‘Distillations’ Article on Arsenic Featured on Top 40 Favorite History Writing List

“Rings of Fire,” an article written by Jayson Maurice Porter for the Science History Institute’s Distillations magazine, has been named one of the best online history pieces of 2024 in the science category. The Top 40 list is compiled annually by Bunk, a project powered by the University of Richmond that serves as a home for the web’s most interesting writing and thinking about American history.

Published on February 1, 2024, “Rings of Fire” explores arsenic histories of racism and empire in the Americas, with a focus on Latin America’s arsenical pesticide export boom from 1870 to 1930.

Porter is an environmental writer and historian who received his PhD from Northwestern in 2022. He is a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Maryland, College Park, and is currently writing a book tentatively titled Held: Multispecies histories of black relations to place and power.

In addition to sifting through thousands of American history-related articles, essays, blogs, and newsletters to come up with its yearly list of top 40 favorites, Bunk regularly republishes stories from around the web, including several others from Distillations.

Featured image from “Rings of Fire”: Girl in a cotton field in Wake County, North Carolina, 1942.
State Library of North Carolina