As we look forward to warmer weather and a diminishing pandemic, The Extraordinary Times catches up with friends in the local historical and cultural scene. This week we welcome David Stradling, Zane L. Miller Professor of Urban History at the University of Cincinnati. In his twenty years at the University of Cincinnati, Stradling has taught a variety of courses on urban and environmental history, including courses in UC’s Environmental Studies program. His books include The Nature of New York: An Environmental History of the Empire State (Cornell University Press, 2010), Making Mountains: New York City and the Catskills (University of Washington Press, 2007), Smokestacks and Progressives: Environmentalists, Engineers and Air Quality in America, 1881-1951 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), and, with Richard Stradling, Where the River Burned: Carl Stokes and the Struggle to Save Cleveland (Cornell University Press, 2015). He earned his PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1996. Living in Clifton, he raised two daughters with his partner Jodie, and he commutes to campus on foot through Burnet Woods.
* What have you been up to this past year? Like almost all my colleagues at UC, I've been teaching online. My students have been very patient and generous, so everything has gone more smoothly than I thought it might. I miss being in the classroom, of course, and I look forward to getting back as soon as we can, but I do think we've managed to continue teaching and learning through all of this. I've also continued to do some writing, although the distractions of last year kept my productivity low. My new project is a history of dredging, and I've been writing about Canadian and United States cooperation to diminish the impact of open water dumping of dredge spoils in the Great Lakes - a surprisingly interesting topic! * You’re the Zane L. Miller Professor of Urban History at the University of Cincinnati, a position named for your remarkable predecessor. Can you share some memories of Zane and his scholarly legacy? I remember the very day I met Zane. I was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, and my advisor suggested that I talk to Zane about possible research topics in Cincinnati, which is where I grew up and where my parents still lived. I went to his office at UC, where he was generous with his time and his advice—a generosity I wound up taking advantage of over the next twenty-five years. Zane suggested I investigate the movement to control coal smoke in Cincinnati. That became to topic of my master's thesis, which then became the basis of my dissertation. I turned the dissertation into my first book. In other words, he really set me on a productive path! In between finishing my MA at Wisconsin and returning there to get a PhD, I spent a year working with Zane at UC. I took a research seminar with him, and to this day I use some of his favorite phrases and advice to students when I teach that class - as I am right now. He often said, "What is the problem for which your work is the solution?" This is a surprisingly difficult question for history students to answer—I certainly found it frustrating—but answering it is essential to understanding what you might achieve as a scholar. * Apart from Zane Miller, what other writers and historians have inspired your work in the fields of urban and environmental history? I was fortunate to work with William Cronon at Wisconsin. Like Zane, he was incredibly generous with his time, and he took his duties as mentor very seriously. I left Wisconsin feeling as though I had been at the center of the emerging field of environmental history. Bill helped attract other great environmental scholars to Wisconsin, and, of course, talented students flocked to work with him. Still, he had time to work with us individually, and he shaped my dissertation and then my second book, on the Catskill Mountains, which appeared in a book series he edited. I was also fortunate to meet Joel Tarr early in my career. While I was conducting research on coal smoke in Pittsburgh, I arranged to meet Joel for lunch. He, in turn, invited Sam Hays, a professor from the University of Pittsburgh and one of the leading historians of environmental politics. We had a lively conversation about air pollution—no kidding—and I've been learning from Joel ever since. He and I wrote an article together many years ago, when he was a senior scholar, and I was just starting out. I learned from him then that everyone benefits from sharing their work widely. He sent our draft to several people, getting feedback and making changes. I learned so much from the experience, and I'm happy to report that Joel and I have just started working on another article together—on urban landslides. * As a native Cincinnatian, what do you most appreciate about living in the Queen City? I've always appreciated Cincinnati's size. It isn't so large that getting around is difficult. Cincinnatians tend not to have to wait in line for things. If you want to go to a baseball game, you can decide just a few minutes before first pitch. In other words, it's an easy city to live in. At the same time, it's large enough to have lots of cultural attractions and, of course, a very rich history. * In Where The River Burned: Carl Stokes and the Struggle to Save Cleveland (written with your brother Richard), you note that the Cuyahoga fire of 1969 “became notorious but not well understood.” Why did Cleveland’s river catch fire, and what lessons did you draw from this historical event? The Cuyahoga is a slow-moving river and where it moves through industrial Cleveland it is incredibly crooked and crossed by several bridges. All these physical factors mattered, as did the fact that many industries polluted the river, along with several cities and suburbs, which dumped untreated sewage into the river. When you combine these things, you get the possibility of driftwood soaking in oil slicks, accumulating against bridge abutments, and creating fire hazards in the dense part of the river. This is what happened in 1969—the last of many fires on the river. Right where the Cuyahoga passes between two great steel mills, a fire started beneath a railroad trestle. The damage was minor compared to some of the earlier fires, but by 1969 most Americans realized that burning rivers aren't a good sign. Something was terribly wrong with the Cuyahoga, Cleveland, industrial America, and with the country as a whole. At first Clevelanders didn't take too much meaning from the burning river, since it had happened before, and everyone already knew the river was terribly polluted. But over the next several months the fire took on a new meaning, becoming symbolic of ecological devastation in urban America. We decided that here was an example of an event growing to meet people's expectations—the fire became bigger, longer, more damaging in each retelling. It wasn't so much that the fire sparked change—the Clean Water Act passed three years later—but that people who knew we needed change used the story of the fire as illustration. * You are currently working on a global history of dredging. For the uninitiated, how did you come by such an unusual subject, and what questions are you seeking to answer? I actually began thinking about dredging while researching in Cleveland. Residents around Lake Erie, especially people who fished, began to complain about the dumping of spoils in the lake, which in turn forced the Army Corps of Engineers to figure out what to do with polluted spoils. They decided to put the spoils behind diked areas in the lake, one of which has since become a fantastic nature preserve—one of several created by the effort to keep pollution out of the lake. When I told this story at a conference, several other historians encouraged me to look further into dredging. Turns out there isn't much written about what is really a ubiquitous action. Essentially every port city in every era has dredging to keep commerce viable, and yet historians have spent almost no time trying to figure out how it happened and what the consequences were. It turns out that dredging was an essential tool of empire builders—commercial and political. I'm just getting started on telling that tale.
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AuthorMatthew Smith, PhD (History). Public Programs at Miami University Regionals. Historian of Appalachia, the Ohio Valley, & the early American republic. Archives
February 2024
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