MSU Press will be attending the American Society for Environmental History (ASEH) conference from March 25-27, 2026, in Kansas City, Missouri. ASEH’s 2026 theme is Crossroads: Environmental Histories on Contested Grounds which focuses on the historical meetings of people, goods, and ideas from the across the continent.
ASEH’s vision is to understand the complex entanglements of humans and the rest of nature over time. By fostering such inquiry, the American Society for Environmental History aims to broaden debate about the desirability, possibilities, and prospects of enhancing sustainability and reducing environmental and social injustice.
At ASEH, take the time to learn about MSU Press’s two new series: Environmental, Health, and Well-being & Environmental Studies of the Great Lakes.
Check out MSU Press’s upcoming book Retracing the Dragoon Trail in Iowa: Environmental Transformation along the Des Moines River by Kevin T. Mason!
In Retracing the Dragoon Trail in Iowa, historian Kevin T. Mason presents a vivid and deeply researched account of Iowa’s evolving landscape, beginning with the 1835 expedition of the First U.S. Dragoons. Drawing from archival records, maps, government surveys, Indigenous histories, and ecological data, Mason explores how Iowa’s prairies and wetlands gave way to farms, towns, and transportation networks. He situates these environmental shifts within the broader forces of Manifest Destiny, military expansion, and settler colonialism, while amplifying the voices of the Sauk, Meskwaki, Dakota, and other Indigenous nations whose histories are often marginalized.
But Mason doesn’t just write about history—he walks it. His 371-mile journey retracing the original dragoon route across Iowa blends scholarship with storytelling, captured through video essays, photography, and writing. This modern-day trek, featured on Iowa PBS’s Iowa Life and Iowa Public Radio’s Talk of Iowa, brings the past into the present, offering a compelling look at how landscapes remember. The result is a powerful contribution to environmental history, regional studies, and Indigenous scholarship—one that reveals the layered interactions between land use, policy, and historical change.
Use code MSU30 for 30% off and free shipping on conference titles.
| Title | Author | Price | Sale Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Animal Resistance in the Global Capitalist Era | Colling | $44.95 | $31.47 |
| Animals and Race | Thurston-Torres | $39.95 | $27.97 |
| Animals as Domesticates | Clutton-Brock | $29.95 | $20.97 |
| Animals as Food | Fitzgerald | $44.95 | $31.47 |
| Animals as Neighbors | O’Connor | $29.95 | $20.97 |
| Animals, Mind, and Matter | Donovan | $39.95 | $27.97 |
| French Thinking about Animals | Mackenzie & Posthumus | $44.95 | $31.47 |
| Hats | Smi | $44.95 | $31.47 |
| Making Animal Meaning | Kalof & Montgomery | $32.95 | $23.07 |
| Mourning Animals | DeMello | $44.95 | $31.47 |
| Spanish Thinking about Animals | Carretero-González | $49.95 | $34.97 |
| Whose Dog Are You? | Wallen | $49.95 | $34.97 |
The Animal Turn series focuses on how animals figure in human lives, how humans figure in animal lives, and how both are tethered together in an increasingly fragile biosphere. The series presents an interdisciplinary examination of the human-animal relationship as grounded in specific historical, cultural, and environmental contexts.
Learn more about The Animal Turn here.
Environmental, Health, & Well-being
Series Editor: Tatiana Konrad
This series tackles the relationship between health and the environment, paying particular attention to changes occurring over time and across place. It seeks to illuminate the causes and consequences of human, more-than-human, and environmental ill-health, while also attending to possibilities for well-being, flourishing, and repair. Encouraging an expanded notion of health, Environment, Health, and Well-being presents scholarship that considers human well-being as directly correlated with health systems; extends the notion of health and well-being beyond the purely human frame; and interrogates planetary health through specific landscapes, ecologies, and human and more-than-human activities. Recognizing the ecological, political, social, and viral turbulence of our current times, the monographs and edited collections in this series look to interdisciplinary practice within the field of the environmental humanities as a way of understanding the present, reflecting upon the past, and rethinking possibilities of the future.
Environment, Health, and Well-being, while grounded in the environmental humanities, understands the barriers to environmental health as tied to legacies of extraction, consumption, colonization, and unlimited growth. It is thus especially interested in scholarship from Indigenous, race, gender and queer, and disability studies, as well as approaches that address histories and futures of labor and profit. Environment, Health, and Well-beingwelcomes projects from new and established scholars, in and outside of academia, which make visible for audiences the timeliness and necessity of interdisciplinary research on the relationships between humanity and environments. The contributions in this series capture the multifaceted nature of environmental health and foreground the importance of perpending the planet’s well-being in these ecologically precarious times.
Environmental Studies of the Great Lakes
Series Editors: Robert Michael Morrissey & Daniel Macfarlane
The Environmental Studies of the Great Lakes series publishes scholarly monographs, edited collections, and reprinted classics that examine the environmental aspects of the region’s past. Defining the region expansively, works in this series connect the lakes with national and international themes—for example, globalization, invasive species, freshwater systems, global water politics and, especially, environmental justice. The goal of this series is to produce a series of books fundamentally about the Great Lakes and also of interest to all readers of critical and compelling environmental studies.