A spread from a Burlington Route brochure promoting train travel as a life-changing adventure.
A mere dream for centuries, the Northwest Passage has now become a place and a topic where scientific and traditional knowledge intersect. This is the introductory chapter of “The Northwest Passage: Myth, Environment, and Resources”—a virtual exhibition written by historian Elena Baldassarri.
This exhibition tells the story of the Northwest Passage from the pursuit of a myth to the exploitation of natural resources. Historian Elena Baldassarri takes readers on a multimedia tour of the Arctic, featuring interactive maps, photographs, videos, and interviews with experts, scholars, and elders of Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, Canada.
Elena Baldassarri
Is the Arctic the last frontier? With text, audio, and video, historian Elena Baldassarri describes the historical struggle to find a passage through the perilous environments of the Far North. This is a chapter of the virtual exhibition “The Northwest Passage: Myth, Environment, and Resources.”
This exhibition tells the story of the Northwest Passage from the pursuit of a myth to the exploitation of natural resources. Historian Elena Baldassarri takes readers on a multimedia tour of the Arctic, featuring interactive maps, photographs, videos, and interviews with experts, scholars, and elders of Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, Canada.
Elena Baldassarri Once an environment in which the notion of nations was unheard of, the Arctic region is now a disputed space among superpowers. This is a chapter of the virtual exhibition “The Northwest Passage: Myth, Environment, and Resources”—written and curated by historian Elena Baldassarri.
This exhibition tells the story of the Northwest Passage from the pursuit of a myth to the exploitation of natural resources. Historian Elena Baldassarri takes readers on a multimedia tour of the Arctic, featuring interactive maps, photographs, videos, and interviews with experts, scholars, and elders of Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, Canada.
Elena Baldassarri Cushing uses the voyage of the First Fleet to illustrate the shift in hierarchies and power relations between humans and animals.
A container ship of the Greek shipping company Costamare Inc. crashes into the Astrolabe Reef off the northern coast of Tauranga, causing New Zealand’s worst maritime environmental disaster.
The Panama Canal opens for shipping on 15 August 1914. This 77.1 kilometer canal connects the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean across the Isthmus of Panama. It eliminates the need for ships to make a long and hazardous detour around Cape Horn and provides a much faster and safer route between the two oceans.
A supertanker suffers an explosion while offloading oil near Genoa, Italy, triggering a huge oil spill; quick action by Italian authorities limits the extent of the disaster.
Beginning in the pre-modern world, the Volga and Mississippi Rivers both served as critical trade routes connecting cultures in an extensive exchange network, while also sustaining populations through their surrounding wetlands and bottomlands. In modern times, “Mother Volga” and the “Father of Waters” became integral parts of national identity, contributing to a sense of Russian and American exceptionalism. Rivers, Memory, and Nation-Building discusses their histories, through which we derive a more nuanced view of human interaction with the environment, which adds another lens to our understanding of the past.
As a space where terrestrial jurisdiction did not apply, the ocean has often served as a repository for unwanted things, whether people or objects. This article traces the journeys of several ships and their cargos of toxic waste in the 1970s and 1980s.
