Richard W. Judd

My primary field of interest is U.S. environmental history, particularly in New England. I received a Ph.D from the University of California Irvine in 1979 and first came to Maine in 1980 as a postdoctoral fellow. I returned to California in 1981 and worked for the next three years as assistant/associate editor for the Journal of Forest History (later merged with Environmental History). Since rejoining the History Department in 1984, I have taught a series of courses concentrated in nineteenth and twentieth century America, including urban history, economic/industrial history, environmental history, and Maine History. At the graduate level, I lead seminars in U.S. history since 1865 and in U.S. environmental history. I also edit the Maine Historical Society’s quarterly journal, Maine History, and in conjunction with its publication I offer a graduate practicum in editing and producing an historical journal.

Representative Scholarship:

“Good Roads for Whom?: Farmers, Urban Merchants, and Road Administration in Maine, 1901-1916,” Maine History 43 (no. 4, 2008)

“The Maine Woods: A Legacy of Controversy,” Maine Policy Review 16 (Winter 2007)

Positioning Québec in Global Environmental History, New Perspectives in Québec Studies (Montreal: Éditions Nota Bene/GLOBE, 2007), with Stéphane Castonguay

Climbing Katahdin: Lucius Merrill and the Paths to Katahdin (Bangor Public Library, 2006)

“Approaches en histoire environmentale: Le cas de la Nouvelle-Angleterre et du Québec,” Globe: Revue internationale d’études québécoises 9 (no. 1, 2006)

“A “Wonderfull Order and Ballance”: Natural History and the Beginnings of Conservation in America, 1730-1830,” Environmental History 11 (January 2006): 8-36 [winner of the American Society for Environmental History-Forest History Society Leopold-Hidy Award for the best article to appear in Environmental History in 2006] .

“More Buck for the Bang: Sporting and the Ideology of Fish and Game Management in Northern New England and the Maritime Provinces, 1870-1900,” with William Parenteau, in Stephen J. Hornsby and John G. Reid, eds., New England and the Maritime Provinces: Connections and Comparisons (Toronto: McGill-Queens University Press, 2005).

“Jock Darling: The Notorious ‘Outlaw” of the Maine Woods,” written by James B. Vickery and compiled by Richard W. Judd, Maine History 41 (Fall/Winter 2002) [published April 2004 as a special issue devoted to historian James B. Vickery, edited by Andrea Constantine Hawkes]

“George Perkins Marsh: The Times and Their Man,” Environment and History [special issue on David Lowenthal’s biography of George Perkins Marsh] 10 (Winter 2004)

“Writing Environmental History from East to West,” in Reconstructing Conservation: Finding Common Ground,” edited by Ben A. Minteer and Robert Manning (Washington: Island Press, 2003)

Book Publications:

  • Historical Atlas of Maine, co-edited with Stephen J. Hornsby with cartographic design by Michael J. Hermann (University Press of New England, 2014)
  • Second Nature: An Environmental History of New England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014)
  • A Landscape History of New England, co-edited with Blake Harrison (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012)
  • The Untilled Garden: Natural History and the Origins of American Conservation, 1730-1850 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009)
  • Positioning Québec in Global Environmental History, New Perspectives in Québec Studies (Montreal: Éditions Nota Bene/GLOBE, 2007), with Stéphane Castonguay
  • Natural States: The Environmental Imagination in Maine, Oregon, and the Nation (with Christopher S. Beach; Washington, DC: Resources for the Future Press, 2003)
  • Common Lands, Common People: The Origins of Conservation in Northern New England (Harvard University Press, 1997)
  • Maine: The Pine Tree State from Prehistory to the Present (co-edited with Joel Eastman and Edwin Churchill; University of Maine Press, 1995)
  • Socialist Cities: Municipal Politics and the Grass Roots of American Socialism (State University of New York Press, 1979)
  • Aroostook: A Century of Logging in Northern Maine (University of Maine Press, 1979)

Works in Progress:

  • Finding Thoreau: The Meaning of Nature in the Making of an Environmental Icon