User:Panders2025/Firestone Natural Rubber Company/Bibliography

You will be compiling your bibliography and creating an outline of the changes you will make in this sandbox.

Outline of proposed changes
Additions:

The largest and most important change I would like to make is a section on the impact of Firestone and the Harbel Plantation on Liberia's environment. There are very few mentions of environmental destruction. An important exception is at the end in the section about the 2020 Center for International Policy report, which reads, "Firestone's contamination of local watersheds resulting in elimination of fish and natural wildlife."

I plan on making another section, likely the third section on the page, just about environmental controversies. As such, I will move this sentence from the labor controversies section. The bulk of the information in this section will likely come from Mitman's book, Empire of Rubber. I hope to supplement this with Church's article in order to have more of a biological/geographical grounding. I want to take a relatively broad understanding of the environmental and include disease, health outcomes, birthrates, etc. Mitman's emphasis on the history of science and medicine might be useful in this regard.

I will have to see how broad/specific my claims about environmental destruction will go. For example, will I only discuss total amounts of trees cut down, acres appropriated etc, or will I be able to discuss certain areas, townships, neighborhoods etc. and how Firestone affected them over the years? This will come from close study of Mitman's book.

The entire history of the Harvard Expedition is absent from the article. I plan to add this in according to Mitman's book, his article, as well as the primary source footage present in the documentary. I hope to gather historical/descriptive information from Mitman's texts moreso than how the Expedition fits into his argument, as this seems to be excessively argumentative. Depending on the amount of content I can derive, I would either place this explanation under the Creation and Early History section or, more likely, create another section just about the Harvard Expedition before the Journey Without Maps section. I think this would better fit with the structure of the article already in place.

Based on how fruitful the W.E.B. Du Bois letters end up being, I would like to add in his thoughts on Firestone's development. Similar to above, this could be in the early history section or, more likely, its own section. Du Bois' page itself mentions a few times his trips to and interest in Liberia. If I end up taking this approach, I would like to research if any other Pan-Africanists published their thoughts about Firestone.

Currently, there is only one photo on the entire page. I can easily add small images, even from the Firestone company website itself (after researching how the citations for that works). I would use the wikipedia page of a similarly sized and similarly historic company looks in order to produce this. More importantly, I will be coming across many more photos during my research and will have an eye out for which ones might be pertinent to include.

I would like to add more links to the See Also section. As of now, the See Also only links to pages that have to do with corporations and economic exploitation. This seems in line with the focus of the article at this point. Going off of my additions, I want to add to the See Also section with articles about development in Liberia, the environment of Liberia, etc. I would also like to connect this with larger themes of environmental African history such as the mineral industry in Africa.

Changes:

There are two sentences (beginning with "According to the report") that are repeated twice, once while discussing labor controversies generally and second time while specifically discussing the content of the United Nations Mission in Liberia report. I plan to delete one of these and possibly offer more of a summary of the report in the general section.

The little text box to the right of the page seems quite lackluster. I can easily add information such as when it was founded, acquired etc.