A Teaching Portfolio in the Making:
Environmental History From the Ground Up
9 May 2003
Barry Ross Muchnick
Environmental History Course Quartet. . . A Précis
History is not a problem
The writing of it is
Savoie Lottinville1
Writing history is not a problem. Though challenging, the private act of researching and
writing history pales in comparison to the flushed challenged of teaching it. Teaching history,
especially environmental history, is the real trial of knowledge, acumen, and influence. Drawing
us quickly into the complexity between and within intersecting scales of cultural and ecological
patterns, studies of interactions between humans and the natural world are by necessity
complicated – and interdisciplinary. As such, environmental historians consider not only the
physical universe, but also the symbolic, the metaphorical, the literary. To the data collected on
soil conditions, geology, hydrology, wildlife, forest health, microbes, and biodiversity, we gather
and glean important documents from poems and films, diaries, legal briefs, photographs,
paintings, music, myths and ideologies, and architecture. If writing environmental history is akin
to long uphill journey then teaching it is a truly Sisyphusian task.
This semester I have tried my hand at rolling the boulder up the hill by empirically (or at
least imaginatively) testing the anonymous adage which proclaims one really doesn’t know a
topic until one tries to teach it to someone else. Therefore, since the best way to learn a set of
theories, materials, or skills is to parlay that knowledge from the abstract realm of philosophical
understanding to the concrete realm of pedagogical practice, I developed four undergraduate
course syllabi to plumb and probe the depths of my own facility with environmental history.
The attached syllabi are the result of an extremely rewarding process whereby I ask and
address a series of questions regarding my personal and professional objectives, the problems
and parameters of the field itself, and my educational goals for my (future) students. For
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example, in what ways can I use a teaching career to expressly link scholarship, activism, and
community service? Which materials will allow me to balance the requisite coverage of
canonical texts with bold forays into a cross-cultural and critical analysis of the tools, tropes, and
techniques of environmental history? How can I organize information and ideas not only to
provide a foundation of theoretical concepts and interpretive skills but also to facilitate students’
critical thinking and to foster an interest in further, self-guided learning? If I strive to improve
the retention and relevance of course content, to foster supportive, purposeful relationships
between myself and my students, and to promote active rather than passive learning, what kind
of assignments or learning spaces can I create within the structure of a university setting?2 Given
environmental history’s interdisciplinary modus operandi, what suite of source materials will
best increase students’ abilities to engage, to analyze, and to articulate their own assumptions
about and interactions with the natural world and each other?
To wit: how might I instill in students a sense of thinking like scientists, but artistically:
to test how arguments might apply in different contexts; to require high standards of evidence; to
place scientific and technical concerns in a creative tension with the ability to situate events and
ideas in their historical context in order to account for discrepancies in sources; to apply this
knowledge in support of original interpretations written in a scholarly, persuasive, and
compelling manner.
Before I mention specific aspects of the syllabi, I want briefly to describe how I feel my
pedagogical philosophy situates ideas about studying the past into a framework for changing the
future. I believe education matters a great deal. Ideas count. So do the processes whereby ideas
are naturalized, socialized, and incorporated into the fabric of mainstream popular and
intellectual culture. Teaching environmental history is for me a way of selecting the most
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colorful and durable threads from the technicolor past, teasing apart the fundamental fibers of
meaning, and saying to students, “O.K. We have these threads which stretch all the way back to
our origins. How do they connect with the tapestry we call today? More important, how can we
re-weave our stories of self-understanding to create the kind of future we want to have?” In this
way teaching is both a form of scholarship and a type of community (broadly, and biotically
construed) service, a technique for linking the lessons of the past to the potential for the future
through investigation, experimentation, and imagination.
One of the fundamental issues at the core of my attraction to and concern about the
practice of teaching history is the tension between an analytic and descriptive mode of inquiry.
To sharply separate narrative and analysis runs counter to the kind of fusion I think marks solid
history and effective teaching. Blending the rigor of the sciences with the interpretive finesse of
the arts is central to my vision of effective environmental history. Agreeing with but expanding
upon Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, the answer to the question, “What constitutes useful
knowledge?” is not an either / or proposition. Rather, innovative perspectives and solutions lie in
the and, the synthetic qualities of deep interdisciplinary scholarship and practice. “The two
processes,” the physicist writes, “that of science and that of art, are not very different. Both
science and art form in the course of the centuries a human language by which we can speak
about the more remote parts of reality.”3 My projected syllabi assume a dynamic and changing
relationship between art and science, one as apt to produce contradictions as continuities.
Moreover, they assume that the interactions of the two are dialectical.
If the remote parts of reality include the near and distant past, environmental history as a
field is also positioned to excavate the roots of the paradox underlying the historian’s practice;
the postmodern critique that the veracity of interpretation rests on a faithfulness to a reality lying
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outside or prior to that interpretation. The same complexity marks the ongoing debate about the
extent to which wilderness – indeed, nature itself – is a cultural concept. I want to pass that
ambiguity and uncertainty on to my students so that they can wrestle with the inherent and
intractable problems of preserving as an instrument of inquiry something whose truth value we
question.4 But deconstructing our views of nature first requires exposure to and a working
understanding of the basic themes of environmental history. a task which calls for an accessible
yet challenging set of materials in the classroom.
In each course syllabi, I tried to balance critical monographs, shorter articles, and
excerpts from influential works. Because book length texts devote so many pages of a student’s
assigned time to single themes or topics, they inevitably reduce the number of topics that can be
covered in course readings. Worse, they simultaneously ghettoize the topics they do cover:
offering one book on gender, one on Native Americans, one on the history of ecological ideas,
and so on, with little overlap among the various subjects. Yet there are many books that
introduce their subject successfully to undergraduates, books that are particularly good at
provoking classroom discussion, books that work well together in linking the overarching themes
of a course. William Cronon’s Changes in the Land, for example. At the same time, constructing
a reader allows the inclusion of many more, shorter, readings covering a wider range of topics
and possesses the distinct advantage of drawing from various disciplines, showcasing a variety of
media that are either no longer in print or remain unpublished, and introducing undergraduates to
scholarly journals.
In the North American environmental history lecture course I used a combination of
classic texts, experimental new narratives, films, children’s books, short stories, and scientific
journal articles to create a rounded source base. Integrating these into lectures along with video
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clips, audio clips, and active learning exercises, I hope to adapt the traditional lecture to more
readily accommodate individual learning styles of students. The modified chronological
approach of the course follows a rough temporal trajectory but is organized around thematic
clusters that permit movement forward and backward in time to accentuate key turning points,
sets of conditions, or relevant ideological genealogies. Though focusing on North America, the
materials range far from the lands now known as the United States, reinforcing the notion that
any environmental perspective on national history is indeed a trans-national perspective.
My representation of diverse geographic regions is paralleled by introducing
marginalized voices. Ethnicity, gender, and class concerns interact with ecological questions to
present a solid narrative sweep of the period covered by the course without erecting a monolithic
interpretive structure. A central mechanism of the course is that the students learn to see the past,
as Bill Cronon advises, “as a story to be told rather than a problem to be solved”. 5 Written
assignments like response papers and film critiques provide students the opportunity to disarm
the defenses built into narrative that seem to promote the idea that a convincing narrative
requires no more routing out. The mid term and final exams gauge retention and recall, while
offering the chance to demonstrate facility and reinforce competency in thinking and writing
about nature as a physical entity and a influential set of ideas. Finally, a creative project allows
students to personalize the course materials in ways not often available in university curricula.
The methods seminar revels in environmental history’s methodological impurity and
turns on how we can integrate vastly different temporal and spatial scales, methodologies,
sources of evidence, and styles of inquiry and communication. Beginning with an orientation in
the discipline and sessions discussing the predominant meta-narratives and the literary devices
behind them, the course switches gears and starts toward a more workshop-oriented design. A
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meeting targeting library training and research competency precede a unit of sessions which
delve, in turn, into reading images on canvas and on film, decoding cartographic representations
of time and space, using material objects, reading the landscape, improving scientific literacy,
and examining paradigmatic myths of ecology and social theory. The underlying premise is that
objects made, modified, or in some cases imagined by man – including the landscape itself –
reflect, consciously or unconsciously, directly or indirectly, the beliefs and behaviors of the
individuals who made, commissioned, sold, purchased, or used them, and by extension the
beliefs of the larger culture to which they belong.
Consider the week on photography. Although historians have long used images as
illustrations to support or reiterate arguments developed through the study of more conventional
literary sources, we will ask how pictures can be used as distinct primary sources. Using
photographs, prints, watercolors and natural history illustrations, the class will consider the
documentary and ideological content of images through an examination of such issues as
patronage, the politics and economics of production and publication, the technological
constraints placed on image makers and publishers, the relationship between visual images and
literary texts, and viewer responses.
The session on scientific literacy also prepares students to place knowledge making
alongside image making and to problematize its relationship to a larger historical moment. By
questioning awareness of how the scientific endeavor is deployed to support or subvert
arguments, I hope to stress that science as a social process not only transmits shared habits,
attitudes, values, and ideologies across generations, but also shapes laws and policies in different
historical contexts as the values placed on science and professional expertise changes over time.6
6
A writing practicum component of the course integrates sensory engagement, intellectual
engagement, and emotional response with exercises in nuanced description, analysis, and
deduction. Guiding students through the process of developing a significant research project
emphasizes that science and literature are kin: both are creative human endeavors that carry with
them a complex set of myths, paradigms, and protocols. For example, the iterative process of
observation, data (source) collection, hypothesis formation, inference, problem solving, and
communication is echoed in the practicum series: writing techniques, interpretation, outlining
and structuring, drafting, and presentation. Again, thinking as scientists, artistically.
The workshop method is also at the heart of the third seminar, an exploration of issues of
equity and environmental justice in North America with all its nationalism, superstitions, class
distinctions, and prejudices. Though the guided research process is similar, the final research
project is paired with a service learning project which enables students to synthesize the material
learned in the course through an application of their own research on behalf of a community or
campus partner. Grouped together in small teams, the students will provide information and
analysis on a particular environmental justice issue for a local non-profit organization, working
educational farm, or a campus organization. The service learning project assists the larger task of
doing history by helping us break down our social and ideological barriers instead of
emphasizing them, and bringing a consciousness of the past alive in our everyday efforts.
The active component of studying the history of environmental justice is embedded in the
subject matter in two ways. First, studying the past from the bottom up corrects for past
tendencies to study the elites. Second, re-examining the divergent histories of conventional
modes of conservation and social movements concerned primarily with quality of life issues will
help students not only to address and understand the interactions of social and environmental
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problems but to encourage them to debate the official ideologies and representations of the past,
and hopefully help them see themselves as active citizens shaping their own lives.7
Finally, the fourth seminar begins with patterns of movement in the students daily lives.
A seminar more exclusively drawing from literary sources than the previous three, “Routes of
Travel” explores the difference between “rootedness” and “routedness” in the human and natural
world. Following men and women up, down, and around the continent on foot and on horseback,
in boats, cars, and trains over the span of four hundred years, we will unpack the structural and
technical challenges of recording and re-telling an essentially linear expedition in narrative
episodes. The course will approach how notions of region, nature, mobility, and technology
intersect with and influence records of reality. The real point of this course is to stir the
imagination, to overcome the ennui and disconnectedness so prevalent in modern society. By
asking how people in the past relate to specific places – how and why they chose to leave, for
example, what motivates migration – students will reflect the location of their own lives, both in
practical and theoretical terms.
Behind all the questions guiding these course syllabi lie others. What constitutes a
privileged claim to knowledge and how can we – as students, scholars, teachers, and
practitioners – understand, adjudicate, and perhaps negotiate different knowledges constructed
at different levels of abstraction under radically different material and historical conditions?89
Pedagogy for me is as much about learning as it is about teaching. Education is not merely about
gathering and correlating facts or acquiring knowledge. These course syllabi are signposts along
my own personal, intellectual, and professional journey, cairns to mark a path for other students,
travelers, and teachers.
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Notes
Quoted as a header for the “Acknowledgements” in James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in
Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), xiii.
2
John Lemmons, Eleanor Saboski, Pamela Morgan, Jacque Carter, Owen Grumbling, and Jaime Hylton suggest a
number of possibilities in “An Integrated Learning Community To Increase Environmental Awareness,”
Environmental History Review16 (Spring 1992) 1: 64-76.
3
Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science (New York, 1958), 109 quoted in
H. Stuart Hughes, History as Art and as Science: Twin Vistas on the Past (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers,
1964), 2.
4
Joan W. Scott discusses the paradox of doing history at great length in, “After History?” in Joan W. Scott and
Debra Keates, eds. Schools of Thought: Twenty-five Years of Interpretive Social Science (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2001).
5
William Cronon, “The Uses of Environmental History” Environmental History Review (Fall 1993): 17.
6
John Lemmons, Eleanor Saboski, Pamela Morgan, Jacque Carter, Owen Grumbling, Jaime Hylton, “An Integrated
Learning Community To Increase Environmental Awareness,” Environmental History Review16 (Spring 1992) 1:
66-67.
7
Green, James R. “Workers, Unions, and the Politics of Public History.” The Public Historian 11(Fall 1989) 4: 13.
1
8
Here I paraphrase David Harvey in, “Militant Particularism and Global Ambition: The Conceptual Politics of
Place, Space, and Environment in the Work of Raymond Williams,” Social Text 42 (Spring 1995) : 69-98.
9
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North American Environmental History
Instructor: Barry Ross Muchnick
Spring 2003
Lecture Time and Location: M, W, 1:20-2:30 p.m., Drumgoole Hall, Room 28
Office Hours: M, W, 3:00-4:00 p.m.
Email office hours: barry.Muchnick@yale.edu,
M, W, F (3-4 p.m.)
Though I check my email constantly throughout the week, I will set aside
specific blocks of time each week to respond to your submitted questions
and comments.
Course website: www.earthatlast/envhist/future.edu
Course Description
What is “nature,” anyway? Animal, mineral, vegetable – ethereal? How have ideas about and
interactions with the natural world shaped life in North America in the past? Conversely, how has
the natural world in turn shaped the attitudes and behavior of inhabitants of what is now known as
the United States? And how have human attitudes and activities worked to reflect, to reproduce,
and to re-envision their cultural and political lives? These questions, along with others will guide
us throughout the semester as we study the changing relationships between humans and the
natural world from the Puritan era to the present. Our central premise will be that much of the
familiar terrain of the history of North America looks very different when considered in its
environmental context, and that one can learn a great deal about both history and the environment
by studying the two together.
From the lichen encrusted Plymouth rock to the rock music of the 1980s, nature has played a
central role in the natural and cultural history of North America. Subjects we will cover include:
Native American resource strategies; the ecological impacts of European arrival; the effects of
cultural and biological migrations; the rise of capitalist markets, urban centers, and industrial
development; agricultural innovations and disasters; changing scientific concepts and developing
environmental movements; the explosion and implications of technology; the transformations of
ideas about nature, its use, and its values; the effects of pollution, toxics, chemicals, and other
wastes; and the complex interrelationships between gender, ethnicity, power, and the
representation of, access to, and role in governing natural resources. Investigating the explanatory
power of environmental history will allow us to expose the roots of institutions, consumption
patterns, economic activities, and shifting power dynamics in society.
Course Goals
One major purpose of this course is to introduce you to the interdisciplinary and specialized field
of environmental history as a way to improve your ability to think critically and historically.
Along the way you will develop skills – orally and in writing – for inquiring about,
contextualizing, and analyzing a variety of media viewed from an environmental angle. By
examining material that bridges the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, you will
also increase your level of exposure to and comfort in dealing with the complexity, ambiguity,
and uncertainty in human affairs and ecosystems. Not only will you learn about how facts, figures
and trends fit into major themes of North American history, but you will also learn how to think
creatively and place accepted versions of the past in tension with alternatives.
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Student Responsibilities
Ultimately, this educational experience is your own and we are here to help you make the most of
it. At its best, the study of history cuts across the grain of conventional wisdom, challenges staid
or stagnant interpretations, undermines cherished assumptions, and erodes stereotypes. At its
worst it reads like dense, undercooked pudding, tastes no better, and serves as a fact-finding
exercise. I organized the materials and structure of this course with this tension in mind.
Nevertheless, if something is not clear or you have ideas about how to improve a week’s theme, I
am responsive to constructive feedback, an important adaptability you too will develop in
response to feedback on your written work. We ask that you think seriously and creatively about
history as a means to debate the meanings of texts, to analyze the judgment of authors and artists,
and to engage the opinions of your peers.
Course Requirements [in brief]
(grading schema and assignment details follow preliminary schedule)
In addition to attendance at lectures, discussion sections, and evening screenings, there will two
exams, a number of short written assignments (three 1-2 page and one 5-7 page essay), and a
creative project.
Attendance and Participation 25%
Screenings and Film Critiques 15%
Midterm Exam
15%
Final Exam
20%
Mid-length Essay (4-6 pp.)
15%
Creative Project
10%
100%
Readings: (Books, CD, course packet)
Books
 William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1983).
 Alfred Crosby Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe 900-1900 (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
 Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2002).
 Jennifer Price, Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America (New York: Basic
Books, 1999).
 Stephen Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America (New
York: Hill and Wang, 2002).
 Stephen J. Pyne, How the Canyon Became Grand: A Short History (New York: Penguin
Putnam Inc., 1998).
 Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York: Hill
and Wang, 1995).
 Glenda Riley, Women and Nature: Saving the “Wild” West (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of
Nebraska Press, 1999).
 Louis Warren, The Hunter’s Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-Century
America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).
 Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are (New York: Harper and Row, 1963).
 Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American
Environmentalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
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CD
 Woody Guthrie: Columbia River Collection (Rounder Records 1036).
Course Packet
 Available at your local photocopy service
Preliminary Lecture Schedule
Readings followed by a bold (O) are available online. Readings followed by a bold (R) are on
reserve. (P) connotes readings included in the course packet.
Week 1
Whither, weather, and rye?
An Introduction to Environmental History
(122 pp.)
Lecture 1: As natural as the day is . . . what, exactly?
Reading
 Raymond Williams, “Ideas of Nature,” in Problems in Materialism and Culture (London:
Verso, 1980): 67-85. (P)
(18)
 Overview discussion of the organization and requirements of the course; details, expectations,
goals.
Lecture 2: The Nature of History :: The History of Nature
Reading
 Carolyn Merchant, “Nature as Female,” in The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the
Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1980): 1-41. (P)
(40)
 “The Potential of Environmental History,” in Roderick Frazier Nash, ed., American
Environmentalism: Readings in Conservation History, (New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 3rd
ed., 1990): 1-8. (P)
(7)
 Aldo Leopold, “February: Good Oak,” in Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and
There (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949): 6-18. (P)
(12)
 William Cronon, “Kennecott Journey: The Paths out of Town,” in William Cronon, George
Miles, and Jay Gitlin, eds., Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past (New
York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992):28-51. (P)
(23)
 Donald Worster, “Appendix: Doing Environmental History,” in Donald Worster ed., The
Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1988): 289-307. (P)
(18)
 Lynn White, Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” Science, 155 (March 10,
1967): 1203-1207. (P)
(4)
 start reading Ecological Imperialism for next week—trust me.
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Week 2
Imperial Invasions, Microbial Migrations: Ecology of a Changing Planet
Lecture 3: Conquering pestilence: “Neo-Europes,” Biological Determinism and the
Columbian Encounter
Lecture 4: Disease and Dispossession
Reading (243 pp.)
 Alfred Crosby Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe 900-1900 (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1986): 1-69, 132-216, 269-308.
(226)
 Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2002): 21-38.
(17)
EVENING SCREENING: The Columbian Exchange
Week 3
Colonialism and the Unsettling of New England
Lecture 5: The Howling Wilderness
Lecture 6: Indian and Colonial Ecologies: The Native/Exotics Debate
Reading (172 pp.)
 William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1983): 1-81.
(80)
 Calvin Martin, “The Four Lives of a Micmac Copper Pot” Ethnohistory 22 (Spring,
1975) 2: 111-133. (O)
(22)
 Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2002): ix-xii, 3-20.
(21)
 Carolyn Merchant, “Farm, Fen, and Forest: European Ecology in Transition,” in The Death of
Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1980):
42-68. (P)
(26)
 Calvin Martin, “The European Impact on the Culture of a Northeastern Algonquian Tribe: An
Ecological Interpretation,” William and Mary Quarterly Series 3, 31 (January, 1974) 1: 3-26.
(O)
(23)
Week 4
Capitalism and the Consequences of Commercial Markets
Lecture 7: Meandering Merchandise: Wildlife, Property and the Commodification of the
Natural World
Lecture 8: Enclosing the Commons: Frontiers, Forests, Fences, Fields, and Feces
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Reading (182 pp.)
 William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1983):82-170.
(88)
 Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2002): 39-70.
(31)
 Jim O’Brian, “The History of North America From the Standpoint of the Beaver,” Free
Spirits: Annals of the Insurgent Imagination, 1 (INFORMATION: HERE, 1982): 4554.(P)9)
 Jennifer Price, “Missed Connections: The Passenger Pigeon Extinction,” in Flight Maps:
Adventures with Nature in Modern America (New York: Basic Books, 1999): 1-55.
(54)
EVENING SCREENING: Confronting the Wilderness
Week 5
Dark Sweat, White Cotton: Ecology of Slave Labor
Lecture 9: Cruel Crops: Soil, Society, and the Civil War
Lecture 10: IN CLASS MIDTERM EXAMINATION
Reading (71 pp.)
 Karl Jacoby, “Slaves by Nature?: Domestic Animals and Human Slaves,” Slavery and
Abolition 15 (April 1994): 89-99.(P)
(10)
 Mart A. Stewart, “Rice, Water, and Power: Landscapes of Domination and Resistance in the
Low Country, 1790-1880,” Environmental History Review 15 (Fall 1991): 47-64.(P)
(17)
 Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2002): 71-115.
(44)
Week 6
Antebellum Attitudes: Agricultural Improvement,
Industrialization, and Resource Use
Lecture 11: Dunghill Democracy
Lecture 12: Countryside in the Cities: Manufactories, Machines, and the Metropolis
Reading (164 pp.)
 Stephen Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America (New
York: Hill and Wang, 2002): 1-15, 19-66, 69-108, 143-150, 166-169, 209-213.
(109)
 Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2002): 157-172.
(15)
 Raymond W. Sinclair, “Personal Boundaries in the Urban Environment: The Legal Attack on
Noise, 1865-1930,” Environmental Review 3 (1979). (P)
(15)
 Suellen M. Roy, “’Municipal Housekeeping’: The Role of Women in Improving Urban
Sanitation Practices, 1880-1917,” in Martin V. Melosi, ed., Pollution and Reform in
(25)
American Cities, 1870-1930 (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1980):173-198.(P)
5
EVENING SCREENING: To be announced
Week 7
Expeditions and Explorations: Representing Nature
Lecture 13: Sampling the Sublime: Romantic Reconnaissance, Realistic Resources
Lecture 14: Earth Science and Scientific Spectacle
Reading (182 pp.)
 Stephen J. Pyne, How the Canyon Became Grand: A Short History (New York: Penguin
Putnam Inc., 1998).
(182)
Week 8
“In God we Trusted, In Kansas we Busted”:
Technology, Mass Migrations, and Cultural Upheaval
Lecture 15: “This Machine Kills Fascists”: Dust Bowl Ditties and One Great Depression
Lecture 16: Dam it all: Hydroelectricity, Industrial Agriculture, and the Remaking of the
Countryside
Reading (150 pp. and listening to Guthrie CD)
 Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York: Hill
and Wang, 1995).
(113)
 “Roll on Columbia, Roll on,” “Mile an’ a half from th’ end of th’ line,” and “Columbia
(5)
Talkin’ Blues,” in Bill Murlin, ed., Woody Guthrie Roll on Columbia: The Columbia River
Collection (Bethlehem, Pennsylvania: Sing Out Publications, 1991): 14-15, 26-27, 56-58. (P)
 Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2002): 175-205.
(30)
 David W. Orr, “Biological Diversity, Agriculture, and the Liberal Arts,” Conservation
Biology 5 (September, 1991) 3: 268-270.(P)
(2)
EVENING SCREENING: The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936)
Week 9
Tipping the Scales (not just one’s rhetorical hat):
Beleaguered White Men: Conservation, Contradictions, and Community
Lecture 17: Environment, Politics, and Patriarchy
(In class screening of excerpts from “The Paper Tiger Project,” Donna Haraway)
Lecture 18: Aim High, Shout Loud: Conservation, Preservation, and Recreation
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Reading (208 pp.)
 Glenda Riley, Women and Nature: Saving the “Wild” West (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of
Nebraska Press, 1999): xi-xviii, 1-21, 43-113, 154-193
(137)
 Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2002): 138-156.
(18)
 Jennifer Price, “When Women Were Women, Men Were Men, and Birds Were Hats,” in
Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America (New York: Basic Books, 1999):
57-110.
(53)
Week 10
State Power, Class, and Coercive Conservation
Lecture 19: The Faraway Nearby: Localism, Nationalism, and Nature
Lecture 20: The Contested Commons: Natural Resource Management and National Parks
Reading (171 pp.)
 Louis Warren, The Hunter’s Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-Century
America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997): 1-172.
(171)
EVENING SCREENING: Talking with Thoreau.
Week 11
Plastic Flamingos and ’57 Chevies: Designing Suburban America
Lecture 25: Ranchers and Ranchettes: From Cattle to Carports
Lecture 26: Is Route 66 the Only Way?: National Parks and Consumer Culture
Reading (253 pp.)
 Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American
Environmentalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001): 1-118, 189-270.
(198)
 Jennifer Price, “A Brief Natural History of the Plastic Pink Flamingo,” in Flight Maps:
Adventures with Nature in Modern America (New York: Basic Books, 1999): 111-166. (55)
Week 12
Where the Wild Things Aren’t: Wilderness and Environmental Justice
Lecture 21: Subaltern Struggles: The Roots of Environmental Justice
Lecture 22: The Ecology of Exclusion
Reading ( pp.)
 The Wilderness Act of 1964 (excerpts) (O)
 The Civil Rights Act (excerpts) (O)
7




Martin Luther King, Jr., “Preface,” “A knock at midnight,” “Antidotes to Fear,” in Strength
to Love (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Fortress Press, 1963): 11-12, 58-68, 115-126.
Shel Silverstein, Lafcadio: The Lion Who Shot Back (New York: Harper & Row, 1963).(P)
(~30)
Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are (New York: Harper and Row, 1963).
(~40)
Patricia Nelson Limerick, Hoping Against History: Environmental Justice in the Twenty-first
Century,” in Kathryn M. Mutz, Gary C. Bryner, and Douglas S. Kenney, eds., Justice and
Natural Resources Concepts, Strategies, and Applications (Washington, D. C.: Island Press,
2002): 337-354. (P)
(17)
EVENING SCREENING: Deadly Deception
Week 13
Earth Day, Ecology, and the New Environmentalism
Lecture: Atomic Psalms: Population Bombs and Environmental Anxieties in a Nuclear Age
Lecture: The Politicization of Ecology
Reading (152 pp.)
 Rachel Carson, “Reporter at Large,” The New Yorker 38 (16 June 1962): 35-40; “Beetle
scare, spray planes, and dead wildlife,” Audubon 64 (November 1962): 318-323; “Poisoned
waters kill our fish and wildlife,” Audubon 64 (September 1962): 250-3; “Beyond the dreams
of the Borgias,” National Parks Magazine 36 (October 1962): 2, 4-7; “Rachel Carson
answers her critics,” Audubon 65 (September 1963): 262-5.
(24)
 Daniel J. Rohlf, “Six Biological Reasons Why the Endangered Species Act Doesn’t Work –
And What to Do About It,” Conservation Biology 5 (September 1991) 3:273-282. (P)
(9)
 Michael Smith, “Advertising the Atom,” in Michael Lacey, ed., Government and
Environmental Politics (Baltimore, Maryland: John Hopkins Press, 1989):233-262. (P) (29)
 Christopher Stone, “Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects,”
Southern California Law Review45 (1972): 450-501.
(51)
 Lamont C. Cole, “The Impending Emergence of Ecological Thought,” Bioscience 14 (1964)
7: 30-32. (P)
(3)
 Donald Worster, “Organic, Economic, and Chaotic Ecology,” in Carolyn Merchant, ed.,
Major Problems in American Environmental History (Lexington, Massachusetts: D. C. Heath
and Company, 1993): 465-479. (P)
(14)
 Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2002): 239-261.
(22)
EVENING SCREENING: Atomic Cafe
Week 14
The United States World Over: Globalized Environmentalism
Lecture 27: Globalization and its Discontents
Lecture 28: Our Common Future: Making Peace With the Planet
8
Reading (22 pp.)
 William Matthews, “Civilization and its Discontents,” in Christopher Merrill, ed., The
Forgotten Language: Contemporary Poets and Nature (Salt Lake City, Utah: Peregrine
Smith Books, 1991): 108-109. (P)
(2)
 William Greider, “’Citizen’ GE,” in Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith, The Case Against
the Global Economy and for a Turn Toward the Local (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books,
1996): 323-334. (P)
(11)
 Wendell Berry, “Conserving Communities,” in Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith, The
Case Against the Global Economy and for a Turn Toward the Local (San Francisco: Sierra
Club Books, 1996): 407-416.. (P)
(9)
Course requirements, grading, and assignments
1. Participation in lectures and discussion sections is required. (25% of the grade)
Attendance will count for 10%, and participation 15%. At some point during each lecture I
will distribute a 3x5 card for some kind of brief written exercise. For example, during the first
week of class I might ask you to jot down a working definition of nature. Cards will be
collected and though ungraded, will count towards determining lecture attendance and
participation grade. Please note that participation is more than just opening your mouth for
the sake of saying something. It is being prepared to engagingly discuss the assigned readings
and/or films, and relate them to the lectures. The success of the discussion section requires
that each participant articulate and be able to defend her / his ideas, as well as listen carefully
and respectfully to the questions, concerns, and ideas of others. To be clear, class
participation will be evaluated according to the following criteria:
 You will earn an “A” for consistently coming to section with questions about the
materials already in mind. You will have read the materials carefully and considered
them critically. In addition to raising issues for other members to discuss, you engage
other students in active dialogue by attentively listening to contrary opinions. Your
responses to comments on the table often carry discussion to a higher level. In short, you
will receive an “A” when you actively participate in the generation, discussion, exchange,
and analysis of ideas.
 You will earn a “B” for consistently completing the assigned readings on time, but
without identifying questions of your own to bring up in section. Though courteous and
articulate, you wait passively for others to raise interesting issues, and do not actively
engage the ideas of others. Instead, you express your ideas without relating the comments
toward the direction of the discussion. A “B” grade connotes occasional participation that
either frustrates group discussion through silence or irrelevance.
 You will earn a “C” for refusing to participate in discussion. If however, you are
clinically or painfully shy, or feel you may better participate in alternative ways, please
contact me. A grade lower than a “C” will be given to anyone that is consistently
unprepared, silent, absent, or unproductively disruptive.
9
2. Film Series Critiques. (15% of the grade)
You must attend 5 out of 7 evening film screenings and write 3 short (1-2 page) critiques.
Each paper should respond thoughtfully and analytically to one or more of the films. For
example, you might assess the presentation of ideas about, reactions to, and interactions with
the natural world. How are issues of power, gender, or labor dealt with in the films? What
assumptions does the film reveal or obscure? It may be helpful to place yourself in the shoes of
the filmmaker and ask questions about the use of color, focusing techniques, camera
movement, image framing, scene sequencing, and transitions are used to generate effect, story,
and argument. One film critique is due before the midterm, and another by week 10. I will
accept film critiques up until 5 PM on the Friday of even-numbered weeks (e.g. 6, 8, 10. . . ).
3. Midterm Exam (15% of the grade)
An in -class 50 minute exam during week 5 will cover the first 8 lectures and the evening
screening for week 4. The exam draws from lecture materials (including cultural
artifacts such as images, songs, and documents presented during lecture) and discussion
sections. The best way to prepare is to attend lectures and actively participate in section
dynamics.
4. Final Exam (20% of the grade)
The final exam will cover the entire semester, with an emphasis on weeks 9-13. The exam
includes short answer/identification, brief essay questions, and your choice of one out of three
longer essay questions. The longer essay question will be selected from a set of five essay
questions which will be distributed to you in advance.
5. One mid-length (4-6 page) essay. (15% of the grade)
For this essay you will critically analyze one of the books you read for class. You will be
expected to apply the historical, theoretical, and interpretive skills you have developed during
the semester to analyze the argument of the text. If the book was excerpted for class, you
should read the entire thing, as well as conduct research to place the book into a larger context
of historical inquiry. I will hand out a schedule for discussing potential research ideas,
selecting topics, submitting drafts, and due dates during week three. The following
remarks are intended to give you a sense for how papers will be graded. Note the emphasis on
four key topics: thesis, use of evidence and examples, organization, and writing skills:
 The Unsatisfactory Paper: The D or F paper either has no thesis at all or one that is
strikingly vague, broad, or uninteresting. There is little inclination that the writer understands
the material being presented. The paragraphs do not hold together; ideas do not develop from
sentence to sentence throughout the text. This paper usually repeats the same thoughts over
and again, perhaps in slightly different language but expressing the same views. Additionally,
the paper is often rife with mechanical faults, grammatical errors, and spelling mistakes.
 The C Paper: The C paper has a thesis, but it is often nebulous, uninteresting, or obvious. It
does not advance an argument that it is of value to debate. The thesis often hangs on personal
opinion, and rarely (if at all) uses evidence to justify, defend, or support that opinion. The C
paper usually contains mechanical flaws, errors in spelling and grammar, but note that a
paper without these flaws can still warrant a C.
 The B Paper: The author of the B paper knows exactly what s/he wants to say. It is well
organized, presents worthwhile and interesting ideas, and is supported with sound evidence in
a clear and convincing way. Whereas some of the sentences may not be elegant, they are
logical, and thought follows from thought. The paragraphs may be unwieldy, but for the
10
most part are organized around the central thesis. The spelling is good, the grammar is
precise, and the punctuation is accurate. Above all, the paper makes sense, does not contain
irrelevant or peripheral material, and keeps its promise of arguing for an explicit position.
 The A Paper: The A paper has all the qualities of the B paper, but in addition it is lively,
well paced, exciting, and possesses style. The entire work fits the thesis and demonstrates a
mind at work. While it may have a proofreading error or two, it is apparent that these errors
are the consequence of the normal accidents all writers encounter, and not the result of
neglect or indifference.
6. Creative Project (10% of the grade)
Wide open opportunity here. Past examples include photo essays, poems, a short play, song
lyrics, paintings, sculpture, interpretive dance, slide shows, cartoon compilations, a short
journal, personal environmental histories, etc. You will sign up for and present your project in
section (sign-up sheets circulating during week 2). The only limit is your imagination and two
requirements. The projects must be 1) historically authentic; and 2) relevant to the subject
matter of your chosen week. This is a chance for you to personalize your education, not joke
around. You will receive full credit is you meet the above criteria and zero credit if your
project is sloppy or half-hearted.
11
Methods in Environmental History
Fall Semester 2004
Instructor: Barry Ross Muchnick
Seminar Time and Location: Tuesday 1:00 -3:30p.m., Strout Rm. 128
Office Hours: Wednesday 2:00 – 3:00 and by appointment
Email office hours: barry.Muchnick@yale.edu
M, W, F (3-4 p.m.)
Though I check my email constantly throughout the week, I will set aside
specific blocks of time each week to respond to your submitted questions
and comments.
Course website: www.earthatlast/envhist/future.edu
Course Description
Environmental history has emerged over the past thirty years as a vital and exciting new way of
studying the past. If one of the most powerful narratives of environmental history is the
progressive triumph of human beings over the physical environment, then grasping how these
narratives are formed – what sources of evidence and data are used, which interpretive techniques
are at work, where certain ideological frameworks come from – can vastly improve our
understanding of contemporary resource issues. This interdisciplinary seminar will introduce and
engage some of the major debates in the field, discuss different analytical frameworks, and
evaluate types of traditional and innovative sources. We will examine the tools, techniques, and
tropes of environmental history not only by interrogating its prevailing assumptions and
predominant themes, but also by investigating its methods. Selected topics and activities include
exploring narrative strategies; deconstructing imagery on film and on canvas; using maps;
questioning material culture; reading the landscape; and developing scientific literacy.
We will direct our investigation of American environmental history with a set of three key
intersecting questions. First, how has the entire range of human activities relied on and interacted
with the natural world? In other words, in what ways do natural resources and phenomena shape
human lives in different regions? An equally pressing concern is how those dynamics are
predicated upon social-, racial-, or gender-mediated differences. Second, how are cultural and
political attitudes and beliefs influenced by changing perceptions, meanings, and interpretations
of nature? Finally, in what ways have humans reshaped the American landscape, and what are the
consequences of these alterations for natural and human communities, as well as the power
relations between them?
Each session will be divided between seminar style discussion and a workshop style practicum
that focuses on the craft of devising, planning, writing, and revising a work of history of your
own creation. We will consider the building blocks of historical research from an environmental
perspective by excavating the fundamentals of sound research methods, library skills, and writing
techniques.
Course Goals
The central purpose of this course is to improve your ability to think historically and conceptually
about nature – as a physical entity and a set of evolving ideas – from a perspective rooted in and
balanced between the arts, humanities, and science. Juggling scientific and technical concerns
with the ability to place events and ideas in their historical context is key to learning how to
synthesize factual details, account for discrepancies in sources, and applying this knowledge to
support your interpretation in a scholarly, persuasive manner.
1
Another major goal of this course is to introduce you to the interdisciplinary and specialized field
of environmental history as a way to improve your skills – orally and in writing – for inquiring
about, contextualizing, and analyzing a variety of media viewed from an environmental angle. By
examining different kinds of material that bridges the humanities, social sciences, and natural
sciences, you will also increase your level of exposure to and comfort in dealing with the
complexity, ambiguity, and uncertainty in human affairs and ecosystems.
A no less important goal of this seminar is to develop proficiency and technical skills in the art
and practice of writing environmental history. The Writing Practicum is a series of workshops
designed to lay the foundation for, build upon, and inhabit an intellectual and creative dwelling in
which you will be able to identify, engage, and write successful history about topics of your
choosing and interest.
Student Responsibilities
Ultimately, this educational experience is your own and I am here to help you make the most of
it. At its best, the study of history cuts across the grain of conventional wisdom, challenges staid
or stagnant interpretations, undermines cherished assumptions, and erodes stereotypes. At its
worst it reads like dense, undercooked pudding, tastes no better, and serves as a fact-finding
exercise. I organized the materials and structure of this course with this tension in mind.
Nevertheless, if something is not clear or you have ideas about how to improve a week’s theme, I
am responsive to constructive feedback, an important adaptability you too will develop in
response to feedback on your written work. I ask that you think seriously and creatively about
history as a means to debate the meanings of texts, to analyze the judgment of authors and artists,
and to engage the opinions of your peers.
Course Requirements, in brief
(grading schema and assignment details follow preliminary schedule)
Regular attendance and participation
Leading class discussion (Oral presentation and handout)
Four short (500 word) response papers
Annotated bibliography
Prospectus and thesis statement (3-4 pp.)
Research paper first draft
Final research paper (12-15 pp.)
Oral presentation (15 minute) of final research project
Readings (books and course packet)
Books
 William Rathje and Cullen Murphy, Rubbish: The Archaeology of Garbage (Tuscon,
Arizona: The University of Arizona Press, 2001).
 James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life (New
York: Doubleday, 1996, expanded and revised edition).
 Jules David Prown et al. Discovered Lands Invented Pasts: Transforming Visions of the
American West, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
 Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape Painting 1825-1875 (Oxford
University Press, 1980, 1995).
 Donald Worster, The Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1979).
2
 Arthur F. McEvoy, The Fisherman’s Problem: Ecology and Law in the California
Fisheries, 1850-1980 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
 Andrew Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Course Packet
 Available at your local photocopy center.
Recommended texts:
Good reference works for citation, style, and study design include The Chicago Manual of Style,
Kate Turabian’s A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, the MLA
Handbook, and W. C. Booth, G.G. Colomb, and J. M. Williams, The Craft of Research (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1995). Because this is a writing intensive course, I strongly
recommend you consult – or better yet, purchase – the following primers and guides on writing:
 William Strunk, Jr. and E. B. White, The Elements of Style 4th ed. (New York: Macmillan,
19__).
 William Zinsser, On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction 6th ed. (New
York: Harper Perennial, 1976, 1998).
For the grammatically challenged or linguistically adventurous, Karen Elizabeth Gordon’s The
Deluxe Transitive Vampire: The Ultimate Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager,
and the Doomed is a worthwhile reference and coffee table book.
Preliminary schedule
Readings followed by a bold (O) are available online. (P) connotes readings included in the
course packet.
WEEK 1
Doing Environmental History: Overview and Introduction
Reading (64 pp.)
 Donald Worster, “Appendix: Doing Environmental History,” in Donald Worster ed., The
Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1988): 289-307. (P)
(18)
 David Hackett Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (New
York: Harper Torchbooks, 1970): 307-318. (P)
(12)
 William Cronon, “The Uses of Environmental History,” Environmental History Review 17
(Fall 1993): 1-22. (P)
(22)
 William Cronon, “The View From Walden,” in Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and
the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983): 3-15. (P)
(12)
Writing Practicum
Towards choosing a topic
WEEK 2
Narrative and Environmental History I:
3
Declension, Determinism, and Contingency
Response paper # 1 due
Reading (154 pp.)
 William Cronon, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative,” The Journal of
American History 78 (March, 1992) 4: 1347-1376. (O)
(29)
 William Cronon, “Kennecott Journey: The Paths out of Town,” in William Cronon, George
Miles, and Jay Gitlin, eds., Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past (New
York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992):28-51. (P)
(23)
 François Furet, “From narrative history to problem-oriented history,” in François Furet
translated by Jonathan Mandelbaum, In the workshop of history (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1984):54-67. (P)
(13)
 John McPhee, “Atchafalaya,” in The Control of Nature (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux,
1983): 3-92. (P)
(89)
Writing Practicum
History workshop: Thinking historically with primary and secondary materials
WEEK 3
Narrative and Environmental History II:
The Reality Effect
Response paper # 2 due
Reading (74 pp.)
 Peter Mathiessen, Wildlife in America (New York: Penguin Books, 1959, 1987): 19—33. (P)
(14)
 Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams (New York: Warner Books, 1993): 3-7, 8-12, 23-27, 3842, 61-66, 102-106. (P)
(28)
 A. R. Louch, History as Narrative,” History and Theory 8 (1969) 1: 54-70.
(16)
 James West Davidson, “The New Narrative History: How New? How Narrative,” Reviews in
American History (September 1984):322-334. (P)
(10)
 Richard J. Evans, “The Future of History,: Prospect (October 1997): 1-6. (P)
(6)
Writing Practicum
Levels of Meaning / Point of View / Creative Liberties / Writing Techniques and Preferences
WEEK 4
Research Literacy and Library Skills
 During class time meet at Merrill Library for Research Workshop
WEEK 5
Inherited Ideas and the Natural Imagination: Telling Tales on Canvas
Annotated bibliography due
4
Reading (187 pp.)
 Jules David Prown et al. Discovered Lands Invented Pasts: Transforming Visions of the
American West, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992): Jules David Prown, xi-xv; Nancy
K. Anderson, “’Curious Historical Artistic Data’: Art History and Western American Art,” 136; William Cronon, “Telling Tales on Canvas: Landscapes of Frontier Change, 37-88;
Martha A. Sandweiss, “The Public Life of Western Art,” 117-135.
(108)
 Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape Painting 1825-1875 (Oxford
University Press, 1980, 1995): 137-200.
(63)
 Ann Shelby Blum, “Animal Pictures and Natural History,” in Picturing Nature: American
Nineteenth-Century Zoological Illustration (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University
Press, 1993): 3-19. (P)
(16)
Writing Practicum
Thinking about interpretation
WEEK 6
Through the Eye of the Beholder: Photography and Rephotography
Reading (156 pp. and view folio of images on class website)
 Marsha Peters and Bernard Mergen, “‘Doing the Rest:’ The Uses of Photographs in
American Studies,” American Quarterly XXIX (1977) 3: 280-303. (P)
(23)
 Mary Meagher and Douglas B. Houston, Yellowstone and the Biology of Time: Photographs
Across a Century (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998). Preface (xiiixiv), Introduction (7-12), Plates, (226-252), Appendix 2: Summary of Vegetation Changes
Shown by Photo Comparisons. (R)
(7 text)
 Estelle Jussim and Elizabeth Lindquist-Cock, “Landscape as Politics and Propaganda,” in
Landscape as Photograph (Yale University Press: New Haven, 1985): 137-149.(P)
(12)
 Eduardo Cadava, “Lapsus Imaginis: The Image in Ruins,” October Magazine (Spring 2001):
35-60. (P)
(25)
 E. H. Gombrich, “The Evidence of Images,” in Charles S. Singleton, ed., Interpretation:
Theory and Practice (Baltimore, Maryland: The John Hopkins Press, 1969): 35-56. (P) (21)
 Greg Mitman, “Wildlife Conservation Through a Wide-Angle Lens,” in Reel Nature:
America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University
Press, 1999): 85-108. (P)
(23)
 Ann Shelby Blum, “The Lens and the Line: Photography and Microscopy,” in Picturing
Nature: American Nineteenth-Century Zoological Illustration (Princeton, New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 1993): 265-317. (P)
(52)
 start reading Dust Bowl for next week!
Writing Practicum
Analyzing evidence
WEEK 7
Cartographic Controversy: How to read maps
Prospectus and thesis statement due
5
Reading ( 325 pp.)
 Mark Monmonier, How to Lie with Maps (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996):
Foreword xi-xii, 1-4, 184-186. (P)
(9)
 Gregory H. Nobles, “Straight Lines and Stability: Mapping the Political Order of the AngloAmerican Frontier,” The Journal of American History 80 (June, 1993) 1: 9-35. (O)
(26)
 J. B. Harley, “Maps, knowledge, and power,” in Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels, eds.
The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the symbolic representation, design and use of
past environments ( New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988): 277-312. (P)
(35)
Case Study
 Donald Worster, The Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1979). skim for argument
(243)
 Geoff Cunfer, “Causes of the Dust Bowl,” in Anne Kelly Knowles, ed., Past Time Past
Place: GIS for History (Redlands, California: ESRI, 2002): 93-105. (P)
(12)
Writing Practicum
Outlining options
WEEK 8
Flotsam and Jetsam: Gleaning the Material World
Reading (130 pp.)
 Jules David Prown, “Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and
Method,” Winterthur Portfolio 17 (Spring, 1982): 1-19. (P)
(18)
 William Rathje and Cullen Murphy, Rubbish: The Archaeology of Garbage (Tuscon,
Arizona: The University of Arizona Press, 2001).
(excerpts)
 “Recalling Things Forgotten: Archaeology and the American Artifact,” “I would have the
howse stronge in timber,” “the African American past,” and “small things forgotten,” in
James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life (New
York: Doubleday, 1996, expanded and revised edition): 1-27, 125-164, 212-252, 253-260.
(112)
Writing Practicum
Writing and responding to drafts
WEEK 9
Reading the Landscape
DRAFTS DUE
Reading (95pp.)
 D. W. Meinig, ed., The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1979): Introduction, 1-6; Peirce F. Lewis, “Axioms for Reading the
Landscapes: Some Guides to the American Scene,” 11-32; D. W. Meinig, “The Beholding
Eye: Ten Versions of the Same Scene,” 33-48; D. W. Meinig, “Symbolic Landscapes: Some
Idealizations of American Communities,” 164-192. (P)
(70)
 Stephen Daniels Denis and Cosgrove, “Introduction,” in Denis Cosgrove and Stephen
Daniels, eds. The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the symbolic representation, design
and use of past environments ( New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988): 1-10. (P) (10)
6
 D. M. J. S. Bowman, “Future eating and country keeping: what role has environmental (15)
history in the management of biodiversity,” Journal of Biography 28 (2001): 549-564.(O)
WEEK 10
Scientific Literacy
Reading (184 pp.)
 Andrew Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920 (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2000): 1-30, 63-163, 193-198.
(135)
 Yrjö Haila, “Measuring Nature: Quantitative Data in Field Biology,” in Adele E. Clarke and
Joan H. Fujimura, eds., The Right Tools for the Job: At Work in Twentieth-Century Life
Sciences (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992): 233-253. (P)
(20)
 Simon Levin, “The problem of pattern and scale in ecology,” Ecology 73 (1992) 6: 19431967. (P)
(24)
 A. B. Hill and I. D. Hill, Bradford Hill’s principles of medical statistics, 12th edn (London:
Edward Arnold, 1991): 272-277. (P)
(5)
Writing Practicum
From paper to presentation
WEEK 11
Tragic Myths: Revisting the Question of the Commons
Reading (286 pp.)
 Arthur F. McEvoy, The Fisherman’s Problem: Ecology and Law in the California Fisheries,
1850-1980 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 1-247.
(247)
 Garret Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (1968): 1243-1248. (P)
(6)
 Bonnie J. McCay and James M. Acheson, “Human Ecology of the Commons,” in Bonnie J.
McCay and James M. Acheson, eds., The Question of the Commons: The Culture and
Ecology of Communal Resources (Tuscon, Arizona: The University of Arizona Press, 1987):
1-34. (P)
(33)
WEEK 12
Student Presentations: Final Research Presentations
WEEK 13
Student Presentations: Final Research Presentations
FINAL PAPERS DUE AT BEGINNING OF CLASS
7
Course requirements, grading, and assignments
2. Participation and attendance (20% of the grade)
Participation in seminar discussions is required.
Attendance will count for 10%, and participation 15%. Please note that participation is more
than just opening your mouth for the sake of saying something. It is being prepared to
engagingly discuss the assigned readings. The success of the seminar requires that each
participant articulate and be able to defend her / his ideas, as well as listen carefully and
respectfully to the questions, concerns, and ideas of others.
Leading Discussion / class handout
Each week, one or two people (depending on class size) will be responsible for starting off
our classroom discussion. If you are paired with someone, the two of you will be expected to
collaborate. You are responsible for isolating key words, concepts, or images from the week’s
reading. You might address overarching questions or present materials / perspectives missing
from the class. Each person should speak for ONLY 5-7 minutes before opening the
conversation up to the seminar or moving on to a specific activity. If leading discussion
singly, your handout should be limited to one page. If presenting as a pair, your handout
should be a maximum of two pages. Plan to meet with me during office hours at least one
week in advance before you are scheduled to lead discussion. Leading discussion is
considered part of participation. Creativity is always encouraged. To be clear, class
participation will be evaluated according to the following criteria:
 You will earn an “A” for consistently coming to section with questions about the
materials already in mind. You will have read the materials carefully and considered
them critically. In addition to raising issues for other members to discuss, you engage
other students in active dialogue by attentively listening to contrary opinions. Your
responses to comments on the table often carry discussion to a higher level. In short, you
will receive an “A” when you actively participate in the generation, discussion, exchange,
and analysis of ideas.
 You will earn a “B” for consistently completing the assigned readings on time, but
without identifying questions of your own to bring up in section. Though courteous and
articulate, you wait passively for others to raise interesting issues, and do not actively
engage the ideas of others. Instead, you express your ideas without relating the comments
toward the direction of the discussion. A “B” grade connotes occasional participation that
either frustrates group discussion through silence or irrelevance.
 You will earn a “C” for refusing to participate in discussion. If however, you are
clinically or painfully shy, or feel you may better participate in alternative ways, please
contact me. A grade lower than a “C” will be given to anyone that is consistently
unprepared, silent, absent, or unproductively disruptive.
2. Four short (500 word) response papers (15% of the grade)
For week two and three of the semester, you are required to submit short response papers.
Due the Monday before class by 5 PM, these pieces are intended as a response to the
materials, and as such may be impressionistic or journalistic in style and tone. Engaging the
readings for the week, they may be reflective, exploratory, or personal. The remaining two
response papers, due any time before week 12, should directly address the central issues of
the week’s readings and must make an analytical argument about the texts. You might
8
address the author’s methods, question a work’s organization, unearth hidden assumptions, or
challenge the author’s conclusions.
3. Annotated Bibliography (5% of the grade)
Based on the topic you have selected, you should submit an annotated bibliography at the
beginning of week 5. Basically, this is an opportunity for you to identify primary materials
and secondary sources relevant to your project and begin to place them in conversation with
your central research questions and each other. I will look for a minimum of three primary
sources and between 8-12 secondary sources. Each source should stimulate a few sentences
(no more) regarding its relevance to you project, questions raised, or challenges posed.
4. Prospectus and thesis statement (5% of the grade)
At the beginning of class during week 7, you will hand in a brief (3-4) page historiographical
essay on your topic. In addition to providing a summary and synthesis of the secondary
reading you have completed to this point, you will describe in some detail the primary data
you are using and outline a preliminary sketch of your argument.
5. Research paper first draft (15% of the grade)
A first draft of your final project is due week 9.
6. Final research paper (30% of the grade)
This project is your chance to synthesize the material covered in this course through your
own engagement with the assigned readings and your own research. Papers should
incorporate one or more of the broader themes of the semester and integrate your chosen
topic with one or more of the assigned texts. In addition to using relevant secondary sources,
you are expected to incorporate primary historical data – diaries, newspapers, maps,
photographs, images, government reports – into the structure of your argument.
7. Oral presentation (10% of the grade)
Often the tangible products of work we do in an academic setting are restricted to papers and
other written assignments. This presentation is a way to parlay the sum of your significant
efforts over the course of the semester into a presentation intended for a broad audience.
Creativity is greatly encouraged, and multi-media materials are not only allowable, but
desirable. Each student will speak for 10-15 minutes, taking care to emphasize the methods
he /she used as they pertain to the discussion we have had throughout the semester. A
workshop during week 9 will prepare you in greater detail.
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Environment and Equity in North America
Spring Semester 2004
Instructor: Barry Ross Muchnick
Seminar Time and Location: Thursday, 1:00 – 3:30 p.m., 208 Woodbridge Hall
Office Hours: 2:00-3:00 M, W and by appointment
Email office hours: barry.Muchnick@yale.edu
M, W, F (3:00-4:00 p.m.)
Though I check my email constantly throughout the week, I will set aside
specific blocks of time each week to respond to your submitted questions and
comments.
Course Description
Environmental racism is not a recent phenomena. Nor is the concept of environmental justice a
new development. Though events in the 1980s sparked heated debate about the friction between
race, ethnicity, class, and the distribution of environmental costs and benefits, this course will
argue that environmental justice has a history in North America that originates not in the 1980s
but rather in the 1890s and earlier. We will explore the parallel and oftentimes divergent histories
of environmental and social justice movements by exploding the process whereby assumptions
about people and the natural world are created, naturalized, socialized, and adopted by political
movements. Among the topics we will explore are the expulsion of Native Americans from
public lands; the early phases of scientific racism; the role of gender and class conflict in defining
conservation policies; the rise of domestic democratic movements; the impoverishment of
agricultural communities; and the twin presence of corporations and the government in the realm
of pollution and public health. In addition to introducing the work of community organizers,
scholars, and activists, this seminar will examine the ways environmental justice broadly
construed can redefine our fundamental definitions of “nature,” “culture,” and “environment.”
In addition to writing short critical response papers and developing a major historical research
paper, you will participate in a service learning project which allows you to apply the insights,
perspectives, and skills you gain over the course of the semester to a contemporary environmental
and/or social justice issue. In each seminar we will divide our time between a rigorous and
challenging discussion of the weeks assigned materials and a writing/research workshop. A series
of workshops will guide you through the process of identifying a question, finding evidence,
articulating a thesis, and writing the research paper. Similarly, a schedule for the service learning
project will help spread the work over the semester.
Course Goals
One major purpose of this course is to introduce you to the interdisciplinary and specialized field
of environmental history as a way to improve your ability to think critically and historically.
Along the way you will develop skills – orally and in writing – for inquiring about,
contextualizing, and analyzing a variety of media viewed from an environmental angle. By
examining material that bridges the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, you will
also increase your level of exposure to and comfort in dealing with the complexity, ambiguity,
and uncertainty in human affairs and ecosystems. Not only will you learn about how facts, figures
and trends fit into major themes of North American history, but you will also learn how to think
critically and historically.
An equally important goal of this seminar is to develop proficiency and technical skills in the art
and practice of writing environmental history. Furthermore, you will have the opportunity to put
your work to work, so to speak, and use your talents as a historian to help your community.
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Student Responsibilities
Ultimately, this educational experience is your own and I am here to help you make the most of
it. At its best, the study of history cuts across the grain of conventional wisdom, challenges staid
or stagnant interpretations, undermines cherished assumptions, and erodes stereotypes. At its
worst it reads like dense, undercooked pudding, tastes no better, and serves as a fact-finding
exercise. I organized the materials and structure of this course with this tension in mind.
Nevertheless, if something is not clear or you have ideas about how to improve a week’s theme, I
am responsive to constructive feedback, an important adaptability you too will develop in
response to feedback on your written work. I ask that you think seriously and creatively about
history as a means to debate the meanings of texts, to analyze the judgment of authors and artists,
and to engage the opinions of your peers.
Course Requirements
(grading schema and assignment details follow preliminary schedule)
Attendance and participation
20%
Leading class discussion
(Oral presentation and handout)
Two short (4-5 pp.) critical response papers
20%
Service learning project
25%
Final research paper (12-15 pp.)
25%
Service learning project presentation
10%
100%
Required Readings (books and course packet)
Books

Robert D. Bullard, Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots
(Boston, Massachusetts: South End Press, 1993).

Karl Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature: Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the
Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making
of the National Parks (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

Temma Kaplan, Crazy for Democracy: Women in Grassroots Movements (New
York: Routledge, 1997).

Kathryn M. Mutz, Gary C. Bryner, and Douglas S. Kenney, eds., Justice and Natural
Resources: Concepts, Strategies, and Applications (Washington, D. C.: Island Press, 2002).

Jace Weaver, ed., Defending Mother Earth: Native American Perspectives on
Environmental Justice (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1996).

Richard White, Roots of Dependence: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change
among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, 1983).

Osha Gray Davidson, Broken Heartland: The Rise of America’s Rural Ghetto (Iowa
City: University of Iowa Press, 1996).
Course Packet: Available at your local photocopy store
Recommended texts:
Good reference works for citation, style, and study design include The Chicago Manual of Style,
Kate Turabian’s A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, the MLA
Handbook, and W. C. Booth, G.G. Colomb, and J. M. Williams, The Craft of Research (Chicago:
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University of Chicago Press, 1995). Because this is a writing intensive course, I strongly
recommend you consult – or better yet, purchase – the following primers and guides on writing:
 William Strunk, Jr. and E. B. White, The Elements of Style (INFORMATION, YEAR)
 William Zinsser, On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction 6th ed. (New
York: Harper Perennial, 1976, 1998).
For the grammatically challenged or linguistically adventurous, Karen Elizabeth Gordon’s The
Deluxe Transitive Vampire: The Ultimate Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager,
and the Doomed is a worthwhile reference and coffee table book.
Preliminary schedule
Readings followed by a bold (O) are available online. (P) connotes readings included in the
course packet.
WEEK 1
Red, White, and Blue – Please meet Green, Brown, and Black
Introduction and Overview
Reading (55 pp.)

Gerald Torres, “Foreword,” David H. Getches and David N. Pellow, “Beyond
‘Traditional’ Environmental Justice,” in Kathryn M. Mutz, Gary C. Bryner, and Douglas S.
Kenney, eds., Justice and Natural Resources: Concepts, Strategies, and Applications
(Washington, D. C.: Island Press, 2002): xxi-xxviii, 1-30.
(38)

Patricia Nelson Limerick, “Hoping Against History: Environmental Justice in the
Twenty-first Century,” in Kathryn M. Mutz, Gary C. Bryner, and Douglas S. Kenney, eds.,
Justice and Natural Resources: Concepts, Strategies, and Applications (Washington, D. C.:
Island Press, 2002): 337-354.
(17)
 Start reading Roots of Dependency for next week
Workshop: Writing Preferences and Intellectual Power: Writing your own ticket
WEEK 2
Inventing Otherness in Colonial America
Reading (153 pp.)
 Richard White, Roots of Dependence: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change
among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983):
16-146.
(130)
 Joyce Chaplin, “Natural Philosophy and an Early Racial Idiom in North America: Comparing
English and Indian Bodies,” William and Mary Quarterly 54 (January 1997): 229-252.(P)(29)
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Workshop: Sources and topics
WEEK 3
Scientism and Environmentalism
Select service learning topics and teams
Reading (143 pp.)
 Robert R. Berkhofer, Jr., The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from
Columbus to the Present (New York: Vintage Books): 1-70. (P)
(70)
 William Stanton, “An Universal Freckle” in The Leopard’s Spots: Scientific Attitudes Toward
Race in America, 1815-1859 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960): 1-14. (P)
(14)
 Josiah C, Nott and George R. Gliddon, Indigenous Races of the Earth; or New Chapters of
Ethnological Inquiry (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott and Company, 1857): 353-368, 399-401,
638-650. (P)
(30)
 Karl Jacoby, "Slaves by Nature? Domestic Animals and Human Slaves,” Slavery and
Abolition 15 (April 1994): 88-99. (P)
(11)
 Mart A. Stewart, “Rice, Water, and Power: Landscapes of Domination and Resistance in the
Low Country, 1790-1880,” Environmental History Review 15 (Fall 1991): 47-64. (P)
(17)
Workshop: Meetings to talk about topics
WEEK 4
Conservation Contradictions: Native People and National Parks
Response paper # 1 due on or before this date
Reading (203 pp)
 Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the
National Parks (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999): 1-139.
(139)
 Richard White, Roots of Dependency, 147-211.
(64)
Workshop: Historiography and secondary sources – How to frame your research
WEEK 5
Tribal Tribulations: Social and Natural Resources in the Twentieth Century
Annotated bibliography due
Reading (114 pp.)
 Jace Weaver, “Notes from a Miner’s Canary,” Donald Fixico, “The Struggle for Our Homes,”
Grace Thorpe, “Our Homes Are Not Dumps,” Justine Smith, “Custer Rides Again – This
Time on the Exxon Valdez: Mining Issues in Wisconsin,” Margaret Sam-Cromarty, “Family
Closeness: Will James Bay Be Only a Memory for My Grandchildren?,” Jace Weaver,
“Triangulated Power and the Environment” Tribes, the Federal Government, and the States,”
in Jace Weaver, ed., Defending Mother Earth: Native American Perspectives on
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
Environmental Justice (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1996): 1-28, 29-46, 47-58, 5971, 99-106,107-121.
(92)
Sarah Krakoff, “Tribal Sovereignty and Environmental Justice,” in Kathryn M. Mutz,
Gary C. Bryner, and Douglas S. Kenney, eds., Justice and Natural Resources: Concepts,
Strategies, and Applications (Washington, D. C.: Island Press, 2002):161-183.
(22)
Workshop: Arguments, analyses, and antecedents: positioning your paper
WEEK 6
Women, Whiteness, and Working Class Wilderness:
Love Canal and the Legality of Discrimination
Reading (164 pp.)
 Karl Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature: Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden
History of American Conservation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001): 1-48,
149-198.
(97)
 Dorceta E. Taylor, “Environmentalism and the Politics of Inclusion,” in Robert D. Bullard
ed., Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots (Boston, Massachusetts:
South End Press, 1993): 53-61.
(9)

James L. Wescoat Jr., Sarah Halvorson, Lisa Headington, and Jill Replogle, “Water,
Poverty, Equity, and Justice in Colorado,” in Kathryn M. Mutz, Gary C. Bryner, and Douglas
S. Kenney, eds., Justice and Natural Resources: Concepts, Strategies, and Applications
(Washington, D. C.: Island Press, 2002): 57-86.
(28)
 “Suburban Blight and Situation Comedy,” in Temma Kaplan, Crazy for Democracy: Women
in Grassroots Movements (New York: Routledge, 1997): 15-45 (P)
(30)
Workshop: Annotated Bibliography Due
WEEK 7
Home front Movements and Domestic Democracy
Prospectus and thesis statement due
Reading ( 132 pp.)
 Robert Gottlieb, “Reconstructing Environmentalism: Complex Movements, Diverse Roots,”
Environmental History Review 17 (1993) 4:1-20. (P)
(20)
 Dorceta E. Taylor, “American Environmentalism: The Role of Race, Class and Gender in
Shaping Activism, 1820-1995, Race, Gender & Class 5 (1997) 1: 16-62. (P)
(46)
 “Introduction: Women Prophets and the Struggle for Human Rights,” “Suburban Blight and
Situation Comedy,” “‘When it rains, I get mad and scared’: Women and Environmental
Racism,” “Homemaker Citizens and New Democratic Organizations,” “Conclusion: Social
Movements and Democratic Practices,” in Temma Kaplan, Crazy for Democracy: Women in
Grassroots Movements (New York: Routledge, 1997): 1-14, 47-72, 73-101, 179-189. (P) (36)
 Robert D. Bullard, “Introduction,” and “Anatomy of Environmental Racism and the
Environmental Justice Movement,” in Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the
Grassroots (Boston, Massachusetts: South End Press, 1993): 7-13, 15-39.
(30)
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Workshop: Re-envisioning and remembering the null hypothesis
WEEK 8
The Pastoral Ghetto
Response paper # 2 due on or before this date
Service learning project interim report due
Reading (183 pp.)
 Osha Gray Davidson, Broken Heartland: The Rise of America’s Rural Ghetto (Iowa City:
University of Iowa Press, 1996): 1-184.
(183)
Optional Reading
 Frederick H. Buttel and William L. Flinn, “The Interdependence of Rural and Urban
Environmental Problems in Advanced Capitalist Societies: Models of Linkage, “ Sociologia
Ruralis 17 (1977): 255-279. (P)
(24)
Workshop: Prospectus and Thesis Statement Due
WEEK 9
Industrial Exploitation, Urban Outrage, and the Politics of Pollution
Research paper drafts due
Reading ( 91 pp.)
 Martin V. Melosi, “Environmental Crisis in the City: The Relationship between
Industrialization and Urban Pollution,” in Martin V. Melosi, ed., Pollution and Reform in
American Cities, 1870-1930 (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1980, 3-34. (P) (33)
 Cynthia Hamilton, “Coping with Industrial Exploitation,” Robert W. Collin and William
Harris, Sr., “Race and Waste in Two Virginia Communities,” Conner Bailey, Charles E.
Faupel, and James H. Gundlach, “Environmental Politics in Alabama’s Blackbelt,” Marion
Moses, “Farmworkers and Pesticides,” in Robert D. Bullard, Confronting Environmental
Racism: Voices from the Grassroots (Boston, Massachusetts: South End Press, 1993):63-76,
93-106, 107-122, 161-178.
(58)
Workshop: Opening the Mind’s Window: Drafting and reiterating iteration
WEEK 10
The Political Ecology of Ethnicity
Reading (175 pp.)
 Richard Hansis, “A Political Ecology of Picking: Non-Timber Forest Products in the Pacific
Northwest,” Human Ecology 26 (1998) 1: 67-86. (P)
(19)
 Laura Pulido, “Sustainable Development at Ganados del Valle,” Devon Peña and Joseph
Gallegos, “Nature and Chicanos in Southern Colorado,” in Robert D. Bullard, Confronting
Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots (Boston, Massachusetts: South End
Press, 1993); 123-139, 141-160.
(36)
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

Eric K. Yamamoto and Jen-L W. Lyman, “Racializing Environmental Justice,” University of
Colorado Law Review 72 (Spring 2001): 311 – 360.
excerpts
Richard White, Roots of Dependency, 212-314.
(102)
WEEK 11
Justice for All: Wilderness and Civilization
Reading
 The Wilderness Act (excerpts)
 The Civil Rights Act (excerpts)
Final Draft Papers Due
Workshop: Reverse Outlining and the peer review
WEEK 12
Working the World: Corporations, the State, and Subaltern Response to Globalization
Reading (125 pp.)
 Steve Marquardt, “Green Havoc: Panama Disease, Environmental Change, and Labor Process
in the Central American Banana Industry, American Historical Review 106 (February 2001)
1:49-80. (P)
(31)
 Nancy J. Jacobs, “The Great Bophuthatatswana Donkey Massacre: Discourse on the Ass and
the Politics of Class and Grass,” American Historical Review 106 (April 2001) 2: 485-507.
(O)
(22)
 Ramanchandra Guha, “A Sociology of Domination and Resistance,” “Scientific Forestry and
Social Change,” and “Rebellion as Confrontation,” in Ramanchandra Guha ed., The Unquiet
Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya rev. ed. (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2000): 1-8, 35-61, 99-137. (P)
(72)
WEEK 13
Re-envisioning Environmentalism: Social Justice and Environmental Equity
Reading (35 pp.)
 Giovanna Di Chiro, “Nature as Community: The Convergence of Environment and Social
Justice,” in William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature
(W. W. Norton & Company, 1996): 298-320. (P)
(22)
 Alan Taylor, Unnatural Inequalities: Social and Environmental Histories,” Environmental
History (YEAR): 6-19. (P)
(13)
FINAL PAPERS DUE AT THE BEGINNING OF CLASS
SERVICE LEARNING REPORT DUE
Course requirements, grading, and assignments
3. Attendance and participation (20% of the grade)
Attendance will count for 10%, and participation 15%. You are expected to attend all seminar
meetings and arrive prepared to engage with the readings for that week. Additionally, there
will be several in-class writing assignments, ranging from your response to the assigned texts
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to personal reflections on the course material. Please note that participation is more than just
opening your mouth for the sake of saying something. It is being prepared to engagingly
discuss the assigned readings. The success of the seminar requires that each participant
articulate and be able to defend her / his ideas, as well as listen carefully and respectfully to
the questions, concerns, and ideas of others.
Leading Discussion / class handout
Each week, one or two people (depending on class size) will be responsible for starting off
our classroom discussion. If you are paired with someone, the two of you will be expected to
collaborate. You are responsible for isolating key words, concepts, or images from the week’s
reading. You might address overarching questions or present materials / perspectives missing
from the class. Each person should speak for ONLY 5-7 minutes before opening the
conversation up to the seminar or moving on to a specific activity. If leading discussion
singly, your handout should be limited to one page. If presenting as a pair, your handout
should be a maximum of two pages. Plan to meet with me during office hours at least one
week in advance before you are scheduled to lead discussion. Leading discussion is
considered part of participation. Creativity is always encouraged. To be clear, class
participation will be evaluated according to the following criteria:
 You will earn an “A” for consistently coming to section with questions about the
materials already in mind. You will have read the materials carefully and considered
them critically. In addition to raising issues for other members to discuss, you engage
other students in active dialogue by attentively listening to contrary opinions. Your
responses to comments on the table often carry discussion to a higher level. In short, you
will receive an “A” when you actively participate in the generation, discussion, exchange,
and analysis of ideas.
 You will earn a “B” for consistently completing the assigned readings on time, but
without identifying questions of your own to bring up in section. Though courteous and
articulate, you wait passively for others to raise interesting issues, and do not actively
engage the ideas of others. Instead, you express your ideas without relating the comments
toward the direction of the discussion. A “B” grade connotes occasional participation that
either frustrates group discussion through silence or irrelevance.
 You will earn a “C” for refusing to participate in discussion. If however, you are
clinically or painfully shy, or feel you may better participate in alternative ways, please
contact me. A grade lower than a “C” will be given to anyone that is consistently
unprepared, silent, absent, or unproductively disruptive.
2. Two short (4-5 pp.) response papers (20% of the grade)
In each paper you will critically analyze the major reading for a given week. One paper is due
before week 4, and the other is due before week eight. For both papers, you are strongly
encouraged to incorporate other readings, discussions, and experiences. Remember, these
pieces are thesis driven. The goal is to analyze, not to summarize. It is important to use
concrete examples and evidence to support the answer to a question you pose about the
materials. I am interested in your interpretation and response to historical scholarship in
general, and in particular to your chosen texts.
3. Service learning project (30%)
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This project enables you to synthesize the material learned in this course through an
application of your own research on behalf of a community or campus partner. Together with
a small team of you peers, you will provide information and analysis on a particular
environmental justice issue for a local non-profit organization, working educational farm, or a
campus organization. All projects will involve substantial, in-depth research, writing and in
some cases, technical (mapping or GIS work) skills. You will select your project from a list
of potential topics / partnerships and work on it all term along with your teammates and the
organization representative. I will provide more details on this assignment later in the term,
but here are some preliminary deadlines and requirements.
 WEEK 3: select topics and teams
 WEEK 8: Interim progress report (2-3 pp.) due to partner and me
 WEEK 13: Final materials due to partner and me
 Public presentation of each team’s work during exam week
4. Final research paper (30% of the grade)
A research paper is a work in progress. Accordingly, the final paper is best understood as a
series of steps designed not only to create the finest possible finished product but also to
highlight the importance of the writing process. Papers should incorporate one or more of the
broader themes of the semester and integrate your chosen topic with one or more of the
assigned texts. In addition to using relevant secondary sources, you are expected to
incorporate primary historical data – diaries, newspapers, maps, photographs, images,
government reports – into the structure of your argument. The research paper is broken down
into stages to reduce end-of-term-overload and
 Annotated Bibliography (5%)
Based on the topic you have selected, you should submit an annotated bibliography at the
beginning of week 5. Basically, this is an opportunity for you to identify primary
materials and secondary sources relevant to your project and begin to place them in
conversation with your central research questions and each other. I will look for a
minimum of three primary sources and between 8-12 secondary sources. Each source
should stimulate a few sentences (no more) regarding its relevance to you project,
questions raised, or challenges posed.
 Prospectus and thesis statement (5%)
At the beginning of class during week 7, you will hand in a brief (3-4) page
historiographical essay on your topic. In addition to providing a summary and synthesis
of the secondary reading you have completed to this point, you will describe in some
detail the primary data you are using and outline a preliminary sketch of your argument.
 Research paper first draft (10%)
A first draft of your final project is due week 9.
 Final draft (10%)
Due at the beginning of class during week 11
7. Service learning project presentation (10% of the grade)
Often the tangible products of work we do in an academic setting are restricted to papers and
other written assignments. This presentation is a way to parlay the sum of your significant
efforts over the course of the semester into a presentation intended for a broad audience.
Creativity is greatly encouraged, and multi-media materials are not only allowable, but
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desirable. Each team will speak for roughly 20 minutes, taking care to contextualize the
research agenda within the body of literature and praxis we have covered during the semester.
Your peers, the partners, and I will provide feedback on the presentation.
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Routes of Travel: Travel Narratives and Environmental History
Fall Semester 2003
Barry Ross Muchnick
Seminar Time and Location: Wednesday, 1:00 – 3:30 p.m., 028 Leyland Place
Office Hours: 2-3 M, W and by appointment
Email office hours: barry.Muchnick@yale.edu
M, W, F (3-4 p.m.)
Though I check my email constantly throughout the week, I will set aside
specific blocks of time each week to respond to your submitted questions and
comments.
Course Description
You will embark on several journeys during the course of the semester. First, you will travel back
in time through hundreds of years of North American landscape, encountering drastically
different ecologies, perspectives, and styles of writing and recording events. Along the way you
will encounter significant moments in American history, as well as the ideological underpinnings
of many widely-held assumptions about human and animal migrations. Second, you will journey
through an intellectual terrain of changing methods that travelers (and historians) have used to
understand, investigate, and interpret both past and present environments.
We will explore the difference between “rootedness” and routedness” in terms of the human
relationship to the natural world, and unpack the structural and technical challenges of recording
and re-telling a linear expedition in narrative episodes. To understand the history of transcontinental migration is to grasp the history of how notions of region, nature, mobility,
technology, transportation, and literature intersect and influence records of reality. Through
written projects and oral presentations you will explore the legacy of cultural and environmental
history on your own perceptions and patterns.
Student Responsibilities
Ultimately, this educational experience is your own and I am here to help you make the
most of it. At its best, the study of history cuts across the grain of conventional wisdom,
challenges staid or stagnant interpretations, undermines cherished assumptions, and erodes
stereotypes. At its worst it reads like dense, undercooked pudding, tastes no better, and serves as a
fact-finding exercise. I organized the materials and structure of this course with this tension in
mind. Nevertheless, if something is not clear or you have ideas about how to improve a week’s
theme, I am responsive to constructive feedback, an important adaptability you too will develop
in response to feedback on your written work. I ask that you think seriously and creatively about
history as a means to debate the meanings of texts, to analyze the judgment of authors and artists,
and to engage the opinions of your peers.
I ask that you think creatively and seriously about the content of your writing. Your
papers will be evaluated for the quality, concision, and poignancy of your prose as well as the
range and depth of your thought. This assignment is your opportunity to engage, challenge,
stretch, and incorporate or otherwise converse with the materials in this course as well as your
own experience.
Please be forewarned that late essays will be marked down ½ grade for each day after the
due date unless previous arrangements have been made at least one week in advance.
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Course Requirements, in brief
(grading schema and assignment details follow preliminary schedule)
Regular attendance and participation (seminar and screenings)
Leading class discussion (Oral presentation and handout)
Ten (1 page) response papers
Mid –term essay (5-7 pp.)
Final research paper (15-17 pp)
Readings (books and course packet)
Books
 Cabeza De Vaca, Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America, translated by Cyclone
Covey (Albuquerque, New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press, 1983).
 Sarah Kemble Knight, The Journal of Madam Knight with an introductory note by George
Parker Winship (New York: Peter Smith, 1704, 1935).
 Mark Van Doren, ed., Travels of William Bartram (Toronto, Ontario: General Publishing
Company, 1791, 1928).
 Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (New York: Verso, 2001).
 John Mack Faragher, Women and Men on the Overland Trail (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale
University Press, 1979).
 Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997).
 John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America (New York: Bantam Books,
1962).
 William Least Heat-Moon, River-Horse: The Logbook of a boat across America (New York:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999).
 Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild (New York: Villard Books, 1996).
 Scott Russell Sanders, Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World (Boston,
Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1993).
Course Packet: Available at your local photocopy store
Preliminary Schedule
Readings followed by a bold (O) are available online. (P) connotes readings included in the
course packet.
WEEK 1
Cardinal Directions: Space, Place, and the Ecology of Travel
 No reading. Course overview and objectives; assignments and activities; format and
requirements.
WEEK 2
Arrivals and Departures: Bipedal Encounters and Observations of the “Other”
Reading (194 pp.)
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 Cabeza De Vaca, Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America, translated by Cylclone
Covey (Albuquerque, New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press, 1983): 1-143.
(143)
 Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (New York: Verso, 2001): 1-13, 31-44.
 Jennifer L. Morgan, “’Some could Suckle over Their Shoulder’: Male Travelers, Female
(26)
Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology,” William and Mary Quarterly LIV (January
1997) 1: 167-192. (P)
(25)
WEEK 3
Journal Joust:
Economy and Ethnography on the Road in the Eighteenth Century
Reading ( pp.)
 Sarah Kemble Knight, The Journal of Madam Knight with an introductory note by George
Parker Winship (New York: Peter Smith, 1704, 1935). entire
(70 small pages~~ 40)
 Mark Van Doren, ed., Travels of William Bartram (Toronto, Ontario: General Publishing
Company, 1791, 1928): 1-27, 64-69, 80-99, 112-153, 380-406.
(118)
WEEK 4
Philosophical Excursions
Evening Screening: Winged Migrations
Reading ( pp.)
 William Hazlitt, “On Going on a Journey,” in George Goodchild, ed., The Lore of the
Wanderer: An Open-Air Anthology (New York, Dutton, [1821], 1915): (P)
PAGES
 Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (New York: Verso, 2001): 104-132, 148168.
(48)
 Henry David Thoreau, “Walking” (P)
WEEK 5
Life on the Trail and Urban Outings: Survival and Society En Route
Reading (145 pp.)
 Hans Huth, “The Poetry of Traveling,” in Nature and the American: Three Centuries of
Changing Attitudes (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1957): 71-86. (P)
(15)
 John Mack Faragher, Women and Men on the Overland Trail (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale
University Press, 1979): 1-87, 144-187.
(130)
WEEK 6
Viewing Nature Through a Window: Technology and Representation
Mid – term essay due in class
Evening Screening: Planes, Trains, and Automobiles
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Reading ( pp.)
 Linda Nash, “The Changing Experience of Nature: Historical Encounters With a Northwest
River,” Journal of American History 84 (2000) 4: 1600-1629. (P)
(29)
 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in
the 19th Century, translated by Anslem Hollo (New York: Urizen, 1979). (P)
excerpts
 Sarah H. Gordon, Union to Passage: How the Railroads Transformed American Life, 18291929 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996): (P)
excerpts
 Robert Louis Stevenson, “Across the Plains,” in Across the Plains with other Memories and
Essays (New York:, 1905):
(P)
PAGES
WEEK 7
Fictive Footsteps: Fiction, History, and the Metaphysics of Movement
Reading (356 pp.)
 Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997): 1-356
WEEK 8
Preservationist Pilgrimages
Reading (roughly 180 pp.)
 John Muir, A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company,
1916). (P)
excerpts
 Charles F. Lummis, A Tramp Across the Continent (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1892). (P)
excerpts
WEEK 9
Camping with Charley and Kerouac: Wilderness as Antidote to Mainstream Car
Culture
Reading ( 300+ pp.)
 John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America (New York: Bantam Books,
1962). 1-275.
 Jack Kerouac, On the Road (New York: Penguin Books, 1957). (P)
excerpts
 Jack Kerouac, Dharma Bums (New York: Viking Press, 1958). (P)
excerpts
WEEK 10
Variations on Trans-continental Travel
Reading (298 pp.)
 William Least Heat-Moon, River-Horse: The Logbook of a boat across America (New York:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999): 1-186, 331-342, 429-502.
(270)
 Edward Abbey, “Down the River with Henry Thoreau,” in Stephen Trimble, ed., Words
From the Land: Encounters with Natural History Writing (Reno, Nevada: University of
Nevada Press, 1995): 48-76. (P)
(28)
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WEEK 11
Bioregionalism and Belonging
Reading (188 pp.)

Wes Jackson, “Becoming Native to our Places,” in Becoming Native to this Place
(Washington D. C.: Counterpoint, 1996), 87-103. (P)

Scott Russell Sanders, Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World (Boston,
Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1993): 1-121, 173-194.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden (P)
excerpts
(16)
(142)
WEEK 12
The Journey’s End
Reading
 Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild (New York: Villard Books, 1996): 1-203.
WEEK 13
Topic of Choice
We will decide collectively by week 10 and I will have a supplementary reading
packet available
Final papers due in class
Course requirements, grading, and assignments
4. Participation and attendance (35% of the grade)
Attendance will count for 10%, participation 15%, and 10, one page response papers 10%.
Please note that participation is more than just opening your mouth for the sake of saying
something. It is being prepared to engagingly discuss the assigned readings. The success of
the seminar requires that each participant articulate and be able to defend her / his ideas, as
well as listen carefully and respectfully to the questions, concerns, and ideas of others.
 Leading Discussion / class handout
Each week, one or two people (depending on class size) will be responsible for starting
off our classroom discussion. If you are paired with someone, the two of you will be
expected to collaborate. You are responsible for isolating key words, concepts, or images
from the week’s reading. You might address overarching questions or present materials /
perspectives missing from the class. Each person should speak for ONLY 5-7 minutes
before opening the conversation up to the seminar or moving on to a specific activity. If
leading discussion singly, your handout should be limited to one page. If presenting as a
pair, your handout should be a maximum of two pages. Plan to meet with me during
office hours at least one week in advance before you are scheduled to lead discussion.
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Leading discussion is considered part of participation. Creativity is always encouraged.
To be clear, class participation will be evaluated according to the following criteria:
 You will earn an “A” for consistently coming to section with questions about the
materials already in mind. You will have read the materials carefully and considered
them critically. In addition to raising issues for other members to discuss, you engage
other students in active dialogue by attentively listening to contrary opinions. Your
responses to comments on the table often carry discussion to a higher level. In short, you
will receive an “A” when you actively participate in the generation, discussion, exchange,
and analysis of ideas.
 You will earn a “B” for consistently completing the assigned readings on time, but
without identifying questions of your own to bring up in section. Though courteous and
articulate, you wait passively for others to raise interesting issues, and do not actively
engage the ideas of others. Instead, you express your ideas without relating the comments
toward the direction of the discussion. A “B” grade connotes occasional participation that
either frustrates group discussion through silence or irrelevance.
 You will earn a “C” for refusing to participate in discussion. If however, you are
clinically or painfully shy, or feel you may better participate in alternative ways, please
contact me. A grade lower than a “C” will be given to anyone that is consistently
unprepared, silent, absent, or unproductively disruptive.
2. Ten (1 page) response papers (factored into participation grade)
Due the Tuesday before class by 5 PM, five of these pieces are intended to initiate a response
to the materials, and as such may be impressionistic or journalistic in style and tone.
Engaging the readings for the week, they may be reflective, exploratory, or personal.
Examples include thoughtful considerations of movement, travel, or daily technologies and
their effect on perceptions of and interactions with the natural world. Five of these papers are
due before week 6.The remaining five response papers, due any time up until and including
week 12, should directly address the central issues of the week’s readings and must make an
analytical argument about the texts. You might address the author’s methods, question a
work’s organization, unearth hidden assumptions, or challenge the author’s conclusions.
When you hand these in, you should tag them “Analytical response # ___” in the header. In
other words, you may skip two out of the 12 weeks for which writings are assigned. Though
the response papers will not be graded, I will return them to you with written comments and
factor them into the participation grade.
3. Mid – term essay (25% of the grade)
In contrast to the final research paper, which will involve extensive outside research, for this
essay you will be expected to develop a topic with me in advance (at least three weeks before
the paper’s due date), based in part on one or more of the readings from the first half of the
course. This is not a research paper, and you should not devote the time to it that a formal
research project might demand. Rather, it should be a somewhat speculative venture forth
into your own exploration of intellectual travel, grounded both in your experiences and the
materials from the course.
4. Final research paper (30% of the grade)
This project is your chance to synthesize the material covered in this course through your
own engagement with the assigned readings and your own research. Papers should
incorporate one or more of the broader themes of the semester and integrate your chosen
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topic with one or more of the assigned texts. In addition to using relevant secondary sources,
you are expected to incorporate primary historical data – diaries, newspapers, maps,
photographs, images, government reports – into the structure of your argument. You will try
understand how documents and data fit into a broader social, political, cultural, and
ecological context. We will schedule one-on-one and group meetings throughout the semester
well in advance of the due date.
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