Workers and Environmentalists

History is a book discipline, not a journal one. So it’s rare that a big new journal begins. For the first time in a good 15 years, that has happened, with Modern American History, the first journal dedicated to 20th century U.S. history specifically. If that surprises you, well, go back to my first point. The first two issues are out. In the third, there is a roundtable asking a bunch of scholars what happened to the environmental movement, specifically why it has become such a hard sell to Americans. I wrote one of the essays. It’s now available for those of you who have a library account to access journals. The whole roundtable is worth reading, but I put my essay on my Academia page to make it more available. I talk a lot about a combination of environmentalism’s own successes, its political choices in the face of Reagan and the revived conservative movement, and the broader economic transformations that environmentalists have done a very poor job of addressing. So check it out.

In other news, the site Subway Reads has included Out of Sight as one of its choices if you are riding the subway and want to read about climate change. Because if you are angry riding the New York subway, as everyone should be these days, you might as well be angry at capitalism too.