recog...

The author describes the evolution of one of America's first environmental movements - the anti-smoke crusade of the early 1900s. The roots of modern environmentalism, David Stradling explains, reach into this Victorian era when air quality became an important issue for middle-class residents in coal-dependent cities - how could a city without pure...

Garbage, wastewater, hazardous waste: these are the lenses through which Melosi views nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. In broad overviews and specific case studies, Melosi treats the relationship between industrial expansion and urban growth from an ecological perspective.

This paper treats major themes in the development of urban water supply in the United States from the Fairmount Waterworks in Philadelphia (1801) to modern systems in the late twentieth century. Technical changes in sources of supply, distribution networks, filtration, and treatment are central to the discussion with an eye to the environmental imp...

Urban life in America is supported by an invisible infrastructure. This text explores water supply, wastewater and solid-waste disposal systems in US cities from the colonial era to the present day. Martin Melosi explores the changing technologies and expanding population, along with the public health and ecological theories and practices which dev...

The emergence of the environmental justice movement in the 1980s has stimulated much debate on the extent to which race and class have been or should become central concerns of modern environmentalism. Leaders in the environmental justice movement have charged that mainstream environmental organizations and, in turn, environmental policy have demon...

Reviews in American History 27.2 (1999) 259-266Nancy Tomes. The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998. xv + 351 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $29.95. There is a timeless quality to the issues Nancy Tomes raises in The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in Am...

In Common Fields, environmental historian Andrew Hurley has gathered thirteen original essays to tell a compelling story of one city's history. It is a story built on the never-ending tension between urban growth and environmental sustainability - a tension that defines the fate not just of St. Louis, but of cities around the world. In these pages,...

Incineration has too often been perceived as a potential disposal panacea rather than one of several disposal options that meet varying criteria. Rather than trying to explain its advantages and disadvantages vis-à-vis other methods, we should first attempt to determine under what circumstances incineration best serves what disposal needs. The hist...

If the emergence of the Environmental Justice Movement displays anything, it is that the foundations of environmentalism laid 25 yr ago, are not unshakeable. The connection between environmental rights and civil rights has to be taken seriously. There is an obligation to discover what is happening to the theory and practice of environmentalism over...

This volume has essays by public and academic historians with working experience on topics, which describe and analyse linkages between public history and the environment and treat some of the ways that historians present environmental issues to the public.

The pariah garbage barge on a two-month odyssey with 3,100 tons of unwanted trash drew throngs of sightseers and reporters Sunday as it anchored just outside New York Harbor while city officials decide its fate. The trek of the Mobro is well known. On 22 March 1987 the fully loaded garbage barge left Islip, New York, looking for a landfill that wou...

In raising questions about the urban experience, the study of technical systems provides a valuable tool for understanding the profound physical transformation of American cities in the 19th and 20th centuries, the degree to which those changes influenced patterns of growth, and how net incomes of those technical systems affected the lives of the p...

Examines how federal policy evolved from a pro-exploitation to an energy-environmental-balance perspective. Changes are traced through four periods: 1) The Conservation Era, from the late 19th century to 1960; 2) The Transition Decade, the 1960s, a period of rising environmental awareness; 3) The Energy Crisis, the 1970s, when the convergence of th...

The book begins by outlining the wood/water power era, then progresses through coal, petroleum, and nuclear power sources, considering the environmental issues attached to each. The histories of concurrent conservation and environmental movements are considered, and much historical background is provided; any event - natural, economic, social, dipl...

The history of solid waste collection and disposal is traced from the 19th Century, when public health was the major factor, to modern programs. Once regarded as a nuisance, solid wastes are now looked upon as the third pollutant and an ecological hazard because they are so closely interrelated with air and water pollution. Solid wastes were recogn...