The Documentary Impulse.

This article has two interconnected goals. It is, first of all, a review of the film The Land Beneath Our Feet, an exemplary documentary that combines the history of technology, science and technology studies, and environmental history in its exploration of the social, cultural, and natural consequences of the rubber industry's expansion in Liberia. The essay's larger purpose, however, is to explore the powerful role documentary film-making practices have to play in the development of new approaches in the history of technology. Here, an interview with historian and film co-director Gregg Mitman provides the framework for an expansive conversation about both the "documentary impulse" that he explores in his film and related written works, and also the growing role of audiovisual practice in scholarly work.

Geographies of hope: mining the frontiers of health in Denver and beyond, 1870-1965.

Across the western landscape of the United States, health was a natural resource, mined and sold by late-nineteenth and twentieth-century town boosters and physicians to those afflicted with chronic pulmonary illnesses such as tuberculosis and asthma. Regional economies of health were built upon climate and sunshine. After the Second World War, children, rather than nature, increasingly became a vital resource upon which institutions such as Denver's Jewish National Home for Asthmatic Children expanded the economic networks through which capital and drugs flowed. Despite these changes, the material traces of past landscapes lingered and resurfaced in the reconfigured places where hope dwelled.

Hay fever holiday: health, leisure, and place in Gilded-Age America.

By the 1880s hay fever (also called June Cold, Rose Cold, hay asthma, hay cold, or autumnal catarrh) had become the pride of America's leisure class. In mid-August each year, thousands of sufferers fled to the White Mountains of New Hampshire, to the Adirondacks in upper New York State, to the shores of the Great Lakes, or to the Colorado plateau, hoping to escape the dreaded seasonal symptoms of watery eyes, flowing nose, sneezing fits, and attacks of asthma, which many regarded as the price of urban wealth and education. Through a focus on the White Mountains as America's most fashionable hay fever resort in the late nineteenth century, this essay explores the embodied local geography of hay fever as a disease. The sufferers found in the White Mountains physical relief, but also a place whose history affirmed their social identity and shaped their relationship to the natural environment. And, they, in turn, became active agents in shaping the geography of place: in the very material relationships of daily life, in the social contours of the region, and in the symbolic space that nature inhabited. In the consumption of nature for health and pleasure, this article suggests, lies an important, yet relatively unexplored, source for understanding changing perceptions of environment and place and the impact of health on the local and regional transformation of the North American landscape.

From miasma to asthma: the changing fortunes of medical geography in America.

Historians of modern medicine often divide their subject into two parts, separated by the bacteriological revolution of the late nineteenth century, when medicine supposedly became 'scientific' for the first time. The history of medical geography--to say nothing of other subjects--calls this common view into question. At least in the United States, students of medical geography, arguably the pre-eminent medical science in an age dominated by miasmatic theories of disease, readily adapted to the discovery of germs. And although bacteriology quickly eclipsed medical geography in the world of medicine, place remained an important consideration in treating asthma (and allergies generally) throughout the post-bacteriological period.