【Seminar（11/29）】SRC Seminar"East-West Knowledge Transfer in Settler Societies: How the U.S. Great Plains Became the “American Steppes”

29 November (Tue.) 18:00–19:30 (Japan Standard Time)

David Moon (UCL/SRC)

“East-West Knowledge Transfer in Settler Societies: How the U.S. Great Plains Became the “American Steppes”

Hybrid (Room 403 at SRC with Zoom)

here

English

Between the 1870s and 1930s, Euro-American settlers supported by the U.S. government transformed the Great Plains from the domain of Native Americans who lived mostly, but not solely, from hunting animals to vast fields of grain. In displacing the Indigenous peoples and their ways of life, the American settlers and government drew on the prior experience of the Russian and Soviet states in the similar environment of the Eurasian steppes. Since the eighteenth century, Slavic settlers and migrants from central Europe largely displaced the Indigenous nomadic pastoralists and converted their pastures to fields of grain. Knowledge of crop varieties, agricultural sciences, and farming and forestry techniques were all transferred from the Eurasian steppes to North America. This lecture explores how and why this happened.

David Moon, The American Steppes: The Unexpected Russian Roots of Great Plains Agriculture, 1870s-1930s. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Platform for Explorations in Survival Strategies (SRC, Hokkaido University)

JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B) (21H00555): Interdisciplinary Approach to the “Crisis of the 14th Century.”

(PI: Yoichi Isahaya)

Yoichi Isahaya (yoichi.isahaya[at]slav.hokudai.ac.jp) ([at] read as @)