American Environmental Hist

Catalog description

This course traces human interaction with the natural environment and with human-created environments in regions of North America that are now occupied by the United States from the colonial period to the present. The course focuses both on how the natural environment shaped the growth of North American civilizations and on how evolving modes of economic production changed various Americans’ relationship to nature and their ideas about it. Special attention goes to how Native people’s original connection to the land gave way to European settlers’ land use, how preseNationist ideas behind the U.S.’s great American park system collided with local people’s traditional uses of natural resources, and how naturalist Rachel Carson’s blockbuster book Silent Spring contributed to growing ecological consciousness among Americans and the rise of the modern environment movement in the 1960s.