Event

From the Red Desert to the Red Planet: Military Engineers, the Mojave, and Life on Mars

This is a hybrid event. The in-person reception will begin at 4:30 pm.

Since the 1950s, the United States military and related agencies have used earth’s extreme environments to simulate outer space. This paper charts those efforts. Gretchen Heefner’s essay adds to recent calls for more robust dialogue between environmental and space histories. By placing the environment at the center of the story of U.S. military expansion, Heefner complicates our understanding of how U.S. power has been sustained around the world and, ultimately, in the heavens.

The Environmental History Seminar invites you to join the conversation. Seminars bring together a diverse group of scholars and interested members of the public to workshop a pre-circulated paper. Learn more.

Purchasing the $25 seminar subscription gives you advanced access to the seminar papers of all seven seminar series for the current academic year. Subscribe at www.masshist.org/research/seminars. Subscribers for the current year may login to view currently available essays.

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