HISTORY 3327

American Environmental History

SPRING 2013

Professor Mark Stoll

Holden Hall 135   E-mail: mark.stoll@ttu.edu   Web: http://courses.ttu.edu/mstoll/
Office Hours: Tuesday 8:30-9:30 and Thursday 11:00-1:00 and by appointment

DESCRIPTION OF COURSE

Through lectures, readings, and film, the course explores two evolving topics in American history: the interrelationship and mutual impact of humans with the land and its plant and animal life; and cultural attitudes and thinking about nature and the environment.

TEXTS

Andrew Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison	Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra	Paul K. Conkin, Revolution Down on the Farm
Andrew Hurley, Environmental Inequalities	Bill McKibben, Eaarth

ASSIGNMENTS

17.5% ea.	Two midterm examinations
25%	Final examination
30%	Six book quizzes
10%	Analytical book review

Exams: Exams will be essay exams. Students will have an opportunity to demonstrate their knowledge of environmental history as well as to engage issues raised in lectures, discussions, and readings. The final exam will have the same format as midterms, with the addition of a cumulative section.

Book quizzes: Short quizzes given on the discussion day for each book will encourage students to have read the books and be ready to discuss them.

Papers: Course assignments include contains one analytical book review. For each review, students will select a book on environmental history from a bibliography on the professor’s Website. (Note that biographies, edited collections, and collections of essays are not appropriate for the assignment and should not be chosen for the book review.) Students may select another book if the professor approves it. Four to six pages long, the book review will have three sections:

1. A short summary (not a table of contents or outline) of the book’s contents; this should not take more than a paragraph or two.

2. An explanation of the book’s thesis, with a discussion of how the author has supported the thesis. The thesis is usually stated in a preface, introduction, or conclusion. If you’re not sure what a book’s thesis is, ask the professor for help.

3. Most important, an analysis of the book, including: how successful (or unsuccessful) it is in supporting its thesis, the author’s bias (i.e., his point of view), whether it agrees or disagrees with other class material, how it might be improved, how well it is written, and whether you agree with the book’s conclusions.

Papers will be printed in 12-point Times New Roman, double spaced, with 1" margins all around (or 1¼" right and left margins and 1" margins top and bottom). Do not add space between paragraphs (and if your word-processing program does so automatically, adjust the “Paragraph” settings). If you quote directly from the text of your book, cite your source by adding the page number or numbers in parentheses immediately after the quotation. For example:

The poet wrote, “That is the way the world ends” (42).
No footnotes or bibliography are necessary.

Attendance: The professor will call roll at the beginning of each class. Students with a perfect attendance record will receive 3 bonus points on their final grades. Students with more than two absences will receive 1.5 points off their final grades for each absence over two. The instructor will accept excuses in cases of true need if appropriately documented.

Plagiarism: Using text written by someone else (even in a close paraphrase) is academic dishonesty. It is strictly against university and departmental policy. Papers that have been plagiarized in whole or in part receive a 0 for the assignment, and a further penalty of 10 points will be deducted from the student’s final grade average.

Electronics in the Classroom: Because electronic devices distract both the student and other students around them, all electronic devices must be turned off during class time. This means no texting or other use of cell phones, and no laptops. Students using cell phones in class will be asked to leave and will be counted absent for the day. Laptops may be used only if the instructor gives permission, but students must use the computer for class-related activities only, such as note-taking. This means no e-mail, social media, Internet surfing, video watching, or other non-academic activities. If, during an exam, a student is seen using any electronic device, the exam will be collected immediately at that moment and receive a failing grade.

Note: Students who, because of a disabling condition, may require some special arrangements in order to meet course requirements should contact the instructor as soon as possible to make necessary accommodations. Students should present appropriate verification from the Disabled Students Services in the Dean of Students Office.

The professor reserves the right to change this syllabus at his discretion. Changes will be announced in class and posted on the course Website.

Required Bureaucratic Educational Jargon Section:

Expected Learning Outcomes: Upon successful completion of this course, the students will be able to (1) demonstrate expanded knowledge of the human condition and human cultures; (2) demonstrate knowledge of the origins and evolution of U.S. environmental problems and issues; (3) describe or identify major events, persons, and themes in American environmental history; (4) think critically about environmental issues.

Assessment of Expected Learning Outcomes: Student learning will be assessed quizzes and exams for outcome 1, 2, 3, and 4, and through essay questions and an analytical book review for outcome 4.

HISTORY 3327: SPRING 2012 COURSE SCHEDULE

Date	Assignment
Jan 17	Introduction
Jan 22	Were Indians environmentalists? Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang, 1983. Krech, Shepard. The Ecological Indian: Myth and History. New York: W.W. Norton, 1999. Mann, Charles C. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. New York: Knopf, 2005. Spence, Mark David. Dispossessing the Wilderness; Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. White, Richard. The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983.
Jan 24	Arrival of the Europeans: ecological imperialism Crosby, Alfred W. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1972. Crosby, Alfred W. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Jan 29	Reading: Andrew Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison
Jan 31	Slavery and the Southern environment Anderson, Virginia DeJohn. Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Cowdrey, Albert E. This Land, This South: An Environmental History. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983. Kirby, Jack Temple. Mockingbird Song: Ecological Landscapes of the South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. McNeill, John Robert. Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Silver, Timothy. A New Face on the Countryside: Indians, Colonists, and Slaves in the South Atlantic Forests, 1500-1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Stewart, Mart A. "What Nature Suffers to Groe": life, labor, and landscape on the Georgia coast, 1680-1920. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996.
Feb 5	New England and Agricultural Improvement Anderson, Virginia DeJohn. Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang, 1983. Donahue, Brian. The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Campanella, Thomas J. Republic of Shade: New England and the American Elm. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. Cumbler, John T. Reasonable Use: The People, the Environment, and the State, New England, 1790-1930. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Stoll, Steven. Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Hill & Wang, 2002.
Feb 7	American Romanticism Huth, Hans. Nature and the American: Three Centuries of Changing Attitudes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957. Judd, Richard William. The Untilled Garden: Natural History and the Spirit of Conservation in America, 1740-1840. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Nash, Roderick. Wilderness and the American Mind. 4th ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. Schmitt, Peter J. Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1969. Novak, Barbara. Nature and Culture: American Landscape Painting, 1825-1875. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. Huntley, Jen A. The Making of Yosemite: James Mason Hutchings and the Origin of America's Most Popular National Park. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011. Purchase, Eric. Out of Nowhere: Disaster and Tourism in the White Mountains. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Wulf, Andrea. Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation. New York: Knopf, 2011.
Feb 12	Reading: John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra
Feb 14	Industrialization and the rise of the cities Steinberg, Theodore. Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Greene, Ann Norton. Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008. McShane, Clay, and Joel A. Tarr. The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Melosi, Martin V. The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.
Feb 19	First Midterm Exam
Feb 21	Chicago and Urban environmental problems Melosi, Martin V. Precious Commodity: Providing Water for America's Cities. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011. Melosi, Martin V. Garbage in the Cities: Refuse, Reform, and the Environment: 1880-1980. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1981. Cronon, William. Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: Norton, 1991.
Feb 26	Snow
Feb 28	Urban air pollution and Transformation of the West: The Spanish, Russians, Mormons, and mining Stradling, David. Smokestacks and Progressives: Environmentalists, Engineers and Air Quality in America, 1881-1951. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Maysilles, Duncan. Ducktown Smoke: The Fight Over One of the South's Greatest Environmental Disasters. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. Worster, Donald. Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West. New York: Pantheon, 1985. DeBuys, William. Enchantment and Exploitation: The Life and Hard Times of a New Mexico Mountain Range. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1985. Morse, Kathryn. The Nature of Gold: An Environmental History of the Klondike Gold Rush. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003. Isenberg, Andrew C. Mining California: An Ecological History. New York: Hill & Wang, 2005.
Mar 5	Reading: Andrew Hurley, Environmental Inequalities
Mar 7	Transformation of the West: Settlement of the Plains and The Progressive Conservation Movement: First Calls for Conservation West, Elliott. The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, & the Rush to Colorado. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000. Lockwood, Jeffrey Alan. Locust: The Devastating Rise and Mysterious Disappearance of the Insect That Shaped the American Frontier. New York: Basic Books, 2004. Flores, Dan. Caprock Canyonlands: Journeys into the Heart of the Southern Plains. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. Worster, Donald. Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. Hays, Samuel P. Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890-1920. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959. Judd, Richard W. Common Lands, Common People: The Origins of Conservation in Northern New England. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. Judd, Richard William. The Untilled Garden: Natural History and the Spirit of Conservation in America, 1740-1840. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Reiger, John F. American Sportsmen and the Origins of Conservation. 3rd ed., rev. & expanded. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2001 [1975]. Coleman, Jon T. Vicious: Wolves and Men in America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.
Mar 9–17	Spring Break
Mar 19	The Progressive Conservation Movement: Conservation Achieved, cont. Book review due Righter, Robert W. The Battle over Hetch Hetchy: America's Most Controversial Dam and the Birth of Modern Environmentalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Runte, Alfred. National Parks: The American Experience. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979. Steen, Harold K. The U.S. Forest Service: A History. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976. Dunlap, Thomas R. Saving America's Wildlife. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. Jacoby, Karl. Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Fiege, Mark. Irrigated Eden: The Making of an Agricultural Landscape in the American West. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999. Hanson, Elizabeth. Animal Attractions: Nature on Display in American Zoos. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Kohlstedt, Sally Gregory. Teaching Children Science: Hands-on Nature Study in North America, 1890-1930. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Mar 21	After the Progressives: The 1920s Clements, Kendrick A. Hoover, Conservation, and Consumerism: Engineering the Good Life. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000.
Mar 26	The New Deal Maher, Neil M. Nature's New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Phillips, Sarah T. This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Sutter, Paul S. Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002. White, Richard. The Organic Machine. New York: Hill and Wang, 1995 Tobey, Ronald C. Saving the Prairies: The Life Cycle of the Founding School of American Plant Ecology, 1895–1955. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. Worster, Donald. Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Mar 28	New Forces, New Fears: Radiation Gutfreund, Owen D. Twentieth-Century Sprawl: Highways and the Reshaping of the American Landscape. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Ackland, Len. Making a Real Killing: Rocky Flats and the Nuclear West. Albuquerque, N.M.: University of New Mexico Press, 1999. Findlay, John M., and Bruce William Hevly. Atomic Frontier Days: Hanford and the American West. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011. Kirsch, Scott. Proving Grounds: Project Plowshare and the Unrealized Dream of Nuclear Earthmoving. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005.
Apr 2	Reading: Carson, Silent Spring
Apr 4	Dams and Wilderness Rome, Adam. The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pearson, Byron E. Still the Wild River Runs: Congress, the Sierra Club, and the Fight to Save Grand Canyon. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002. Reisner, Marc. Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water. New York: Viking Penguin, Inc., 1986. McCool, Daniel. River Republic: The Fall and Rise of America's Rivers. New York Columbia University Press, 2012. White, Richard. The Organic Machine. New York: Hill and Wang, 1995. Mitman, Gregg. Reel Nature: America's Romance with Wildlife on Film. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. Nash, Roderick. Wilderness and the American Mind. 4th ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. Hays, Samuel P. A History of Environmental Politics since 1945. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000. Paris, Leslie. Children's Nature: The Rise of the American Summer Camp. New York: New York University Press, 2008. Schrepfer, Susan. Nature's Altars: Mountains, Gender, and American Environmentalism. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2005. Buhs, Joshua Blu. The Fire Ant Wars: Nature, Science, and Public Policy in Twentieth-Century America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Harvey, Mark W.T. A Symbol of Wilderness: Echo Park and the American Conservation Movement. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994.
Apr 9	Second Midterm Exam
Apr 11	The 1960s: Johnson and the Great Society and Environmental Crisis Biggs, David A. Quagmire: Nation-Building and Nature in the Mekong Delta. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010. Connelly, Matthew James. Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008. Dewey, Scott Hamilton. Don't Breathe the Air: Air Pollution and U.S. Environmental Politics, 1945-1970. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2000. McWilliams, James E. American Pests: The Losing War on Insects from Colonial Times to DDT. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.
Apr 16	Cleaning the Air and Water Taylor, Joseph E. Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999. Milazzo, Paul Charles. Unlikely Environmentalists: Congress and Clean Water, 1955-1972. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006.
Apr 18	The 1970s: Nixon and the Environmental Decade Flippen, J. Brooks. Nixon and the Environment. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000.
Apr 23	Reading: Paul K. Conkin, Revolution Down on the Farm
Apr 25	The Carter Years: Toxic Waste, Nuclear Power, and Energy Crisis Murchison, Kenneth M. The Snail Darter Case: TVA versus the Endangered Species Act. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007. Walker, J. Samuel. Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Walker, J. Samuel. The Road to Yucca Mountain: The Development of Radioactive Waste Policy in the United States. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Blum, Elizabeth D. Love Canal Revisited : Race, Class, and Gender in Environmental Activism. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008.
Apr 30	The 1980s: Reagan and the End of an Bipartisan Environmentalism Widick, Richard. Trouble in the Forest: California's Redwood Timber Wars. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Short, C. Brandt. Ronald Reagan and the Public Lands: America's Conservation Debate, 1979- 1984. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1989.
May 2	Environmental Justice; International Solutions to Acid Rain and Ozone Depletion, but Not Global Warming Weart, Spencer R. The Discovery of Global Warming. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. Steinberg, Ted. Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Price, Jennifer. Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Allen, Barbara L. Uneasy Alchemy: Citizens and Experts in Louisiana's Chemical Corridor Disputes. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003. McGurty, Eileen Maura. Transforming Environmentalism: Warren County, PCBs, and the Origins of Environmental Justice. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2007. Langston, Nancy. Toxic Bodies: Hormone Disruptors and the Legacy of DES. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. Oreskes, Naomi, and Erik M. Conway. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010.
May 7	Reading: Bill McKibben, Eaarth
May 9	Thursday, 7:30 a.m. to 10:00 a.m.: FINAL EXAM