HIS 228 US Environmental History

Historians usually view the environment as a neutral stage upon which the people and events of the past walked. This course argues that the natural world-plants and animals, soil and water, climate and weather-plays a pivotal role in the shaping (and limiting) of human agency and the social, economic, and political landscapes that the peoples of the United States have negotiated for themselves. This survey of U.S. history brings the environment and competing environmental ideologies to the foreground, paying special attention to obscured or buried relationships between land/resource management and the class-, race-, and gender-specific consequences of such decisions. (L03)