Newsroom

by Royden Loewen Mennonite Farmers is an environmental history that juxtaposes life in the twentieth century in starkly diverse contexts. Its main contribution to global environmental history lies in a comparison of micro-histories of seven distinctive places...

By Lisa T. Sarasohn Let’s be perfectly clear: I despise bugs, even the supposedly socially useful ones, like bees or spiders. And I particularly don’t like the nefarious ones that I feature in my book, Getting Under Our Skin: The Cultural and Social History of...

I wanted to write the kind of book I'd enjoy reading. And, I intended to follow the time-honored advice to write about what I know. I am happy to report that I did both in Observing Evolution. My hope now is that a broad audience will enjoy my book, and will...

Many people think of marsupials as Australian mammals, which get almost all the press attention. Most of the marsupials in nature documentaries are from Down Under: kangaroos, wallabies, wombats, koalas, bandicoots, sugar gliders, and so forth. But, despite...

Freshwater semi-aquatic mammals represent some of the world’s rarest species living within some of its most threatened habitats. Better known species, including the platypus, North American and Eurasian beavers, the common hippopotamus, and various species of...

Dr. Valerie Trouet, author of the new book Tree Story: The History of the World Written in Rings, was recently interviewed by Tiffany Gasbarrini, the book’s editor and the Senior Acquisitions Editor for Life Sciences at JHU Press. Their playful, wide-ranging...

Books have a way of influencing your life more so even than experiences. They seem to connect directly to your subconscious, change it, and can alter your path. So while I have been enamored with creeping and crawling things ever since I first began catching...

I have always been fascinated with nature, and at the same time, I have always loved art. The two for me have gone hand in hand as far back as I can remember. Growing up I was constantly out looking for turtles and snakes, or I was fishing. If I wasn’t out...

If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard that from one of my students, I’d be a rich man. Most people hearing that would be downright offended, and understandably so. To 99 out of 100 people it would be an insult. To me, however, it’s like music to my ears...

“A man, a van, and a crazy plan.” That’s how my editor described it. My coauthors, American’s Larry Heaney and Eric Rickart, knew me well enough to believe I could pull it off. Having spent months in the field by myself studying Philippine mammals, the idea of...