War and the Natural World - Thoughts on An Environmental History of the Civil War by Judkin Browning and Timothy Silver

Judkin Browning and Timothy Silver, An Environmental History of the Civil War (The University of North Carolina Press, 2020).

For the last several years I have made an effort to cover the “natural world” issues for my Civil War students. I tend to touch on the standard topics: disease, weather, forests, and geological features on a strategic level (rivers, mountains, valleys) and on a tactical level (the undulating ridges at Gettysburg, to use one fairly common example).

Always looking to add fresh insights to my ever-changing Civil War course, I was especially thrilled to get my hands on this new volume on environmental history. Browning and Silver emphasize familiar topics but do so with such depth as to expand our understanding of the many ways in which the environment shaped the human experience in war. As many (if not most) of my students are environmentally conscious, I am very much looking forward to engaging their ideas in class.

The book is organized into six chronological chapters that take on particular topics as they relate to specific periods of time. The authors cover sickness, for example, during the war’s opening months between the spring and winter of 1861. Of course, soldiers continued to fall to disease as the war developed beyond 1861, but I found this organizational concept an interesting way to explore and unpack environmental topics against the backdrop of a familiar military narrative. Ultimately, the authors’ efforts are a successful marriage of two niche fields: environmental and military history. Rather than emphasizing the environment as a non-military dimension of the Civil War, the authors broaden our understanding of the traditional military history - underscoring the ways in which environmental factors influenced the decisions made by the upper echelons of command as well as the habits of common soldiers.

In the classroom, I expect that my students will find this book particularly enlightening. The authors treat the war as “an ecological event that not only affected people but also altered natural systems and reshaped the already complex interaction between humans, other organisms, and the physical environment." (4) This is refreshing history…because my kids (always inquisitive) are known to ask questions regarding what happened when armies (numbering in the tens of thousands) turned up in a region and commenced doing what humans tend to do: burning up fire wood, drinking wells dry, and of course - relieving themselves. They’ve asked about the thousands of thousands of animals that would have accompanied armies and what happened when they were killed in action, or what armies did with the slaughtered carcasses of cattle and hogs.

I am also using this book to show how scholars build on the work of others, as they draw from the expertise of a number of folks across several disciplines. Sometimes I think that students look at history as an insular subject, not realizing that historians can benefit greatly by drawing from, for example, medical or biological science. Coupled with the primary sources that describe events ranging from continuous rain to luminescent battle wounds (for real…) the synthesis of all these resources goes a great distance to illustrate how the war indeed altered the natural world…and how the natural world altered the human experience in war.

Good news: the authors have scheduled an interview with yours truly for the very near future - so stayed tuned to The Rogue Historian Podcast. We’ll be going through the book in detail!

With compliments,

Keith