Book Review of The Great Gypsy Moth War: A History of the First Campaign to Eradicate the Gypsy Moth, 1890-1901
Spear, Robert J. The Great Gypsy Moth War: A History of the First Campaign in Massachusetts to Eradicate the Gypsy Moth, 1890-1901. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005.
In 1869, a seemingly uneventful escape took place in Medford, Massachusetts. French economic entomologist Etienne Leopold Trouvelot had been keeping European gypsy moth eggs in his backyard when a gust of wind blew them out of their confinement. The moths had been brought to the United States by an idealistic Trouvelot in hopes they would produce silk and bring him economic fortune. While the gypsy moth breed had no real commercial worth since the silk they created was low-quality, they were valued by Trouvelot for their incredible vitality and ability to survive in a multitude of circumstances. In his book, The Great Gypsy Moth War: A History of the First Campaign in Massachusetts to Eradicate the Gypsy Moth, 1890-1901 (2005), Robert J. Spear brings light to the story of the gypsy moth and the decades of destruction it brought not only to Massachusetts, but to much of the continental United States. Spear, an author and independent scholar, not only tells an often-forgotten story in a fresh way, but he explains how the gypsy moth crisis sparked a lethal domino effect that has continued to have repercussions on the American environment and the policies in place to protect it today.
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Citino, Robert M. “Military Histories Old and New: A Reintroduction” American Historical Review 112, no. 4 (October 2007): 1070-90.
Robert M. Citino’s “Military Histories Old and New: A Reintroduction” is an article, published in 2007, which explores the diminishing academic presence of military history in contrast with its popularity among the general public. Citino is a military historian primarily focused in the study of World War II. Citino discusses the three schools of military history which different historians fall into. These three schools are classified by Citino as “war and society” scholars who look for connections between armies and societies, traditional operational historians who “analyze the hows and whys of actual warfare, strategy, and battle” (Citino, 1070), and historians of memory and culture. Citino, a traditional operational historian, references a multitude of historians from all three schools to expand upon how the field of military history has grown to touch other segments of history and, therefore, should not be devalued by the mainstream history world any longer.
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