This post is part of the Tracking the Effects: Environmental History and the Current United States Federal Administration series edited by Jessica DeWitt and Shannon Stunden Bower. Submissions for this series are being accepted on an ongoing basis. Learn more here.
My favourite song in Hamilton: The Musical (2015) is, a bit perversely, “What Comes Next.” It’s sung by His Majesty George III to his now-former subjects in America, after the Battle of Yorktown has effectively ended the American Revolution.
What comes next?
You’ve been freed
Do you know how hard it is to lead?
You’re on your own
Awesome, wow!
Do you have a clue what happens now?
Oceans rise, empires fall
It’s much harder when it’s all your call …
I like this because it is a rare moment when the play, and the American narrative generally, acknowledges that governing well, and better, is hard, and that the Founding Fathers didn’t author a foolproof path to greatness. In fact, since November we’ve been made acutely aware of just how fragile “the American experiment” might be. We have seen numerous references to the current president acting like a king, exactly the king that Patriots thought they were overthrowing. The surprise seems to be that it wasn’t that hard, after all, to reinstate one.
When we arrived in the United States twelve years ago, one of the shocks learning curves opportunities for growth was professional: I began teaching eighteenth-century history. (The department, having no Canadian content to speak of, was somewhat at a loss for what I might teach; “Well,” said one faculty member, “She can teach the French and Indian War.” And so, here we are.) I’ve written elsewhere about this experience: being Canadian in a curricular geography that otherwise reaches only to Ticonderoga, and how developing courses in the “colonial” era has actually been a revelation to how I approach both Canadian and environmental history. But since last November, it’s been weirdly time-travel-y; like being in a Tardis, constantly shuttling between the past and present. We do this all the time, of course, but this feels different. I live in the middle of Penn’s Commonwealth, the Keystone State, less than 150 miles from Independence Hall (or, before 1776, the Pennsylvania State House) where the Declaration of Independence was signed and the American Constitution written. Amid the current turmoil over the role of government, divisions of power, and the meaning of citizenship, it is impossible not to see these institutions, as well as their environmental implications and the impact on Canada, through the lens of this country’s “founding” era. Teaching history has never felt so real. Or surreal.
Let me share three examples from the classroom since January.
The Chipmunk: Or, science according to the King’s whims
In Colin Coates’ new book, he describes how Louis Nicolas depicted the chipmunk as “the most noble of all the North American animals” in his manuscript Codex Canadensis because of Louis XIV’s reported enthusiasm for the small rodent. In other words, Nicolas tried to anticipate the king’s preferences and patronage in his representations of natural history. As Coates writes, “Even if the king did not see the illustrations, he is an assumed presence in the work.”1 Thomas Wirth likewise notes that the practice of natural history in the Thirteen Colonies was often motivated by the dynamics of capital and aspirations of class in imperial Britain.2
This is science by the carrot: massaging observations to garner political favour. There is also—and arguably more troubling—the stick, or direct and directive political interference in scientific research. In the first Trump administration, this meant redrawing hurricane tracks; in the second, it has meant the elimination or suppression of research deemed unfavourable to the executive interest. While we read about the promotion of the chipmunk, climate data was being DOGEd, and entire research agendas edited, or suspended. State agencies appear compromised, even complicit, leaving individual scientists harassed, unfunded, or gaslit. A rogue social media voice, AltNPS, has taken up the banner of the resistance, like an anonymous pamphlet-writer in the colonies.
The View from Coal Hill
Coal was mined in the northeast even by the turn of the eighteenth century: in small pockets to help build Fortress Louisbourg on Cape Breton, and then in larger and larger amounts in Pennsylvania, east of the Susquehanna and along the Pittsburgh seam.
Phillipe Buache, Carte minéralogique où l’on voit la nature des terrains du Canada et de la Louisiane (1752), Bibliothèque et Archives Nationales du Québec. Note the symbols for charbon de terre, especially in Acadie. 
George Collot, “Plan of the Town of Pittsburg” (1796), David Rumsey Map Collection. 
Pennsylvania Heritage Site Sign: “First Mining of Pittsburgh Coal.”
Eighteenth-century coal fueled nineteenth-century prosperity, expansion, and dominion. It created what Stephen Pyne called a lithic landscape, of third nature and anthropogenic fire.3 It has powered global warming and climate change. Yet even as we discussed the international scientific consensus about the environmental costs of fossil fuels in climate change, an executive order directed that federal agencies and federal lands turn to the enthusiastic pursuit of the “Nation’s beautiful clean coal resources.” Executive orders have been used by this administration at an unprecedented pace; the effect has been, as the saying goes, drinking from a firehose. But this one felt particularly demented, a statement of ambition from a different era and a different reality. Caroline Winterer talks about the “coal sublime,” an aesthetic of nineteenth-century landscape art in which progress and comfort is depicted amid tranquility and “harmless puffs of steam.“4 I wonder if George Inness’ painting of the Lackawanna Valley (ca. 1856) hangs anywhere in the White House these days.
To be fair, Canadian political leadership has also insisted on the necessity of pipelines, with similar justifications of national energy security and economic growth, and a similar papering over of environmental effects and costs. There are regions of the country that still seem determined to find coal at any cost. But anyone who thinks coal is “clean” has never read, seen, or listened to history.
“We may derive essential advantage, from a successful expedition there”
Americans have eyed Canada for acquisition since before there was an America, or a Canada. Here George Washington writes to John Laurens in September 1778, adding that this would require extra supplies, including snow shoes, “for enduring the inclemencies of an active winter-campaign.” The National Archives in Washington is full of correspondence about plans to invade Canada during the American Revolution in hopes of undermining British strength on the one hand and winning local support on the other (neither happened).
There are, of course, other ways to acquire territory. A generation earlier, Charles Lawrence had invited farmers from Massachusetts to occupy the fertile lands of Acadie, having conveniently deported the Acadians who had created them. Calling Canada the 51st state is not unlike renaming Denali or the Gulf of Mexico: making imperial claims to territory through cartographic repossession. That is certainly a practice that is familiar to students of the eighteenth-century.
And, as someone suggested to Thomas Jefferson, the U.S. could always “do the Conquest with money.”5 How much for that country in the window?
As Sandra Swart pointed out at ASEH in 2025, the role of historians is to remind us that the status quo is not received intact, immutable, or fixed. The world can be turned upside down. This administration has done that, to be sure. But neither are we bound to its vision of the world, or of history.
Notes
1 Colin Coates, Political Culture in Louis XIV’s Canada: Majesty, Ritual, and Rhetoric (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024), 119-122.
2 Thomas Wirth, “‘So Many Things for His Profit and for His Pleasure’: British and Colonial Naturalists Respond to an Enlightenment Creed, 1727-1777,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 131: 2 (2007), 127–47.
3 Stephen Pyne, “Cicero Meets the Cretaceous,” Environmental History 29:1 (2024), 174–179.
4 Caroline Winterer, How the New World Became Old : The Deep Time Revolution in America (Princeton University Press, 2024), 86.
5 On Morse and post-Revolutionary interest in Canada, see Jeffers Lennox, North of America: Loyalists, Indigenous Nations, and the Borders of the Long American Revolution (Yale University Press, 2022).
