Introduction – Oceans Forum

“A look at a globe reveals there to be far more ocean than land. It would be more appropriate to use the word water rather than earth. Because people live on the land, they thought only of themselves when they came up with the name earth. If we had been fish, then it would have been called water, and the six continents would have been desert islands where the birds sing and flowers blossom and fall. Who would have built fortresses here?” Yi T’aejun, “The Sea”1 The articles in this forum push at the still-expanding methodological avenues in recent work on oceanic issues to confront issues of particular interest to the field of the United States in the world. This forum grew out of an accidental grouping of panels and roundtables at the American Society for Environmental History and Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations conferences in...

Desert (philosophy) · Environmental ethics · Fish <Actinopterygii> · Fishery · Geography · Globe · International waters · Political science · American Environmental and Regional History · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Geology · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Oceanography