Introduction to Environmental History

This introduction to the history of human interactions with the physical environment focuses on case studies, including European settlement of the New World, industrialization, fire, warfare, and the modern environmental movement, both in the United States and beyond its borders. In this course we will explore several themes, including the consequences of European expansion for human communities and their environments; shifting understandings of nature; cities and their hinterlands as different ways that humans organize nature; and class and race as factors in the human experience of nature and of environmentalism.