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Session Submission Summary

History After Dark: Histories of Nighttime Environments and Cultures

Fri, April 5, 8:30 to 10:00am, Westin Denver Downtown, Floor: Mezzanine Level, Lawrence B

Session Submission Type: Complete Panel

Abstract

History does not stop after dark, nor does the environment end once we leave the confines of the earth. This panel explores the environmental history of night, and the technologies, cultures, and ideas that shape the human relationship with it. The stars and planets above and the darkness that permeates the land below have long held deep importance to human societies. Ideas relating to the cosmos and technologies that pushed back the shadows to reveal new ways to view the night have impacted the way we build communities, the daily lives of everyday people, and perspectives of our place within the world and who belongs in it. Studies on nighttime environments and cultures expand the spatiality and temporalities of where and when environmental history happens.

Understanding this is critical as a “new space age” changes the cultures of night and the human relationship with space again. Conserving dark skies, commercial space tourism, and mass satellite communications were just developing as possibilities or were even fantasies at the beginning of this century. Now, all have now come to be realized and even mainstreamed. The rapid advance of technology and the acceleration of unsustainable exploitation of resources on earth has also eroded the human connection to the night and opened outer space as a new, exploitable environment. However, leaving the earth in this new space age has not evaded longstanding and historically rooted divisions along lines including race and class. This panel re-illuminates the historical night and what has and has not changed in the human relationships to nighttime environments and cultures.

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