—Systemic change begins with personal change—
John Brooke is an Ohio State University Emeritus Professor; Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor of History; Warner Woodring Chair in American History; Professor of Anthropology
He received his B.A. from Cornell University (1975) and his M.A. (1977) and Ph.D. (1982) from the University of Pennsylvania, and between 1981 and 2001 taught at Franklin and Marshall, Amherst, and Tufts before coming to Ohio State. He served as the director of the OSU Center for Historical Research from 2011 to 2022, and co-chaired series on environmental and disease, state formations, the legacy of 1619, and global crisis.
His areas of research and teaching interest include Early American History and Environmental History, and he regularly taught the American survey to 1877, American Political History to 1877, The American Revolution and Early Republic, Global Environmental History, and Climate Change: Mechanisms, Impacts, and Mitigation.
He is the author of four books in early American history: The Heart of the Commonwealth: Society and Political Culture in Worcester County Massachusetts, 1713-1861 (Cambridge University Press, 1989) and The Refiner's Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644-1844 (Cambridge University Press, 1994), Columbia Rising: Civil Life on the Upper Hudson from the Revolution to the Age of Jackson (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press, 2010), and There is a North: Political Crisis, Cultural Transformation, and the Coming of the Civil War (University of Massachusetts Press, 2019). As Co-Chair of the 2013-2015 CHR series on State Formations, he co-edited State Formations: Global Histories and Cultures of Statehood (Cambridge University Press, 2018) with Julia Strauss and Greg Anderson. He is currently working on the revised second edition of Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey (Cambridge University Press, 2014).
Professor Brooke has held fellowships awarded by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Commonwealth Center/Institute of Early American History and Culture at the College of William and Mary, the Charles Warren Center, Harvard University, and the American Antiquarian Society. His books have won the Columbia University Bancroft Prize for American History, the OAH Merle Curti Award for Intellectual History, the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Best Book Prize, the Dixon Ryan Fox Manuscript Prize by the New York State Historical Association, the Ohio Academy of History Book Prize, and the New England Historical Association Book Award.
If John's specialty in deep history weren't valuable enough to understand how our culture's dominance hierarchy formed from the material conditions of the dawn of agriculture, he also specializes in American history, including slavery from before the Revolutionary War through to the Thirteenth Amendment. We start with his sharing what drew him to the two fields. Then I introduce what led me to want to learn from him. I share a main thesis of my book, starting with the journey that led me to see how today's industry and technology evolved from slavery. To clarify, I understand that machines and industry didn't help end slavery, but sustained the system, including its cruelty, just changing the mechanism. As I heard, my thesis is essentially accurate. He shared more history of how slavery evolved from before the Atlantic Slave Trade, through North American chattel slavery, how the framers of the Constitution handled it (or sold out on it), how it evolved with cotton, and more. If you are interested in how our culture still practices the cruelty that slavery did, though with more people suffering and dying, listen to this episode. Then read my book when it comes out to see how to channel the motivation to change that system to effective action.
Greenhouse gas and ocean plastic levels don't rise on their own. The cause of our environmental problems is our behavior, which results from our culture. The world's dominant culture pollutes, depletes, addicts, and imperially takes over other cultures. Yet each person wants clean air, land, water, and food. How did humans create a culture that manifests the opposite of many of their values? Why do most people defend that culture, resist changing it, and promote it, even when faced with evidence that it's sickening them, isolating them, killing them, and risking killing billions more within our lifetimes? If we can't answer these questions, we'll have a hard time changing our culture and therefore the disasters we're sleepwalking into. I've been trying to answer them. Learning about our ancestral past for 250,000 years before agriculture, why and how agriculture started, and what changes agriculture prompted tells us. John Brooke's book, Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey, starts to answer these questions. It's a book of deep history and environmental history---that is, going back hundreds of thousands and even millions of years, treating how environmental changes influenced human behavior. John and I talk about the field of deep history, how we learn the incredible detailed and fascinating histories of how environments changed and people reacted over many time scales. I would find the scholarship fascinating on its own, and all the more because it's relevant to our environmental situation today. Changes that started twelve thousand years ago started patterns that persist today. In fact, some of them are the dominant factors in how we interact with the environment, in particular how dominance hierarchies formed, what patterns they set into our culture, and how they persist. I hadn't heard of this field before his book. If you hadn't either, you'll love it. (He also studies American history including slavery and abolitionism, another relevant part of history. We'll cover them in our next conversation.)