IsisCB Explore

Thesis ID: CBB175217082

Uncertain Climes: Debating Climate Change in Gilded-Age America (2017)

Giacomelli, Joseph Nereo (Author)
Sachs, Aaron (Advisor)

Cornell University
Sachs, Aaron

URI: https://search.proquest.com/docview/1981351170?accountid=12964

Publication Date: 2017
Physical Details: 294 pp.
Language: English

Outside Links

Academia.edu

Climate and climatology Environmentalism Utopias Climate change 19th century Gilded Age (1870s-1900) United States

This dissertation examines a group of late nineteenth-century scientists, surveyors, foresters, and settlers interested in human-induced climate change and its implications. Uncertainty, science, and nature had many different meanings for these climate theorists. Some viewed climate and nature as mysterious but collaborative, as inscrutable allies in the project of westward expansion. Others believed that scientific and climatic unknowns necessitated a rethinking of the ideology of progress. Using the unifying themes of cultural and scientific uncertainty, this project highlights a series of tensions at the core of nineteenth-century culture: tensions between visions of environmental utopia and fears of environmental catastrophe, between positivist science and the illusory nature of scientific knowledge, between the rhetoric of development and ambivalence about the sustainability of extractive capitalism.

...More

Citation URI

https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB175217082/

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Thesis Brian Allen Gazaille; (2016)
Wasteful Words: Visions and Failures of Literary Efficiency in American Fiction, 1885-1910 (/isis/citation/CBB161127975/)

Article Joseph Giacomelli; (2018)
The Meaning of Uncertainty: Debating Climate Change in the Gilded-Age United States (/isis/citation/CBB368622969/)

Chapter Kenneth W. Noe; (2015)
Fateful Lightning: The Significance of Weather and Climate to Civil War History (/isis/citation/CBB769919988/)

Article Lisa Garforth; (2019)
Environmental Futures, Now and Then: Crisis, Systems Modeling, and Speculative Fiction (/isis/citation/CBB582046293/)

Article W. Malcolm Byrnes; (2014)
Climate Justice, Hurricane Katrina, and African American Environmentalism (/isis/citation/CBB751250465/)

Article Meyer, William B.; (2002)
The Perfectionists and the Weather: The Oneida Community's Quest for Meteorological Utopia, 1848--1879 (/isis/citation/CBB000300160/)

Book Peter Knight; (2016)
Reading the Market: Genres of Financial Capitalism in Gilded Age America (/isis/citation/CBB103200421/)

Article Sörlin, Sverker; (2009)
Narratives and Counter-Narratives of Climate Change: North Atlantic Glaciology and Meteorology, c.1930--1955 (/isis/citation/CBB001034159/)

Article Nierenberg, Nicolas; Tschinkel, Walter R.; Tschinkel, Victoria J.; (2010)
Early Climate Change Consensus at the National Academy: The Origins and Making of Changing Climate (/isis/citation/CBB001022609/)

Article Dörries, Matthias; (2011)
The Politics of Atmospheric Sciences: “Nuclear Winter” and Global Climate Change (/isis/citation/CBB001034581/)

Book Finis Dunaway; (2015)
Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images (/isis/citation/CBB313032212/)

Article Fleming, James Rodger; (2006)
James Croll in Context: The Encounter between Climate Dynamics and Geology in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century (/isis/citation/CBB000931784/)

Chapter Howe, Joshua P.; (2014)
Getting Past the Greenhouse: John Tyndall and the Nineteenth-Century History of Climate Change (/isis/citation/CBB001202314/)

Thesis Bergman, James Henry; (2014)
Climates on the Move: Climatology and the Problem of Economic and Environmental Stability in the Career of C.W. Thornthwaite, 1933--1963 (/isis/citation/CBB001567605/)

Article Miller, Julia; (2014)
What's Happening to the Weather? Australian Climate, H. C. Russell, and the Theory of a Nineteen-Year Cycle (/isis/citation/CBB001214350/)

Article Morgan, Ruth A.; (2013)
Histories for an Uncertain Future: Environmental History and Climate Change (/isis/citation/CBB001201446/)

Book Wolfgang Behringer; (2019)
Tambora and the Year without a Summer: How a Volcano Plunged the World into Crisis (/isis/citation/CBB421036085/)

Chapter Weart, Spencer; (2008)
A National Security Issue? How People Tried to Frame Global Warming (/isis/citation/CBB001221276/)

Article Edwards, Paul N.; (2011)
History of Climate Modeling (/isis/citation/CBB001221290/)

Book Hamblin, Jacob Darwin; (2013)
Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism (/isis/citation/CBB001212052/)

Comments

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}