The Environmental History of Slavery in the United States

An event part of the UCL Institute of the Americas Environment and Society in the Americas Seminar Series

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The Environmental History of Slavery in the United States

12 Oct 2022, 16:00 – 17:30

Dr David Silkenat (University of Edinburgh) will discuss his new book Scars on the Land (Oxford University Press, 2022). Scars on the Land is the first comprehensive history of American slavery to examine how the environment fundamentally formed enslaved people’s lives and how slavery remade the Southern landscape.

Dr David Silkenat

Senior Lecturer in American History

University of Edinburgh

David Silkenat is a Senior Lecturer in American History at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of four books, most recently Raising the White Flag: How Surrender Defined the American Civil War (UNC Press, 2019) and Scars on Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South (Oxford, 2022). He has served as Chair of the Scottish Association for the Study of America and on the editorial boards of American Nineteenth Century History and Journal of the Civil War Era. He is currently on the Executive Committee of the Society of Civil War Historians.