Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Strangers on Familiar Soil
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Northampton
STATE: MA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.amherst.edu/people/facstaff/emelillo * https://www.amherst.edu/academiclife/faculty_achievements/node/459141
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:Armand Hammer United World College of the American West, International Baccalaureate, 1993; Swarthmore College, B.A., 1997; Yale University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, M.Phil., 2003, Ph.D., 2006.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Educator and writer. Amherst College, Amherst, MA, associate professor of history and environmental studies.
AWARDS:Awards from the Nantucket Historical Association (NHA) and American Society for Environmental History; E. Geoffrey and Elizabeth Thayer Verney Fellowship, NHA, 2013.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Edward Dallam Melillo is an associate professor of history and environmental studies at Amherst College, in Massachusetts. He is the recipient of several awards, including from the American Society for Environmental History and the Nantucket Historical Association, which honored him with the E. Geoffrey and Elizabeth Thayer Verney Fellowship in 2013 for his book project “Out of the Blue: Nantucket and the Pacific World.” Melillo is the author of two books, Eco-cultural Networks in the British Empire: New Views on Environmental History, published in 2005, and Strangers on Familiar Soil: Rediscovering the Chile-California Connection, published ten years later.
Using numerous and diverse references in Strangers on Familiar Soil, Melillo explores the many connections between the state of California and the country of Chile. From 1786, when a French expedition brought the potato from Chile to California, to 2008, when Chilean president Michelle Bachelet paid a diplomatic visit to California, the connections have been strong. During that time period, Chile provided California with new crops, foods, fertilizers, and mining technologies, as well as supplying gold miners, wood, wheat, and ideas, many of which enhanced California’s development and helped transform its economy. California, in turn, passed on gifts that included systems of servitude, exotic species–such as Monterey pines and California poppy flowers–educational programs, and capitalist development strategies that helped to shape Chile’s history. During the 1960s and 1970s, scientific, economic, and political policies were shared. Melillo looks at the early trends that made this connection possible.
A Choice reviewer “highly recommended” the book, writing: “Carefully researched and organized, this is a truly transnational history.” A Publishers Weekly contributor commented: “By paying attention to Chile and California’s mirror-image geographies as well as their long-term environmental and social connections, Melillo effectively recontextualizes the development patterns of the Americas.”
While discussing all of the positive effects and outcomes of the connection between California and Chile, Melillo does not gloss over the less appealing aspects of the relationship. In particular, he goes into detail regarding the bigotry and violence against Chilean immigrants to California. “Melillo is no romantic,” wrote Foreign Affairs contributor Richard Feinberg. “His emphasis on transnational linkages includes the antagonisms and tensions that these encounters have generated among the people and ecosystems in both places.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, April, 2016, A. Vergara, review of Strangers on Familiar Soil: Rediscovering the Chile-California Connection, p. 1214.
Foreign Affairs, January-February, 2016, Richard Feinberg, review of Strangers on Familiar Soil.
Publishers Weekly, September 28, 2015, review of Strangers on Familiar Soil, p. 79.
ONLINE
Amherst College Web site, http://www.amherst.edu/ (April 17, 2017), “Edward Melillo Wins Two Environmental History Awards”; author profile.
Edward Melillo Wins Two Environmental History Awards
SECTION MENU
Edward Melillo, assistant professor of history and environmental studies, has been awarded honors from the American Society for Environmental History (ASEH) and the Nantucket Historical Association (NHA) for academic literature he has published concerning, respectively, the historic Pacific fertilizer trade and the portrayals that Nantucket whaling crews left of their own journeys.
Mellilo400Edward Melillo
Melillo received the 2013 Alice Hamilton Prize (for best article not appearing in the journal Environmental History) from the ASEH for an article he published in 2012 in The American Historical Review entitled “The First Green Revolution: Debt Peonage and the Making of the Nitrogen Fertilizer Trade, 1840–1930.” In the article, Melillo offers the argument that the Green Revolution of the mid-20th century, which many scholars consider to be the first global-scale, human-initiated nitrogen cycle alteration, was actually preceded by one that ran from the 1840s to the 1930s, in which hundreds of millions of tons of fertilizer were extracted from Peru and Chile and exported to the United States and Europe. According to The American Historical Review, Melillo “fuses two emerging research areas, global environmental history and transnational labor history... [and] offers a new understanding of the roles that labor systems and resources in the Pacific world played in global agricultural transitions.” The research behind the article was based on archival work Melillo did in Chile and California and is part of a book entitled Strangers on Familiar Soil: Rediscovering the Chile-California Connection, 1786–2008, which grew out of Melillo’s Yale doctoral dissertation and is presently under review with Oxford University Press.
Melillo also won the NHA’s 2013 E. Geoffrey and Elizabeth Thayer Verney Fellowship for his book project Out of the Blue: Nantucket and the Pacific World. The work examines maritime connections between Nantucket and the Pacific world between the late 18th and early 20th centuries. The fellowship provides a three-week residence in the historic Thomas Macy House and requires the recipient to produce an article for the summer edition of Historic Nantucket and to deliver a public lecture about his research. Melillo expects to journey to the island in October and to lecture at the Nantucket Whaling Museum.
Melillo’s academic interests revolve around environmental history and the history of the Pacific world. He focuses on the interaction between humans and their ecosystems. Melillo is currently spending his junior sabbatical as a visiting fellow at The Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University. Upon his return to Amherst next semester, he plans on teaching “Commodities, Nature and Society,” a seminar exploring the environmental and social histories of “sugar, silver, silk, coffee, tobacco, sneakers, microchips, units of bandwidth and human body parts.”
Edward D. Melillo
ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES, HISTORY
Associate Professor of History and Environmental Studies (On Leave 1/1/2017 - 6/30/2017)
413-542-5415 Please call the college operator at 413-542-2000 or e-mail info@amherst.edu if you require contact info@amherst.edu 103 Beneski Building
COURSES
« Back | Current Semester | Forward »
Spring 2017
Edward D. Melillo is on leave during the Spring 2017 semester.
SECTION MENU
Degrees
Submitted by Edward D. Melillo on Saturday, 1/7/2012, at 1:21 PM
Ph.D. in History, Yale University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, 2006.
M.Phil. in History, Yale University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, 2003.
Bachelor of Arts, Swarthmore College, 1997.
International Baccalaureate, The Armand Hammer United World College of the American West (Montezuma, New Mexico), 1993.
Books
Submitted by Edward D. Melillo on Thursday, 11/3/2016, at 9:31 PM
• Strangers on Familiar Soil: Rediscovering the Chile-California Connection (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015)
[Winner of the 2016 Caughey Book Prize from the Western History Association for the most distinguished book on the history of the American West; winner of the 2016 Honor Book Prize from the Denver Public Library’s Caroline Bancroft Prize Competition.]
• Co-editor with James Beattie and Emily O’Gorman, Eco-Cultural Networks in the British Empire:New Views on Environmental History (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2015)
Eco-Cultural Networks and the British Empire
• The Butterfly Effect: Insects and the Making of the Modern World (under contract with Alfred A. Knopf)
• Editor, Migrant Ecologies: Environmental Histories of the Pacific World (under contract with the University of Hawai'i Press)
Articles
Submitted by Edward D. Melillo on Thursday, 6/2/2016, at 12:09 PM
• “Chile and the Pacific World,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History, ed. William Beezley (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). Available online:
http://latinamericanhistory.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.001.0001/acrefore-9780199366439-e-304
• “Making Sea Cucumbers Out of Whales' Teeth: Nantucket Castaways and Encounters of Value in Ninteenth-Century Fiji," Environmental History 20, no. 3 (July 2015): 449-74.
• Co-author with James Beattie and Emily O’Gorman, “Rethinking the British Empire through Eco-Cultural Networks: Materialist-Cultural Environmental History, Relational Connections and Agency,” Environment and History 20, no. 4 (November 2014): 561-75.
• “Global Entomologies: Insects, Empires, and the ‘Synthetic Age’ in World History,” Past & Present 223, no. 1 (May 2014): 233-70.
• “Cucumber Archipelago: A Nantucket Reunion in the South Pacific,” Historic Nantucket 63, no. 2 (Fall 2013): 4-9.
• “Beginning in the Belly, Ending in the Atmosphere: An Approach to Teaching Global Environmental History,” World History Bulletin 29, no. 2 (Fall 2013): 30-36.
• “The First Green Revolution: Debt Peonage and the Making of the Nitrogen Fertilizer Trade, 1840-1930,” American Historical Review 117, no. 4 (October 2012): 1028-1060. [Winner of the American Society for Environmental History’s 2013 Alice Hamilton Prize for best environmental history article published during 2012; winner of the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Article Prize (2014) for best article on nineteenth-century history].
• “Spectral Frequencies: Neoliberal Enclosures of the Electromagnetic Commons,” Radical History Review issue 112 (Winter 2012): 147-61.
ATTACHMENT SIZE
The First Green Revolution 530.9 KB
Global Entomologies 253.41 KB
Spectral Frequencies 149.12 KB
Beginning in the Belly, Ending in the Atmosphere 180.31 KB
Making Sea Cucumbers Out of Whales' Teeth 13.13 MB
Book Chapters
Submitted by Edward D. Melillo on Friday, 9/23/2016, at 10:05 AM
• "Anthroposcenics: Alternative Vantage Points on an Emerging Epoch," in Thinking the Earth: Ways of Knowing, Modes of Care, ed. Lenore Manderson (Seattle: University of Washington Press, forthcoming);
• "An Ocean of Skin and Bone: Sailors’ Tattoos, Scrimshaw, and the Nineteenth-Century Vernacular Imagination" in Sea Currents: Art, Science and the Commodification of the Ocean World in the Long Nineteenth Century, eds. Kathleen Davidson and Molly Duggins (forthcoming);
• "Natural Worlds," in A Cultural History of Western Empires in the Modern Age (1920-2000+), ed. Patricia M.E. Lorcin, Volume 6 of A Cultural History of Western Empires (New York: Routledge, forthcoming).
• "Empire in a Cup: Imagining Colonial Geographies through British Tea Consumption," in Eco-Cultural Networks in the British Empire:New Views on Environmental History, ed. James Beattie, Edward D. Melillo and Emily O’Gorman (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2014).
• "A Land 'Wholly Built Upon Smoke': Colonial Virginia and the Making of the Global Tobacco Trade, 1612-1776," in Xu Bing: Tobacco Project, Duke/Shanghai/Virginia, 1999-2011, ed. John B. Ravenal (Charlottesville: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and University of Virginia Press, 2011).
• "Feeding 'La Boca del Puerto': Chileans and the Maritime Origins of San Francisco," in Perspectives on Gender, Race, Ethnicity and Power in Maritime America: Papers from the Conference Held at Mystic Seaport, October 2006, ed. Glenn S. Gordinier (Mystic, Conn.: Mystic Seaport, 2008).
Strangers on Familiar Soil: Rediscovering the Chile-California Connection
Publishers Weekly. 262.39 (Sept. 28, 2015): p79.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Listen
Full Text:
Strangers on Familiar Soil: Rediscovering the Chile-California Connection
Edward Dallam Melillo. Yale Univ., $40 (352p) ISBN 978-0-300-20662-3
In careful and well-organized prose, Melillo (Eco-Cultural Networks in the British Empire), an associate professor of history and environmental studies at Amherst College, argues that mining technologies and farming techniques from Chile helped alter California, especially during the Gold Rush, and in turn the state affected much of the way commercial farming took place in Chile, which is now "covered with artificially irrigated vineyards, trim orchards, and modern packing plants." The first half of Melillo's discussion deals with Chile's influences on California; the second half looks at the flip side. Both prove fascinating, with Melillo highlighting the regions' geographical similarities. Referencing a wide array of sources, Melillo recounts the voyages of thousands of Chileans to San Francisco beginning in 1848, drawn to the prospect of gold. Decades later, California vintners would affect the work of Chilean winemakers, even forming partnerships and joint ventures. Subsequent improvements in soil process and trade agreements also helped Chile grow agriculturally. These days, Chile dominates global produce markets during the northern hemisphere's winter season. By paying attention to Chile and California's mirror-image geographies as well as their long-term environmental and social connections, Melillo effectively recontextualizes the development patterns of the Americas. (Nov.)
Western Hemisphere
Richard Feinberg
Foreign Affairs. 95.1 (January-February 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.
http://www.foreignaffairs.org
Listen
Full Text:
Strangers on Familiar Soil: Rediscovering the Chile-California Connection BY EDWARD DALLAM MELILLO. Yale University Press, 2015, 352 pp.
This wonderful book weaves together captivating anecdotes with analysis of environmental interactions and economic exchanges between California and Chile in order to reimagine the making of the Americas. The two places are linked by the American Cordillera, a chain of mountain ranges that includes the Sierra Nevada in California and the Andes in Chile; a common mild, dry, Mediterranean-type climate; and the Pacific Ocean. They have repeatedly remade each other's histories. The California Gold Rush depended on Chilean ships and wood, Chilean wheat flour, and Chilean mercury. In turn, the Monterey pine tree, native to California, has refashioned the forests and landscapes of southern Chile. More recently, technical assistance partnerships among agronomists and corporate joint ventures have connected California's and Chile's respective fruit and wine industries. But Melillo is no romantic: his emphasis on transnational linkages includes the antagonisms and tensions that these encounters have generated among the people and ecosystems in both places. He recounts ugly instances of bigotry in California against Chilean immigrants, and he frets over the inherent dangers of monoculture and environmental globalization. On a personal note, as a former Peace Corps volunteer in Chile who now resides in California, I am indebted to Melillo for so masterfully authenticating the many connections between the two places that I had long intuited.
Melillo, Edward Dallam. Strangers on familiar soil: rediscovering the Chile-California connection
A. Vergara
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 53.8 (Apr. 2016): p1214.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Listen
Full Text:
Melillo, Edward Dallam. Strangers on familiar soil: rediscovering the Chile-California connection. Yale, 2015. 325p bibl Index afp ISBN 9780300206623 cloth, $40.00; ISBN 9780300216486 ebook, contact publisher for price
53-3613
E184
MARC
This is a fascinating, well-crafted history of what the author calls the many "displacements," "exchanges," and "influences" between Chile and California. From the Spanish conquest to the late 20th century, Melillo (history and environmental studies, Amherst College) argues, the Pacific Coast was shaped by social, economic, environmental, and human exchanges. While today these historical connections are barely known and have remained somehow hidden, Melillo believes they are critical to the understanding of Chile's and California's histories. Chilean gold miners, wood, and wheat, for example, helped build the northern Californian economy, while Monterey Pines, California poppy flowers, and Henry Meigg radically transformed Chilean landscapes. Not only commodities and people traveled along the Pacific Coast, but as the history of the Cold War clearly illustrates, so did ideas. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the Chile-California Program strengthened scientific, economic, and political collaboration and, eventually, a neo-liberal consensus. Carefully researched and organized, this is a truly transnational history, one that contributes to decentering US history, breaking the isolation of traditional Chilean historiography, and demonstrating the critical importance of the Pacific Ocean. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. Most levels/libraries.--A. Vergara, California State University, Los Angeles