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<div align="center"><b><i>Modern Times, Rural Places:<br><br>
Seminar Series at MIT<br><br>
</i></b></div>
<br><br>
<div align="center"><font size=4><b>Mart Stewart<br>
</b></font>Professor of History<br>
Western Washington University<br><br>
<font size=4><b>Slavery and the "Sunny South": <br>
Climate, Race, and Place <br><br>
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</sub></div>
Current discussions of global warming have evolved into debates about the
relationship between climate change, market values, and the political
differences between governments of developed and developing
nations. But the use of ideas about climate to think out loud about
society is not new. Leading medical men and planters in the
mid-nineteenth-century American South also used climate to naturalize
political ideas when they developed an argument about the culture of
their region that linked perceptions of climate with ideas about slavery,
race, agriculture, and "distinctiveness." On the eve of
the Civil War leading Southerners also used this argument to defend their
region against external critiques of slavery. This lecture will
examine the claim that we should "begin with the climate" to
understand what makes the South distinctive. It will also look at
the connections between place-specific ideas about climate and culture in
the American South and kindred ideas that developed elsewhere --for
example, with the discourse of nineteenth-century tropical medicine as it
was articulated by European and Creole medical men in the global
South.<br><br>
<div align="center"><sub> <br><br>
</sub><b>Friday, October 22, 2004<br><br>
2:30 to 4:30 pm<br><br>
MIT, Building E51 Room 095<br><br>
</b></div>
<br><br>
<div align="center">Sponsored by MIT's History Faculty and the Program in
Science, Technology, and Society<br><br>
For more information or to be put on the mailing list, please contact
Margo Collett at
<a href="mailto:mcollet@mit.edu">mcollett@mit.edu</a><br>
or log onto our web sites at
<a href="http://web.mit.edu/history/www/index.html">http://web.mit.edu/history/www/index.html</a>
and <a href="http://web.mit.edu/sts/">http://web.mit.edu/sts/</a><br><br>
For location visit <a href="http://whereis.mit.edu/map-jpg" eudora="autourl"><u>http://whereis.mit.edu/map-jpg<br>
</a></u></div>
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