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Dr. Ruth Mostern: Mapping the Long Term and Large Scale Environmental History of the Yellow River

Institute for a Sustainable Future
October 21, 2022
3:30 PM - 5:00 PM
WALC 1121

Description

Join ISF, the Purdue History Department, and the Purdue Asian Studies Program in welcoming author Ruth Mostern to give a talk on her new book, The Yellow River: A Natural and Unnatural History.

This talk, "Mapping the Long Term and Large Scale Environmental History of the Yellow River," showcases Ruth Mostern’s book: The Yellow River: A Natural and Unnatural History (Yale University Press, 2021). It explains how environmentally transformative human activity has shaped the whole watershed and constituted the relationship between people and the river since Neolithic times. The book demonstrates that the history of the relationship between people and the river is a history of soil as much as it is a history of water, and that some of the most important episodes in Yellow River history transpired on the semi-arid lands of the Loess Plateau, far from the riverbed itself. Using GIS and data analysis as well as close readings of historical sources, the book reveals that although the Yellow River floodplain was sometimes a site of frequent and devastating disasters, this was only the case at times of certain decisions about public policy and infrastructure design.

Bio: Ruth Mostern is Professor of History and Director of the World History Center at the University of Pittsburgh.  She is the author, most recently, of The Yellow River: A Natural and Unnatural History (Yale University Press, 2021).  She is also the author of Dividing the Realm in Order to Govern: The Spatial Organization of the Song State, 960-1276 CE (Harvard Asia Center, 2011), and the co-editor of Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana University Press, 2016).  She is the principal investigator and Project Director of the prize-winning World Historical Gazetteer, a digital platform for integrating knowledge about the past via place.

This event is part of ISF's Imagining a Sustainable Future special initiative that explores how we visualize sustainability across a range of disciplines.

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