This presentation introduces Ruth Mostern’s forthcoming book Yu’s Traces: The Imperial and Ecological History of the Yellow River. The book tells a five-thousand-year history of the relationship between people, water, and sediment in the Yellow River basin of North China. This is a macroscopic book. Covering a very long time frame; it reveals how gradual changes (for instance in climate and population) intersect with sudden cataclysms (such as wars and floods) in the history of the river, interweaving the history of the river’s moist floodplain with that of the erosion region in the semi-desert Loess Plateau hundreds of miles away. It demonstrates that social and political transformations can have unintended ecological consequences very far away from the locations where they transpire. The book combines maps and timelines with historical documents, archaeological information, and environmental science. The talk will describe this novel and interdisciplinary methodology and will include numerous images: maps designed by the author, historical diagrams, and photographs of the Yellow River’s diverse landscapes.

Biography
Ruth Mostern is Associate Professor of History and Director of the World History Center at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of Dividing the Realm in Order to Govern: The Spatial Organization of the Song State (960-1276 CE), the co-editor of Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers, and the principal investigator for the World-Historical Gazetteer, a digital ecosystem for sharing information about historical places.