Staying with the Changes: Displacement, Disaster, and Transformed Landscapes in the United States

Session Submission Type: Complete Panel

Abstract

How have people in the United States understood their relationships to home places, when those places are dramatically transformed—through disaster, engineering, and demographic shifts? Four case studies from the nineteenth and twentieth century United States explore how people have maintained their relationships to home landscapes while those places have been transformed and remade. Caroline Grego explores how Black farmers in South Carolina understood their relationships to labor and land during the Great Migration, when the state shifted from being a majority Black to a majority white population. Focusing on early twentieth century wetland drainage programs in the Florida Everglades, Jane Robbins Mize uses Zora Neale Hurston’s literature and anthropological fieldwork to unpack racialized ideas about these wetlands and the agency of nature. The other two papers offer interrogations of disaster and displacement. Caroline Peyton examines the long history of tornados in the American South and how rethinking narratives of tornado displacement can enrich conversations about climate change. Anna Lehr Mueser turns to collective memory practices in the context of infrastructure development displacements in New York State, showing how multiple generations of families sought ways to maintain a sense of continuity with lost places.

These histories of changing relationships to home places speak to the 2024 conference theme of extractivism and speculation by revealing continuities in place despite the kinds of changes that so often come with extractive industries and developments.

Sub Unit

• ASEH Annual Conference

Individual Presentations

• From the Black Majority to a White Majority: 1920s South Carolina’s Environmental and Demographic Transformations - Caroline Grego, Queens University of Charlotte, History Department

• Literature, Race, and Reclamation: The Drainage of the Everglades - Jane Robbins Mize, Hamilton College, Literature and Creative Writing Department

• “So the memories need not fade”: Writing Continuity Across Rupture in Rural New York - Anna Lehr Mueser, University of Pennsylvania, History and Sociology of Science

• “Peeled and Desolate”: The Long History of Tornadoes in the American South - Caroline R. Peyton, University of Memphis, Department of History

Chair

• Nancy Langston, Michigan Technological University