The Graduate Caucus is pleased to announce its call for participants for the 5th annual Graduate Student Writing Workshop to be held at the ASEH annual meeting in Chicago in 2017. Selected writers will join in small discussion groups with other graduate students and a faculty mentor to workshop pre-circulated pieces of writing. These small working groups will be organized by type of material - thesis/dissertation proposals; conference papers; journal articles (including Gallery submissions); and thesis/dissertation chapters. Please note that a 15-20 maximum page limit will be enforced. Applicants are invited to present their most current work.


The purpose of the Graduate Student Writing Workshop is to provide a forum for graduate students in environmental history to develop their writing and research skills. Guided by the faculty reader, each participant will read and comment on the work of fellow participants. The workshop will emphasize all aspects of the writing process, from cultivating the first germ of a project, to chapter organization and revision, to shaping proposals and abstracts. Groups will be encouraged to discuss writing style, voice, and mechanics, as well as practice how to get and give good feedback. Confirmed faculty participants include Andrew Case, Finis Dunaway, Catherine Dunlop, Stephen Pyne, and Kendra Smith-Howard.


To apply, submit a one-page (double-spaced) summary of the work that you intend to bring to the writing workshop. Note in your application the subject matter of your work as well as the format and potential audience. In addition to the one-page summary, include a one-paragraph bio indicating your research agenda, educational affiliation, and current contact information. Applications should be sent via email to Anastasia Day ([email protected]). The deadline for applications is December 1, 2016. Please note that, if accepted, the final version of your work must be submitted to your faculty reader and fellow participants no later than February 27, 2017.

'The Historian in the Garden' might seem a simple, self-evident title for this blog-venture -- and hopefully it is! I garden, I go out into my garden frequently, and I am a historian. I even occasionally write outside near my garden! However, I also chose it with a few other layers of meaning packed in, like I'd like to unpack here.

The book title I am playfully riffing on is that of Leo Marx's 1964 masterpiece, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. [Pagination is from my copy, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.] 

Leo Marx was an early scholar in American studies -- working from the basis of U.S. exceptionalism and looking to explain unique traits of the American experience and national character. This book was based on his 1950 dissertation in the History of American Civilization, completed at Harvard.

His source base is limited primarily to the literature produced by 'great' (read: white, male) authors of the American cannon. Washington Irving's Sleepy Hollow, The Tempest ('Shakespeare's American Fable'), the agrarian writings of Thomas Jefferson, the technological visions of Tench Cox, and bits of Emerson, Thoreau, Twain, Hawthorne, Melville, and many more appear.

Through these disparate authors, Marx identifies a unique and persistent trope: these authors, in grappling with the onset of American industrial power, locate a tension between nature and culture in the form of, well, a machine in the garden. In his own words:

It is the intrusiveness of the new technology that is key for Marx. The most common machine intruding throughout American literature is a train -- hence the book cover image above. The train has long been recognized in its time and our own for breaking down and reorganizing traditional ideas about space and time. The train network is often famously credited with creating standardized time; Backstory Radio has an excellent podcast covering the completion of the trans-continental railroad as the first time Americans tried to experience an event simultaneously. While we thus often eulogize train network expansion as a unifying force in American history, Marx points out that such technological networks broke down old distinctions that helped us make sense of the world--especially the line between the city and the county.

Marx ultimately concludes that the intrusion of the machine into the garden exposes the inadequacies of our traditional imagery to understand the modern American relationship between nature and culture. Why are American literary heroes always left broken by the intrusion of the machine in the garden? Is there truly a pastoral paradise left to intrude upon? Or has the train been there as long as we have?

• Location -- It is tempting to state that a garden constitutes plants that are grown at or near the home, while agriculture is out in fields. How then, however, to explain public gardens? Botanical gardens? Community gardens? While certainly gardening and domesticity are entwined in certain times and places of American history, the connection is not definitive.
• Function -- Gardens can be healing, as seen in the growing gardens for veterans movement, hospital gardens, and the growing field of horticultural therapy. Gardens can also be aesthetic and artistic places, as the American Impressionist painters conveyed in oils -- see The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts online exhibit, The Artists' Garden.  Gardens can be public and educational, as the mission statement of the famed St. Louis Botanical Garden illustrates. Or they can be privately cultivated in food deserts where that may be the best way to ensure nutritional, fresh, meals for your family; such gardens grow social justice as well as vegetables. Some gardens, like Victory Gardens, are highly political and patriotic. However, there are no strict rules: gardens can serve multiple of these functions or other ones entirely.
• Relationship to the market -- When thinking specifically about how to differentiate gardens from agriculture, an easy answer might seem to be that agriculture is done for a living, to produce commodities that sell on the market for profit, while gardens remain outside the commercial sphere. However, this doesn't hold either. What about public gardens who charge for admission? Or what about truck/market gardens? How about the ways that gardens play into domestic economy by saving money on food? They may not enter the marketplace, but they are still shaped in relation to it. 

Here is where Marx proves helpful. I assert that the garden is ultimately a construction--not only literary, but also social, cultural, and political. I think the reason I can find no strict definitions of what constitutes a garden, is that the social meaning of gardens and gardening is constantly changing, representing a unfixed middle ground between "wilderness" (whatever that means) and "civilization," nature and culture -- an Arcadia we constantly seek.  In this, I agree with Marx that symbols are important to our political and social self-fashioning. However, while I am thoroughly ready to abandon the trope of the machine in the garden, I remain convinced that the garden remains ever more relevant to the twenty-first century. 

As much as the garden is a construction, it is also, undeniably, a place. Gardens are material and real. They have plants, with roots in the soil and leaves angling for sunlight. One can sit there and think, and write. This summer, that is what I intend to do: a historian in her garden.