Militarized Landscapes: From Gettysburg to Salisbury Plain

Description

The black smoke billowing from burning oil wells during the Gulf War of 1990-91 directed media and public attention towards war's devastating environmental impact. Yet even before the first bomb is dropped, preparation for warfare materially and imaginatively reshapes rural landscapes and environments. This volume is the first to explore the comparative histories and geographies of militarized landscapes. Moving beyond the narrow definition of militarized landscapes as theatres of war, it treats them as simultaneously material and cultural sites that have been partially or fully mobilized to achieve military aims. Ranging from the Korean DMZ to nuclear testing sites in the American West, and from Gettysburg to Salisbury Plain, Militarized Landscapes focuses on these often secretive, hidden, dangerous and invariably controversial sites that occupy huge swathes of national territories.

Chris Pearson is Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century History at the University of Liverpool, UK. Peter Coates is Professor of American and Environmental History at the University of Bristol, UK. Professor Tim Cole is Professor of Social History at Bristol University and Director of the Brigstow Institute, conducting research into what it means to be human in the twenty-first century. His first book Images of the Holocaust (Duckworth and Routledge US) was shortlisted for the Longman/History Today Book Award. In 2003 he published Holocaust City:The Making of a Jewish Ghetto with Routledge and in 2011 Traces of the Holocaust: Journeying In and Out of the Ghettos (Continuum) which was commended by the jury of the Fraenkel Prize.

Although the environmental history of war and militarization is a major dimension of all human history, serious study of the subject has begun only recently. The term "militarized landscapes" has become prominent, but its range of meaning has been unclear. This book is the most significant publication on the subject. -- Environment and History