Professor Albert Way Presents Keynote Lecture

Kennesaw State University Professor Albert Way presented the keynote lecture for the 6-week long "Dust, Drought & Dreams Gone Dry" series of events held at the Smyrna Public Library in March and April. 

Dr. Way discussed  "A Southern Dust Bowl? Soil Erosion in the South". He examined how soil erosion in the Southeast US was actually more severe than in the Great Plains during the Dust Bowl Era.  The presentation included tracing the historical roots of the problem back to the 1700s and how it started being effectively resolved starting in the 1930s.

Photo (l to r): KSU Professor Dr. Albert Way, Smyrna Library Director Mary Moore, KSU Professor Dr. Kay Reeve

Biography:

Albert G. Way received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Georgia and joined the faculty of KSU in 2011. He teaches classes in recent U.S. history, Georgia History, and Environmental History. Dr. Way’s research interests focus on the environmental and agricultural history of the American South. He is the author of Conserving Southern Longleaf: Herbert Stoddard and the Rise of Ecological Land Management (University of Georgia Press, 2011), and The Art of Managing Longleaf: A Personal History of the Stoddard-Neel Approach (with Leon Neel and Paul Sutter, UGA Press, 2010). He is currently working on a book-length project tentatively titled Not Naturally a Grass Country: Environment, Plant Genetics, and the Quest for Agricultural Modernization in the Humid World, which examines the use of scientific expertise to transform agricultural landscapes in the American South and other humid regions. He has received fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution and the Institute for Southern Studies at the University of South Carolina.