Carolyn Merchant's book Reinventing Eden is a great read so far. It's laying out in considerable detail a basic framework for the cultural history of "nature" and the environment that I think a lot of people sort of know and discuss, but that isn't fully articulated elsewhere. It's also the most thorough work I've seen at putting gender into environmental history.

I just submitted this as a regular part, but seeing this topic is about historical debate I'll cross post it here.

I know historians have a lot of disagreements about details of events, but are there wars or battles or other large scale public events about which there is debate whether it even happened?

How does Hegel's 'Philosophy of History" resonate among historians? My exposure to these particular lectures is limited to philosophy courses, so I am in the dark in terms of how these lectures/concepts come up in other departments.

Tagging /u/Jan_van_Bergen for the interesting debate we had a day or two ago on the topic of appeasement prior to World War Two, which has inspired me to ask a slightly wider question about the topic.

Appeasement continues to be a topic of great discussion, and the development of its historiography from Cato, to Churchill, A.J.P Taylor to Ovary, with many renowned and respected authors in between, continues to be fascinating. What is it about this topic that has caused it to remain so lively after so long? Do we expect the debate to shift from what seems to be a consensus that the historical community has finally established?

Also, once again, thanks for the discussion - though it ultimately seemed to be borne more out of misinterpretation than of substance, it was still great to revisit my thoughts and productive to reconsider them.