Understanding the Environmental History of Swedish America through Veterinary Scrapbooks, Farm Advertisements, and Mining Diaries

Dr. Brian Leech will give a talk, “Animals/Vegetables/Minerals: Understanding the Environmental History of Swedish America through Veterinary Scrapbooks, Farm Advertisements, and Mining Diaries.” 

Dr. Leech is an associate professor of history at Augustana.

He will discuss what historians can learn about Americans’ changing relationship to the environment through author Ernst Skarstedt’s scrapbooks about animals and health in the Pacific Northwest, promotional literature for the Andover Children's Home and Farm in Illinois, and Alex Erickson’s diary about the multi-racial coal community of Buxton, Iowa.

The talk will be followed by a live Q&A with the speaker. 

The lecture is part of the Lunchtime Lecture Series organized by the Swenson Swedish Immigration Research Center, highlighting the work being done by scholars using materials in the Swenson Center library and archival collections. 

Dr. Leech's recent research has focused the histories of food production, energy policy, and mining communities, including a 2018 book  "The City That Ate Itself: Butte, Montana and its Expanding Berkeley Pit."