Peter Simons

Peter Simons is an environmental historian of the United States. His current book project, Global Heartland: Cultivating the American Century on the Farm, shows how the farm-based internationalism arising out of World War II propelled U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War. He offers a range of courses at Hamilton that cover both U.S. and environmental history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Recent Courses Taught

Introduction to Environmental History
Recent American History

Select Publications

• “Grassroots Diplomats: The International Farm Youth Exchange and Environmental Diplomacy in the Early Cold War,” in Global Exchanges: Scholarship and Transnational Circulations in the Contemporary World, eds. Ludovic Tournès and Giles Scott-Smith (New York: Berghahn, forthcoming).
• “Aviation’s Heartland: The Flying Farmers and Postwar Flight,” Agricultural History 89 (Spring 2015): 225–46.
• Current Book Project: Global Heartland: Agriculture and the Creation of the American Century 
• Review: “The Transformation of Heartland America: A Success Story?” review of Robert Wuthnow, Remaking the Heartland: Middle America since the 1950s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011) in Books & Ideas/La Vie des idées, June 2011.

Appointed to the Faculty

2016

Educational Background

Ph.D., University of Chicago
M.A., University of Maine-Orono
M.P.P., University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
B.A., Calvin College