This Too Shall Burn: History for a Warming Climate

About this event

Community Meeting Room, 1st floor, Main Library, 1703 Orrington, Evanston, IL. Northwestern University's Department of History and Evanston Public Library team up to celebrate a national day of history in public under the motto We Want More History! History Professor Daniel Immerwahr will present a public lecture on a topic with local--and worldwide--significance: THIS TOO SHALL BURN: HISTORY FOR A WARMING CLIMATE. What will it be about? Here's a summary from Prof. Immerwahr: The climate change we’re experiencing is unprecedented. Yet, not long ago, Americans faced a similar dynamic. European colonists seized on North America’s enormous forests, built a country nearly entirely from wood, and then watched, time and again, as it burned. Today, we look on fossil fuels as the cause of our recent prosperity but also possibly the cause of our future ruin. It was the same for them, just with wood. Wood was the source of their abundance. It was also the source of their apocalypse. This lecture considers what we can learn from not-so-different people experiencing a not-so-different problem. Daniel Immerwahr is Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities in the History Department at Northwestern and a contributing writer at The New Yorker. He is the author of the bestselling How to Hide an Empire, one of the New York Times critics' top books of 2019 title, and winner of the Robert H. Ferrell Prize, an annual award given by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) to recognize distinguished scholarship in the history of American foreign relations. Be sure to register, for space is limited! To learn more about WE WANT MORE HISTORY! and the prominent organizations who support it, visit the website here.

Description from evanstonlibrary.bibliocommons.com