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About Brian Hamilton
Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history. A Maine native, he lives in Western Massachusetts and chairs the History and Social Science Department at Deerfield Academy.
Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history. A Maine native, he lives in Western Massachusetts and chairs the History and Social Science Department at Deerfield Academy.
NBN Episodes hosted by Brian:
February 1, 2026
An Ecological History of Modern China
Is environmental degradation an inevitable result of economic development? Can ecosystems be restored once government officials and the public are com…
January 19, 2026
Palo Alto
Palo Alto is nice. The weather is temperate, the people are educated, rich, healthy, enterprising. Remnants of a hippie counterculture have synthesize…
December 31, 2025
Paved Paradise
Parking, quite literally, has a death grip on America: each year a handful of Americans are tragically killed by their fellow citizens over parking sp…
December 31, 2025
US History in 15 Foods
From whiskey in the American Revolution to Spam in WWII, food reveals a great deal about the society in which it exists. Selecting 15 foods that repre…
August 25, 2025
Empire of Rubber
In the early 1920s, Americans owned 80 percent of the world’s automobiles and consumed 75 percent of the world’s rubber. But only one percent of the w…
August 20, 2025
Born in Flames
“Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning!” That legendary and apocryphal phrase, allegedly uttered by announcers during the 1977 World Series as fl…
May 13, 2025
Natural Attachments
A massive oil spill in the Pacific Ocean near Santa Barbara, California, in 1969 quickly became a landmark in the history of American environmentalism…
November 26, 2024
Slow Wood
In Slow Wood: Greener Building from Local Forests (Yale UP, 2024), environmental historian Brian Donahue advances a radical proposal for healing the r…
November 3, 2024
Savings and Trust
In Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman's Bank (W. W. Norton, 2024), Justene Hill Edwards exposes how the rise and tragic failure …
June 8, 2024
The China Firm
What roles did Americans play in the expanding global empires of the nineteenth century? In The China Firm: American Elites and the Making of British …
May 27, 2024
Shock Values
A sweeping history of the United States’ economy and politics, in Shock Values: Prices and Inflation in American Democracy (U Chicago Press, 2024), Ca…
May 23, 2024
Food Margins
An anthropologist walks into a grocery store—no that’s not the start of a joke, that’s the true story of how Cathy Stanton came to be involved with Qu…
May 13, 2024
The Price of Humanity
Amy Schiller's The Price of Humanity: How Philanthropy Went Wrong—And How to Fix It (Melville House, 2023) makes an attempt to rescue philanthropy fro…
March 26, 2024
Shopping All the Way to the Woods
Rachel S. Gross's Shopping All the Ways to the Woods (Yale University Press, 2024) tells the fascinating history of the profitable paradox of the Amer…
January 10, 2024
The Wild and the Toxic
The first wealth is health, according to Emerson. Among health’s riches is its political potential. Few know this better than environmentalists. In he…
September 16, 2023
Disrupting D.C.
The first city to fight back against Uber, Washington, D.C., was also the first city where such resistance was defeated. It was here that the company …
August 22, 2023
Tree Thieves
In Tree Thieves: Crime and Survival in North America's Woods (Little, Brown Spark, 2022), Lyndsie Bourgon takes us deep into the underbelly of the ill…
August 21, 2023
Race and the Greening of Atlanta
Race and the Greening of Atlanta: Inequality, Democracy, and Environmental Politics in an Ascendant Metropolis (U Georgia Press, 2023) turns an enviro…
August 8, 2023
The Toxic Ship
In 1986 the Khian Sea, carrying thousands of tons of incinerator ash from Philadelphia, began a two-year journey, roaming the world's oceans in search…
June 6, 2023
Ice
Ice is everywhere: in gas stations, in restaurants, in hospitals, in our homes. Americans think nothing of dropping a few ice cubes into tall glasses …
May 23, 2023
Sea Change
Atlases are being redrawn as islands are disappearing. What does an island see when the sea rises? Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean (…
April 25, 2023
Our Lives in Their Portfolios
Banks have taken a backseat since the global financial crisis over a decade ago. Today, our new financial masters are asset managers, like Blackstone …
April 11, 2023
Carbon Sovereignty
For almost fifty years, coal dominated the Navajo economy. But in 2019 one of the Navajo Nation’s largest coal plants closed.This comprehensive new wo…
April 5, 2023
Uncertain Climes
Even people who still refuse to accept the reality of human-induced climate change would have to agree that the topic has become inescapable in the Un…