On Monday 24 March 2025 Evan Bonney (Sciences Po Paris) will be the seventh speaker for our 2024-2025 Seminar Series on Modern North American History, organized in cooperation with the Sciences Po Center for History (CHSP) in Paris.
Lecture title: Forests, Water, and the Sciences in Assembling Empire in the Intermountain West, 1901-1915
Lecturer: Evan Bonney
Date: Monday 24 March 2025 from 17:00 to 18:30 CET
Location: Online
Please register here before Friday 21 March.
Evan Bonney is a PhD candidate at the Centre for History at Sciences Po and is due to complete his dissertation by June 2025. His dissertation focuses on the introduction of forestry into federal administration highlighting that US foresters were uniquely versatile agents of empire to settle the Intermountain West between 1891 and 1914. Consequently, his work examines the creation of the US “administrative state,” environmental management, and the history of the sciences in State and federal policy making.
Whether forests generate precipitation or if they mechanically influence water distribution remains up for debate even today. This presentation examines the origins of this debate in the United States, demonstrating that it served as a stage to define who was most apt to inform Congress at the turn of the twentieth century. Indeed, the future of forestry as a federal practice hinged on the lack of conclusive evidence that could close the debate, allowing the foresters of the Forest Service to continue to build a presence in the Intermountain West. By experimenting with what this paper terms the “forest-water link,” US foresters transformed the region into the prime laboratory to explore the potential for and limits of federal power between 1901 and 1914.
Click here for the official invitation.
