Between Sea and Steppe: A Historical Foray in Three Parts

Abstract

Examinations into marine environmental history, Great Plains environmental history, and the city of Odessa, Ukraine, demonstrate these three areas have strong methodological and topical foundations and even stronger potential for future scholarship. Marine environmental history is a growing sub-field that necessitates a multidisciplinary approach to both situate the ocean as an active and dynamic participant in human history and allow it a history in its own right. Great Plains environmental history incorporates many kinds of scholarship including creative works—like those of novelist Will Cather—that shape historical memory as surely as they include marginalized perspectives. Finally, the city of Odessa, Ukraine, underwent such a transformation in the early twentieth century that it became a different city entirely, rendering its formative years (1794 to 1905) a mythologized memory.