(Photograph: Brian Black)

(Photograph: George F. Thompson)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Brian Black is Head of the Division of Arts and Humanities and Professor of History and Environmental Studies at Penn State Altoona. His articles on preservation and environmental history have appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Civil War History, Environmental History, Journal of American History, Landscape, Pennsylvania History, Reconstruction, and USA Today, among others. He is the author and editor of several books, including Nature's Entrepôt: Philadelphia's Urban Sphere and Its Environmental Thresholds (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), Crude Reality: Petroleum in World History (Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), which was selected by CHOICE as an outstanding academic book for 2012, Petrolia: The Landscape of America's First Oil Boom (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), which won the Paul H. Giddens Prize in Oil History, and the four-volume Climate Change: An Encyclopedia of History and Science (ABC-Clio, 2013). Black has received awards and support from Penn State's Institute of Arts and Humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Hewlett Foundation, and Gilder-Lehrman Institute for History, and, in 2012, he was awarded Penn State Altoona's medal in Outstanding Achievement in Research and Creative Activity.

ABOUT THE ESSAYIST

Richard B. Megraw, whose ancestor from Pennsylvania fought and died at Gettysburg, is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama and the author of Confronting Modernity: Art and Society in Louisiana (University Press of Mississippi, 2008) and the forthcoming Gettysburg, Like Granite Under Foot: My Kind of Civil War Battlefield.