Strangers on Familiar Soil: Rediscovering the Chile-California Connection, 1786-2008
Yang and Yamazaki Environment and Energy Building (Y2E2)
Room 300
473 Via Ortega
Stanford, CA 94305
At the first event in the Bill Lane Center for the American West's Winter Seminar series, visiting fellow Edward D. Melillo will talk about his research on the intertwined historical relationships between Chile and California. Lunch will be provided. Attendees are asked to please RSVP by Monday, Jan. 28, using the link above.
From Edward D. Melillo:
This talk offers a "guided tour" of the book manuscript that I am completing during my fellowship at the Bill Lane Center for the American West. My project charts a series of unexpected routes along a north-south axis in order to rediscover sites where the women and men of Chile and California profoundly altered each other’s social and environmental histories. These zones of engagement are countless. Between the 1780s and the 1930s, new crops, foods, fertilizers, mining technologies, laborers, and ideas from Chile radically changed California’s development. Likewise, systems of servitude, exotic species, and capitalist development schemes from California dramatically shaped Chilean history from the 19th to the 21st century. Strangers on Familiar Soil unfolds along a chronological arc, extending from 1786 when a French expedition brought the potato from Chile to California to 2008 when Chilean President Michelle Bachelet made a major diplomatic visit to the Golden State. From the earliest botanical exchanges to the most cooperative agreements, the peoples and environments of Chile and California have been deeply interconnected with each other and with a wider Pacific World.
Participants
Edward D. Melillo
A visiting fellow at the Bill Lane Center for the American West, Edward (“Ted”) Melillo is an Assistant Professor in the History Department and the Environmental Studies Program at Amherst College, where he teaches courses on global environmental history and the history of the Pacific World. Ted’s most recent article, “The First Green Revolution: Debt Peonage and the Making of the Nitrogen Fertilizer Trade, 1840-1930,” appeared in the October 2012 issue of the American Historical Review. In addition to working as a historian, Ted has done ecological fieldwork in northern Sweden and China.
Map: http://goo.gl/H1OHh
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