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Public Health journals, in all their diversity, have received little attention in their own right. This chapter argues that these journals facilitated the growth of nineteenth-century movements for public health, as well as the development of associated professional groupings and wider communities involved in these campaigns. Starting with the launch of Benjamin Ward Richardson’s pioneering Journal of Public Health and Sanitary Review (1855), with its influential slogan, “National Health is National Wealth”, it moves through to the Journal of the Sanitary Institute in the 1890s, which carried detailed reporting of what had become, by then, huge annual congresses devoted to issues of public health and sanitary reform. The chapter brings to the fore some of the forgotten voices in these debates, and the diversity of issues explored, from cholera epidemics to female horticulture, and from diet and education to air and water pollution. In all their various forms, the journals chronicle not just the major advances in science or legislation but the forms of argument of the day. They also sowed the seeds for the environmental campaigning of the present time.

This chapter examines the interaction of race, sanitary reform, and health discourses in the Civil War era. Between the late 1850s and late 1860s, physical and mental health imagery served as a powerful vehicle for discussions about secession, emancipation, and the meaning of race in the wartime Union. Indeed, in letters, speeches, essays, and books, black and white, male and female northerners constantly meditated on the nation’s political and social health—especially the way that emancipation affected the nation. In this way, race, health, and sanitary reform discourses serve as a barometer of the expanding nature of intellectual activity in the war-torn Union.

This chapter builds on the preceding discussion of urban development through an exploration of colonial socio-ecological relations that serve to contextualize contemporary forms of environmental injustice in the urban Caribbean. The chapter connects colonial interventions into Caribbean natural and built environments to discourses of difference and inequality. It focuses first on the imperial discourses and practices that worked on and through Caribbean natural landscapes, sketching the different development of links between imperialism, nature, and landscape. Early colonial narratives and policies, which framed Caribbean island landscapes as instances of threatened tropical paradise, were important in shaping a form of proto-environmentalism. The second focus is on locating antecedents to contemporary socio-ecological relations by exploring colonial urban interventions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries illustrated by two different episodes in the history of sanitary reform: a mid-nineteenth-century cholera epidemic in Jamaica and the early twentieth-century regulation of prostitution in Curaçao.

This chapter explores historical antecedents of and influences on modern international (and global) health, including plague pandemics, European imperialism, colonial conquest, the Atlantic slave trade, and the Industrial Revolution. It examines ideologies and practices of colonial health and tropical medicine, disease problems exacerbated by imperialism (malaria, yellow fever, and trypanosomiasis), and how scientific research and public health measures implemented in American, African, and Asian colonies were justified by missionary and “civilizing” rationales and by protecting imperial military and commercial interests. It traces the impact of 19th century industrialization on health, work, and living conditions, and the rise of bacteriologically-based public health, spanning imperialism and industrialization. It analyzes how sanitary concerns—combined with trade, migration, economic, and security imperatives—motivated international sanitary cooperation and institutions, initially in the Americas. It reviews Rockefeller Foundation-pioneered donor-driven technical approaches, and the interwar League of Nations Health Organisation’s embrace of more aspirational social medicine approaches.

The chapter follows the development of environmentalism avant la lettre from the late nineteenth century to the end of Nazi rule. It shows that German environmentalism showed a number of peculiarities from its inception such as a large and diverse network of individuals and civic leagues on the national, regional and local level, a powerful and proactive state administration, and a pivotal role of scientific expertise. If we include the burgeoning Life Reform movement, we find a broad and diverse environmental scene that, though highly fragmented, was obviously booming before 1914. However, World War One was the start of three decades of crises that severely curtailed the prospects of environmental reform. The chapter also includes a discussion of the Nazi era. Generally speaking, Nazi rule did not mark a turning point in terms of environmental commitments and should be seen primarily in terms of power relations: while the ideological rapprochement of environmentalism and Nazi ideology remained incomplete and often smacked of opportunism, some environmentalists forged a number of alliances with Nazis. Most of them were short-lived and rather ineffectual. The Nazi history of environmentalism was first and foremost a history of opportunism and self-deception.

This book focuses on problems related to more specific issues, such as the nature of student life and accommodations, architectural form and function, medical ethics, sanitary reforms, social control, “forbidden” activities, the construction of sport facilities, and the power of images of the past in constructing present reality. The scale of the inquiry does not equate with the significance of its results. The book explores different aspects of the academic past through an examination of the sites of structures and activities associated with academic institutions across the United States. The projects from which these works emerged resulted from different circumstances. The contents of the book make it clear that the archaeology of academia is hardly a coherent research topic with a fixed research agenda and a single theoretical stance.