As Europeans penetrated and began to settle the "New World" after 1492, they substantially transformed the landscape, which had previously been molded by North America's Native peoples.  Simultaneously, that landscape, and its Native inhabitants, profoundly affected European cultural creations and helped shape those people into "Americans."  This course examines the complex relationship between nature and culture on the North American continent from late aboriginal times to the mid-19^th century.  It focuses on the complicated links between material (including natural) circumstances, mentality, ideology, and power, which affected the physical landscape and the changing experience of American life.

Readings, lectures, and discussions will consider the following topics: Native cultures and ecology; colonization, its environmental impact, and the devastation to and adjustments of Native peoples; westward expansion; ideas of "nature," "wilderness," "frontier," and "progress" and their political implications; impact of agriculture, commercial and industrial production, early urbanization; cultural and scientific trends and their relation to the exploitation, appreciation, or conservation of the American landscape.

Carolyn Merchant, ed., Major Problems in American Environmental History (1993).

Richard White, The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (1983).

Theodore Steinberg, Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England (1991)

Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854).