Steven Stoll

PhD, Yale University, December 1994 (American History)

M Phil, Yale University, May 1992 (American History)

MA, Yale University, May 1990 (American History)

BA, University of California, Berkeley, Highest Distinction & Highest Honors in History, May 1988

I study the ways that people think about land, capital, and how what we call the economy functions within and extracts from ecological communities. I call myself an environmental historian, but my work is related to geography, social ecology, and political economy. Most of my work concerns agrarian societies in North America because agriculture offers the ideal vantage from which to observe the intersection of ideas and practices, economies and landscapes. I am writing a book about land, from the Ice Age to 2008.

Steven Stoll welcomes inquires from students interested in graduate education in environmental history, agrarian societies, or capitalism.

Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia (New York: FSG/Hill & Wang, 2017; paper edition, 2018).

• Reviewed in: New York Times, New York Times Book Review, New York Review of Books, Wall Street Journal, Minneapolis-St Paul Star Tribune, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, ProPublica, Boston Review, International Socialist Review, Southern Spaces

The Great Delusion: A Mad Inventor, Death in the Tropics, and the Utopian Origins of Economic Growth 
(New York: FSG/Hill & Wang, 2008; paper, 2009).

U.S. Environmentalism Since 1945, A Brief History With Documents 
(New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, Bedford Series in History and Culture, 2006).

Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America 
(New York: FSG/Hill & Wang, 2002; paper, 2003).

The Fruits of Natural Advantage: Making the Industrial Countryside in California 
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998).

“Theorizing the Mountains,” Environmental History 26 (January 2021): 23-28.

“Land Locked,” Reviews in American History 49 (2021): 205-213.

“Talking Trash,” Reviews in American History 46 (2018): 345-350.

“Plowed Earth Policies,” Reviews in American History 44 (2016): 104-109.

“The Captured Garden,” International Labor and Working-Class History 85 (Spring 2013): 1-22.

“A Metabolism of Society: Capitalism for Environmental Historians,” in The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History 
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

“A Displaced Worker in a World of Goods: What Winslow Homer’s Old Mill Teaches Us About the World Industrialization Made,” Public Seminar (September 28, 2021), publicseminar.org.

“100 Years Ago, Miners Carried Out the Largest Armed Labor Uprising in U.S. History,” with Paul Salstrom, In these Times (August 20, 2021), inthesetimes.com.

“Chaplin and Marx in Conversation: On Working and Being in Modern Times,” Public Seminar (September 21, 2020), publicseminar.org.

“A Monument to Dis-Union: The West Virginia Coal Miner Statue Ignores Race, Class, and History,” Public Seminar (July 17, 2020), publicseminar.org.

Roundtable: “Why Does Agricultural History Matter?” Agricultural History 93(Fall 2019).

“No Man’s Land: On the Contradictions of Private Property,” Orion Magazine (February 2016).

“The Mismeasure of All Things: How GDP Distorts Economic Reality,” Orion Magazine (September-October 2012).

“Agrarian Anxieties,” Harper’s Magazine (July 2010).

“Toward A Second Haitian Revolution,” Harper’s Magazine (April 2010).

“The Cold We Caused,” Harper’s Magazine (November 2009).

North American Environmental History (lecture)
Environmental History of New York City (lecture/seminar/graduate seminar)
The Agrarian Republic (Understanding Historical Change, lecture)
American Indians (lecture/seminar)
Capitalism (lecture/seminar)
American West, 1490 to 2000 (lecture)
Climate and Society (seminar)
Readings in North American Environmental History (graduate seminar)
Political Philosophy

Steven Stoll's Curriculum Vitae