In the eyes of many of his peers, Alfred W. Crosby was the father of environmental history, and he owed that distinction in large part to his childhood infatuation with Christopher Columbus. He revered him as much as he did his comic strip hero Superman.

That fascination led him, as a scholar, to delve into the biological and cultural impact of Columbus’s voyages to the Americas. And to purse that investigation he expanded the historian’s toolkit.

In groundbreaking feats of interdisciplinary research, he incorporated studies of biology, ecology, geography and other sciences in his efforts to chronicle and understand human events — work that introduced sweeping explanatory concepts like “the Columbian Exchange” and “ecological imperialism.”

“For historians, Crosby framed a new subject,” the historian J. R. McNeil, author of several books on environmental history, wrote.