This course will blend thematic and chronological approaches
in introducing students to the dynamic field of environmental history. It will present essential concepts,
concerns, and methods of environmental history and explore them in the context
of American history. Units will address
environmental issues in vastly different historical settings, ranging from the
Precolumbian world to modern, industrial societies. Because of the breadth of its focus, the course complements and
extends both United State history (HIST 201-3) and world history (HIST 120-2),
and helps prepare students for advanced work in history courses across the
history department curriculum, as well as in Environmental Studies.
Within the
last few decades, environmental history has emerged as an important theme or
specialization within the larger discipline.
Though practitioners define it variously, at base it studies the
relationship between humans and their physical environments, understanding such
relationships as "dialogues" between societies and the material
(including the "natural") circumstances of their existence. Some environmental historians emphasize
culture and intellectual themes, exploring the ways that people have understood
and represented the natural world and shaped it in culturally specific
ways. Others stress the essential
economic foundations of environmental relationships, focusing on the need to
procure subsistence and wealth and the implications that such production has on
physical and natural environments.
Still others have cast attention on the politics and policy of humans'
relationships with their environments, and how social and political life is
situated in landscapes, which are often the object of negotiation and
struggle. Finally, others have seen
environmental history as the study of ecology with people considered as
essential (if sometimes disturbing) elements of natural processes. Students will be acquainted with these
various approaches and the implications of different sorts of environmental
history, while situating their learning in the study of American history.