Join us on Monday, February 10, 2025, at 4pm in the Nexus, Hayden Library for a talk by Daniel Immerwahr, Humanities Professor at Northwestern University, on his upcoming book “This Too Shall Burn: America in the Age of Wood”.

America has been, historically, a land of trees. This made its built environment thoroughgoingly wooden and, as a consequence, alarmingly combustible. In the same way that fossil fuels are today the source of our abundance but also the cause of a dreaded apocalypse, wood was the source of American abundance and the cause of constant, harrowing fires. In This Too Shall Burn, Daniel Immerwahr asks how those hair-raising fires have shaped—or scarred—the American past.

Daniel Immerwahr is a historian at Northwestern University, where he is the Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities and Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence. His most recent book, the award-winning How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, was a New York Times critics’ top book of 2019 and has been translated into seven languages. He is currently a 2024–2025 Radcliffe fellow performing research on this book.

This jointly sponsored talk with STS, Anthropology, and History is free to the MIT community and to the public. We hope to see you there!