American Environmental History History 540/440 North Carolina State University Statue of Liberty Seen from the Dumping Area Proposed as Liberty State Park, 1973
American Environmental History History HI540/440 North Carolina State University, Fall 2017 Wednesday 3pm-5:45pm; 200 Cox Hall Matthew Morse Booker Office hours: Tuesdays 1:30-2:30p & Thursdays 12:35-1:30p and by appointment Office: 274 Withers Hall Email: mmbooker@ncsu.edu Tel: 919 513-1431 Description This course is an intensive reading seminar on the historical relationship between human beings and nature in the United States. The central objective is to explore the varied and changing relations Americans have held with the landscapes they inhabited. Focusing on the past two centuries, we will investigate how humans have used, imagined, and remade this land, and in the process, themselves. Two central questions guide the class: What is environmental history? And, how does environmental history matter in American history? Objectives We will focus on two basic themes or arenas. I argue that environmental historians must track both Material and Intellectual change and continuity. Material refers to actual physical changes in the land. Intellectual refers to how individuals and societies saw themselves and nature and how those ideas led to environmental change. Intellectual and material components interact and influence each other. Having taken this class, students will be informed and better equipped to handle what environmental historian Bill Cronon calls the peculiarly human task of living in nature while thinking ourselves outside it. Building a Community Environmental historians are a large, heterogeneous and growing community. To get a sense of that diversity, I urge you to subscribe to the H-Environment listserv for the duration of the course. H-Environment is the standard online discussion board in English for environmental historians. http://www.h-net.org/~environ/ Other useful introductions to the broader field are: - Environmental History Bibliography at Forest History Society Library (Durham, NC): http://www.foresthistory.org/research/biblio.html - Environment and History journal: http://www.erica.demon.co.uk/eh.html - Environmental History journal: http://www.environmentalhistory.net/ - Exploring Environmental History podcast (check out #10 June 14 2007 at 26:00!): http://www.eh-resources.org/podcast/podcast.html - Bill Cronon s how to do environmental history webpage: http://www.williamcronon.net/researching/index.htm - Online bibliography of Latin American EH: http://www.csulb.edu/projects/laeh/ 2
Course website All assignments will be submitted via the course website: http://www.wolfware.ncsu.edu Evaluation History is a disciplined way of understanding our world as well as the record of the past. The goal is for you to learn to think historically by reading and writing historically. The assignments in this course are designed to assess your performance and will determine your final grade. But they are also intended and designed to enhance your learning experience. Grades will be calculated as follows: 20% Class participation 20% Response papers 20% Critical book review 40% Comprehensive review paper Assignment details Class participation: All readings must be completed before each week s class. Every student must meaningfully contribute to discussion, basing their questions and comments on the readings. Each student will also introduce one week s materials to the course, meeting with Professor Booker in advance to discuss themes and questions. Response papers: Each week, using the course website, submit a 1-2 page paper summarizing the evidence used, arguments and contributions of that week s assigned readings. Then propose a series of questions for discussion. These will serve as the basis for an online discussion and raise questions for discussion in class. Critical book review: In consultation with the instructor, choose and review a reading outside the course list. Your 500 to 700-word review should follow the style and format of the journal Environmental History. Graduate students will write a second book review. Comprehensive review paper: The final paper for the course is a comprehensive review that uses course readings (and others, as needed) to explore a theme within the field of environmental history that you find compelling. Core questions should motivate the paper: What is environmental history? What is it good for, if anything? What are its characteristics, strengths and weaknesses as a field? Students will meet with the instructor to define their questions and to select appropriate readings. 3
PLEASE NOTE: Dates, topics, and reading assignments are subject to change. Schedule of Classes Aug 16: Introductions & Definitions Aug 23: Owning Nature Aug 30: The World Slaves Made Sept 6: To Be Determined Sept 13: Acclimatization Sept 20: Seeing the Land Assignment Williams, Nature Cronon, Changes in the Land Carney, Landscapes of Technology Transfer; Stewart, Rice, Water and Power; Pyne, Fire History of the South TBD Valencius, Health of the Country Muir, Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf Sept 27: The City and the Country Cronon, Nature s Metropolis, chs. 1-2, 7-end Oct 4: Commodities Cronon, Nature s Metropolis, chs. 3-6 Oct 11: Soils and Parks Oct 18: Work Oct 25: Disasters Nov 1: Suburban Nature Nov 8: Hybrid landscapes Nov 15: Toxic Bodies Sutter, Let Us Now Praise Famous Gullies White, The Organic Machine Critical book review due Worster, Dust Bowl Cronon, A Place for Stories Rome, Bulldozer in the Countryside (excerpt); Carson, Silent Spring (excerpt) Booker, Down by the Bay, excerpt; White, From Wilderness to Hybrid Landscapes Langston, Toxic Bodies Nov 22: No class; Thanksgiving 4
Nov 29: Postmodern Nature Friday Dec 1 Cronon, The Trouble with Wilderness; White, Are You An Environmentalist or Do You Work for A Living? Worster, Nature and the Disorder of History Final paper due Texts: All readings are required. Find them at the University Bookstore, off-campus bookstores, and from online booksellers such as www.powells.com Any edition of these books, hardcover, paperback, or e-book is acceptable. Please do buy used books. Prices given are for new books from www.amazon.com. 1. William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (1983/2003) $12.00 2. Conevery Bolton Valencius, The Health Of The Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves And Their Land (2002) $16 3. John Muir, A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf (1916) $8 4. William Cronon, Nature s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1992) $14.00 5. Paul Sutter, Let Us Now Praise Famous Gullies: Providence Canyon and the Soils of the South (2015) $26 6. Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (1995) $14.00 7. Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (1979/2004) $13.00 8. Nancy Langston, Toxic Bodies: Hormone Disruptors and the Legacy of DES (2010), $20 9. Available as PDF files on the course website: a. Raymond Williams, Nature, 184-189 in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976) b. William Cronon, Kennecott Journey: The Paths out of Town," 28-51 in Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America's Western Past (1992) c. Donald Worster, Doing Environmental History, 289-308 in The Ends of the Earth: Essays in Modern Environmental History (1988) d. Paul Sutter, What Gullies Mean: Georgia s Little Grand Canyon and Southern Environmental History, The Journal of Southern History 76:3 (August 2010), 579-616. e. Theodore Steinberg, Dam-Breaking in the 19th-Century Merrimack Valley: Water, Social Conflict, and the Waltham-Lowell Mills, Journal of Social History 24:1 (Autumn, 1990), 25-45. f. Judith Carney, Landscapes of Technology Transfer: Rice Cultivation and African Continuities, Technology and Culture 37 (1996), 5-20. 5
g. Mart Stewart, Rice, Water, and Power: Landscapes of Domination and Resistance in the Lowcountry, 47-64 in What Nature Suffers to Groe : Life, Labor, and Landscape on the Georgia Coast, 1680-1920 (1996) h. Stephen Pyne, Our Pappies Burned the Woods: A Fire History of the South, 143-160 in Fire in America (1982) i. Adam Rome, Conservation, Preservation, and Environmental Activism: A Survey of the Historical Literature (2003) http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/hisnps/npsthinking/nps-oah.htm j. Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Structure of American Politics: The Progressive Era, in American Political History as Social Analysis (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1980) k. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1962), excerpt l. William Cronon, The Trouble with Wilderness, 69-90 in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (1995) m. Richard White, Are You An Environmentalist Or Do You Work for a Living? 171-185 in Uncommon Ground (1995) n. Richard White, From Wilderness to Hybrid Landscapes: The Cultural Turn in Environmental History, The Historian Vol. 66 No. 3 (September 2004), 557-564. o. Matthew Morse Booker, Down by the Bay: San Francisco s History Between the Tides (2013), excerpt p. Donald Worster, Nature and the Disorder of History, in Reinventing Nature? Responses to Postmodern Deconstruction (1995) q. Mike Davis, The Case for Letting Malibu Burn, in The Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (1998) r. Susan Davis, Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture and the Sea World Experience (1997), excerpt 6