Environmental history has expanded the field of history to include a wide range of nonhuman actors such as soil and water. This panel focuses on the air, wind, and sky as historical actors and essences with histories of their own. From the big skies of the American West to the southern breezes of the Gulf South, from the polluted atmosphere of Mexico City to air control on the U.S.-Mexico border, the air has sustained life, affected health, and shaped the way that historical processes unfolded.

A central question unites these case studies: How does one study the nonrepresentational components of our environment through time? While the existence of an element like air is undeniable – it may be experienced physically through wind gusts or perceived via visual indicators such as clouds and pollution – its inherent intangibility lends itself to questions surrounding the feasibility of scholarly inquiry into the subject, especially among the humanities. This panel offers an array of methodological approaches that can be used to render the ineffable visible. It places cultural history in communication with the history of science and medicine and interfaces political history with the history of emotions. In doing so, it reflects on the ways that air can be excavated from historical sources while also paying attention to the challenges implicated in writing histories of abstract phenomena.

Environmental history has long recognized that humanity cannot exist independently from its natural and built surroundings. The goal of this panel is to advance this fundamental premise by adding nuance to human experiences across geographies and chronologies vis-à-vis a consideration of the ways in which air acts as representative of both nature and culture. In the Intermountain West, for instance, the sky, an integral component of the area’s nineteenth-century cultural landscape, mediated experiences of a region transitioning from a liminal space to a modern state while wind patterns shaped bodily experiences of health and empire in the antebellum Gulf South. In the twentieth century, sensory perceptions of air pollution in Mexico City guided the creation of a distinct environmental knowledge regime to counter governmental inaction while along the U.S.-Mexico border, frequent air quality alerts stimulated cooperative, binational forms of antipollution management. The panelists come together to have an interdisciplinary and international conversation, illustrating that ways in which the history of air and its representation through elements such as the wind or the sky holds promise as an emerging subset within the field environmental history.