[Sci-tech-public] FIRST Modern Times, Rural Places seminar at MIT, October 22, 2004

[Margo Collett]

Modern Times, Rural Places:

Seminar Series at MIT



Mart Stewart
Professor of History
Western Washington University

Slavery and the "Sunny South":
Climate, Race, and Place


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.



Friday, October 22, 2004

2:30 to 4:30 pm

MIT, Building E51 Room 095



Sponsored by MIT's History Faculty and the Program in Science, Technology, 
and Society

For more information or to be put on the mailing list, please contact Margo 
Collett at <mailto:mcollet at mit.edu>mcollett at mit.edu
  or log onto our web sites at 
<http://web.mit.edu/history/www/index.html>http://web.mit.edu/history/www/index.html 
and <http://web.mit.edu/sts/>http://web.mit.edu/sts/

For location visit http://whereis.mit.edu/map-jpg
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