Spring 2024 History UN2222 section 001

NATURE & POWER: ENV HIST NORTH AMERICA

NATURE & POWER: ENV HIST

Call Number 11628
Day & Time
Location
TR 10:10am-11:25am
517 Hamilton Hall
Points 4
Grading Mode Standard
Approvals Required None
Instructor Karl Jacoby
Type LECTURE
Method of Instruction In-Person
Course Description

Environmental history seeks to expand the customary framework of historical inquiry, challenging students to construct narratives of the past that incorporate not only human beings but also the natural world with which human life is intimately intertwined. As a result, environmental history places at center stage a wide range of previously overlooked historical actors such as plants, animals, and diseases. Moreover, by locating nature within human history, environmental history encourages its practitioners to rethink some of the fundamental categories through which our understanding of the natural world is expressed: wilderness and civilization, wild and tame, natural and artificial. For those interested in the study of ethnicity, environmental history casts into particularly sharp relief the ways in which the natural world can serve both to undermine and to reinforce the divisions within human societies. Although all human beings share profound biological similarities, they have nonetheless enjoyed unequal access to natural resources and to healthy environments—differences that have all-too-frequently been justified by depicting such conditions as “natural.”

Web Site Vergil
Department History
Enrollment 39 students (70 max) as of 2:04PM Wednesday, December 4, 2024
Subject History
Number UN2222
Section 001
Division Interfaculty
Section key 20241HIST2222W001