Epidemiology is the key arm of public health that studies the pattern and distribution of disease at the population level. A central model employed by modern epidemiologists to explain the occurrence of disease is the epidemiological triangle (or triad), which refers to the shifting interrelationship between pathogen, host, and the environment. Epidemiologists also study the occurrence of disease based on the idea of risk factors, which can be genetic, environmental, or behavioral. Working in local, national, and global settings, epidemiologists are critical for informing public health policy decisions, including public health preparedness, epidemic modeling, and epidemic response, which includes field-based outbreak investigation. The remit of the discipline of epidemiology, in other words, is preparing for future disease outbreaks, managing current endemic disease threats, and stepping in when outbreaks occur. Historical epidemiology, on the other hand, looks to the past to answer pressing questions about the future, seeking to integrate the traditional purview of epidemiology with historical and anthropological methodologies, demography (the study of populations), data science, ecology, environmental studies, and, increasingly, genomics and evolutionary biology. As a deeply multidisciplinary pursuit, and one that is closely allied with global health history, historical epidemiology asks questions about how disease outbreaks in the past have impacted populations, on the one hand, and, crucially, how public health interventions and changes in the environment have mitigated or sometimes intensified the spread of disease. This makes historical epidemiology different from the social and cultural history of medicine, which has long been interested in three questions: the formation and stabilization of disease categories, what diseases meant to people at a given time in the past, and why populations responded to epidemics in the way that they did. Historical epidemiology, however, is interested not just in what responses to disease were elicited in the past but also to the impact of these responses over time on changing morbidity and mortality patterns. Historical epidemiology thus brings in biological and biomedical understandings to nuance the past human response to disease, allowing for innovative spatial and temporal mapping of disease patterns onto social and political events in world history. This article contains sections that explore the key themes in the historiography, methods, and scope of historical epidemiology as it emerged in the 1970s within the domain of world history; was influenced by the social history of medicine and demography in the 1980s and 1990s; and then turned toward global history, environmental history, and genetics in recent years. The article also contains case studies, themes, and special topics of concern for methodological innovations in historical epidemiology that were spurred by ongoing debate about the Epidemiological Transition: the impact of disease prevention strategies, the role of therapeutics, and contemporary disease challenges of emerging and reemerging infectious diseases. Additionally, the article examines new frontiers in the field.

This article recovers a moment in environmental thinking that connected food, nature, and global order. It traces the rise of pictograms in food policy from the 1940s to the 1960s, a style of design that was popularized by an influential circle of political economists and left-wing politicians. Recovering the visual method through the archive of Otto Neurath and his British interlocutors, the article shows how visual statistics extended welfare reform discourse beyond unemployment and national insurance to encompass agriculture and environmental concerns. These ideas were part of international discussion on development, but they proved particularly impactful in Britain, which was navigating conversations about global natural resources at the end of empire. This thread of British environmental thought connected domestic social issues with global, postimperial development, as policymakers, economists, and illustrators worked through food and its visual representation to reimagine global ecological order.

The subject of communication touches on several key themes in world history and has, in various guises, preoccupied historians since the discipline’s inception. Communication (from the Latin stem communico-, meaning to share) is a broad term that encompasses language and the webs of symbolic meaning it creates, as well as the networks through which that meaning circulates. Because communications networks exisat in physical space and tend to develop along routes of trade and migration, the subject is also tied to the emergence of empires, nations, and capitalist globalization. Despite its capaciousness, however, the suggestion that communication is implicated in historical processes of planetary ecological change may strike some readers as paradoxical. In everyday use, “communication” is more readily associated with the assumedly immaterial world of language and representation than is the (more visibly) energy- and labor-intensive realm of transportation with which it is conventionally juxtaposed. An agenda for studying the environmental imbrications of communication networks first emerged not in environmental history but in media studies, where scholars since the 2010s have redirected focus from the content of texts and towards the arrangement of systems and objects in which those texts appear—in other words, to communication’s supporting infrastructure. The materialist reorientation in media studies parallels similar developments in other disciplines. Historians of technology have increasingly rejected narratives of invention and diffusion in favor of use, repair, and maintenance, while extending the field’s parameters to encompass nonhuman nature through the concept of “envirotechnical systems.” STS scholars have long attended to the sociotechnical systems within which knowledge is produced and circulated, thus positioning communication within larger information infrastructures. Economic and global historians have likewise taken up questions of materiality in what has been described as the discipline’s “infrastructural turn.” Combined with environmental historians’ attention to energy, extraction, and nonhuman agency, this convergence of scholarship reframes communication as an embodied and spatially grounded activity that unfolds within—and acts upon—more-than-human environments. While few works position themselves explicitly as environmental histories of communications networks, relevant scholarship can be sorted into three overlapping categories. First are environmental histories of long-distance connectivity and its conduits (rivers, roads, railways, and maritime passages). Second are studies that examine communications systems through their supply chains, labor regimes, and discard. Third are works exploring the forms of scientific knowledge and environmental sensibility afforded by communication infrastructures. This latter category includes the emergence of “the environment” and “the planet” themselves as coherent objects of scientific knowledge. By bringing together these literatures under the theme of communication networks, this bibliography foregrounds the material foundations of information exchange, while showing how different communication infrastructures have structured human relationships with, and understandings of, the nonhuman world.

The process of creating archaeological heritage sites is necessarily rooted in the environments that surround them. This was particularly true for the Maya archaeological site of Quiriguá, located within a United Fruit Company banana plantation. Foreign archaeologists working at Quiriguá actively managed the surrounding landscape, shaping it for excavation work or, increasingly, to conform to a tourist aesthetic. Guatemalan scholars, tourists, and politicians by contrast displayed distinct interpretations of the tropical environment. Archaeological debates directed attention to environmental changes in the region and led Guatemalan elites to question the expansion of banana plantations at the expense of tropical forests, drawing together nascent efforts to conserve both ruins and specific aspects of the natural world. In this, they challenged a previously dominant notion of Guatemala’s tropical lowlands as empty “wastelands” but also solidified narratives about archaeology as national heritage that excluded the contemporary Indigenous population.

Africa’s transition from the periods of colonial rule to its era of political independence is as diverse in its experiences in nature as in its economics and politics and in its geographies. Business and economic change in this transition took place in the formation of game parks and land use practice, but so much more. It also took place in actions at the farm level with new crops, labor extraction, and connections to urban markets that framed local business (i.e., economic activity affecting its rural landscapes and cityscapes). The topics engaged are often overlapping and they include economic, or business, linkages across sources with the tourist sector, cash cropping for export, mining, livestock production, disease ecologies, forestry, extraction of petroleum, and edible oils. These changes were both dramatic and gradual for farmers and pastoralists at the very local level and the larger-scale role of game parks and resource extraction in a global economy. But more materially changes took place further on smallholder farms and pastoral herding landscapes. The writing on these transitions is also diverse due to the effects of regional politics, the persistence of colonial practices in dealing with the natural world of land use, urbanization, and myths of Africa as a pristine landscape. The best and most influential writing on nature in African settings appears in the format of edited volumes and monographs that reflect that diversity. Scholarly work in the field is interdisciplinary and includes scholars from Africa, Europe, and North America, although African scholars have come later in time and often write from university settings in Europe or North America or as contributors to edited volumes.

Amidst the unravelling of the sixth mass extinction—the first mass extinction event in planetary history primarily driven by anthropogenic causes—the emerging field of extinction studies places extinction within its historical, political, and sociocultural contexts. Typically, extinction is understood as the end of a species or other group which officially occurs upon the death of its final individual. Dodos, passenger pigeons, mammoths, dinosaurs—all are icons of extinction, some anthropogenically-driven and some not. Arguing against seeing extinction as a purely scientific issue that needs to be diagnosed and cured by the natural sciences, “extinction studies” contends that extinction cannot be disentangled from its social drivers and effects. The natural sciences have produced a vast interdisciplinary literature on extinction, but, following the lead of the field of “extinction studies,” this entry focuses on humanistic perspectives. Extinction studies examines extinction, endangerment, extirpation, and biodiversity loss from interdisciplinary humanistic and qualitative social science lenses. Extinction studies researchers across disciplines—anthropology, sociology, geography, history, philosophy, literary studies, religious studies, among others—are united by their interest in understanding what extinction is, how it comes to be, how it is understood, and, perhaps most importantly, how “we” – a varied, contested “we” – might attend to it in ethical, responsible, and just ways. Although extinction studies broadly includes many forms of extinction ranging from cultural and linguistic extinction to vegetal and other nonzoological extinctions, studies of nonhuman animals arguably form the bulk of current extinction studies research. Animals and their extinctions—actual or potential—have had a significant role in environmental history and environmental historiography, from studies of agriculture and fishing to studies of conservation, wildlife management, and animal protectionism. This entry begins with general overviews of extinction studies, focusing primarily on edited collections and special issues that have contributed to shaping this emerging field. After these overviews, the entry describes key online resources and digital humanities resources, which have emerged alongside the development of this field. After these broader sections, the entry is arranged around key themes in extinction studies, particularly in relation to extinction and animals. The final section focuses on futures of extinction and ethical questions prompted by emerging technological promises of “reversing” extinction. It is important to note that many of the sources included in this entry do not necessarily describe themselves as “extinction studies,” but each forms a core part of what is shaping that emerging field.