Prof. Walker’s Themes and Readings
(1) Thursday, March 29th: The Settled Life [Excerpt from Steve Mithin, After the Ice
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 5, 29-55.]
(2) Thursday, April 5th: Hydraulic Civilizations [Excerpts from Daniel Headrick,
Technology: A World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 17-27 and RJ.
Forbes, Studies in Ancient Technology (Leiden: Brill, 1965), 4-9, 18-32.]
(3) Thursday, April 12th: Land Transport and Road Building [Excerpt from RJ. Forbes,
Studies in Ancient Technology (Leiden: Brill, 1965), 131-161.
First Essay Posted
(4) Thursday, April 19th: The Panama Canal, Public Health and Modern Conceptions of
Disease [Excerpt from The Panana Canal: An Army’s Enterprise (Washington, D.C.:
Center for Military History, 2009), 26-50.
(5) Tuesday, May 1st: “Pyramids of Concrete”: Twentieth-Century water storage and
control systems in the Soviet Union and USA [Excerpt from Paul Josephson,
Industrialized Nature (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2002), 15-68]
(7) Thursday, May 10th: Nazi Transportation Technology [Tomas Zeller, “’The
Landscape’s Crown’: Landscape, Perceptions, and Modernizing Effects of the German
Autobahn System, 1934-1941,” in David E. Nye (ed.), Technologies of Landscape: From
Reaping to Recycling (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 218-238;
John Guse, “Volksgemeinschaft Engineers: The Nazi ‘Voyages of Technology,’” Central
European History, 44 (2011), 447–477]
Second Essay Question Posted
(8) Thursday, May 17th: Plate Tectonics [H. E. Le Grand, Drifting Continents and
Shifting Theories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 1-2, 37-46, 138-145,
176-182, 195-206, 229-237]
(9) Thursday, May 24th: Peaceful Nuclear Explosions [TBA]
Third Essay Question Posted
Essay Questions
I will post a specific essay question and specify which readings you should use. All of
these reading will be drawn from the reading I have already assigned. The essays
should be four-to-five double-spaced pages long. I will return the essay with a grade and
comments on content, argument, and writing style. You may revise the papers and
submit them again by the end of the term. If they are improved, your grade will improve
as well.