LECTURER: Bill Cronon, 5103 Humanities (also 443 Science Hall)
SECTION LEADERS: Rachel Boothby, Bill Cronon, Carly Griffith, Rebecca Summer
Bill’s Phone: 265-6023. This has an answering machine on which you can leave messages if I’m not in. No calls to my home or cell numbers, please. A much better way to contact me is via email at wcronon@wisc.edu, but please do this sparingly; I often receive dozens of emails per day and it’s all I can do (and sometimes quite a lot more!) to keep up with them. If you don’t hear back from me in a timely way, please just resend your email and try to forgive me for frequently getting swamped with the heavy volume of messages I receive! Please don’t send me texts on my cell or via Facebook.
Bill’s Website: Bill’s website is at www.williamcronon.net, and the page for this course can be found at www.williamcronon.net/courses/469/. Be sure to bookmark and keep track of this link, since the page will have many handouts and other materials helpful for students in the course (I will keep adding new content to it throughout the semester). If you happen to lose track of it, a Google search for “Cronon 469” should yield this page as the top hit. We’ll use this website as our main guide to the course, not Canvas or Learn@UW, though online readings will be accessible through Canvas.
Office Hours: 9:45am-11:45am Wednesdays, 5103 Humanities, first come first served. I would prefer to see you during regular hours, but will try to meet with you at other times if necessary. Please don’t just stop by my office if you need to see me at times other than my office hours, however; email me first and make an appointment. I generally meet with students for appointments in 443 Science Hall.
TA Offices: Email is the best way to get in touch with your section leader if you need to contact them. Rachel Boothby’s address is boothby@wisc.edu; Carly Griffith’s is cgriffith5@wisc.edu; and Rebecca Summer’s is rsummer@wisc.edu. All will circulate office hours at the first section meeting of the semester.
LECTURES will be held on Mondays and Wednesdays from 2:30-3:45pm in 3650 Humanities.
This course surveys the history of the United States and its colonial precursors from an unusual perspective: the evolution of the American landscape. Designed to complement existing courses on American environmental history and the history of the American West, it begins by orienting students to the geography of the North American continent, paying special attention to those features–geology, physiography, climate, vegetation, ecology–that have had the greatest influence on human lives in different regions. It also offers tools for interpreting landscape: different ways of periodizing the American past, different ways of mapping American space, different ways of narrating American historical geographical change. Once this basic introduction has been completed, the course explores elements of the national landscape at moments when they became prominent features of American life, tracing their stories forward in time. Eclectic rather than encyclopedic, it focuses on landscape elements and processes most likely to be helpful to students as they try to understand the world around them today.
For many years, my survey course on American Environmental History (History / Geography / Environmental Studies 460) asked students to write a “place paper” in which they select a place they know well and write an environmental history of that place. Although this has proven to be a wonderful assignment, and many students report having benefitted a great deal from it, I was never completely confident that a lecture course focusing mainly on systemic environmental change, ideas of nature, and environmental politics really gave students the tools they needed to write these place papers. This new course on “The Making of the American Landscape” (taught for the first time in 2016) is my solution to this pedagogical problem: by tracing the physical, cultural, economic, and material evolution of the nation’s different landscapes, it seeks to lay much firmer foundations on which student place papers can be constructed. With this in mind, I’ve moved this semester-long final assignment from 460 to 469, which means that the various resources I’ve developed for the place paper will now be available for this course.
Although 469 is every bit as much a survey of environmental history as 460 is–and the two courses are designed to complement each other with as little repetition as possible–469 focuses much more on the evolution of the material landscape and the various historical relationships that have shaped it over the long sweep of American history. As such, 469 places more emphasis on historical geography than 460 does, and it also spends more time teaching students concrete skills for “reading the landscape”: map reading; the use of natural features to understand settlement patterns; the growth of transportation networks; the evolving infrastructures of water supply, sewage, energy, and other such systems; the history of architectural construction and the built environment; and so on and on. By the time students complete this course, they should have in their personal toolkits a set of skills for interpreting landscapes that they can use for the rest of their lives. As such, the course is an intentional homage to Aldo Leopold’s famous Wildlife Ecology 118 course at the University of Wisconsin, first taught in 1939, in which reading the landscape was one of his chief goals.
“The Making of the American Landscape” offers students not just a survey of the changing landscapes of the United States from colonial times to the present, but also different ways of seeing those landscapes, so that our national history and geography come alive in new ways. By the end of the course, students will have learned to:
\1. Identify numerous features of the American landscapes and understand their origin and evolution;
\2. Think spatially and geographically about historical change;
\3. Improve their skills in reading maps, satellite photographs, and other cartographic documents;
\4. Do digital and archival research to trace the history of a particular American landscape;
\5. Learn to juxtapose sources and research questions to yield original historical interpretations;
\6. Apply alternative periodizations to changing landscapes in order to narrate their pasts;
\7. Synthesize historical geography at the national scale to interpret local landscape change;
\8. Learn to view landscape as the extraordinarily rich historical document in which they themselves live.
This syllabus provides a detailed outline of what we’ll be covering in the course. Please refer to it often as you plan your studying. Readings are moderately extensive but not difficult; they have been chosen as much as possible to be fun and thought-provoking as well as informative. (The approximate number of pages assigned each week appears in parentheses at the end of each week’s title in the syllabus.) Three required texts are available at the University Bookstore, and can also be ordered online. They are as follows (with call numbers):
Wayne C. Booth, et al., The Craft of Research, 4th edition, Q180.55 M4 B66 2016. (please read 4th edition)
William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, GF 504 N45 C76 2003 (any edition OK)
Christopher Wells, Car Country: An Environmental History, HE5623 W45 2014
I have reduced the number of required textbooks quite significantly in recent years in an effort to lower costs for students; at the same time, the number of online readings has increased, as you’ll see when you study the syllabus below. All required textbooks are available on reserve in Helen C. White library. You needn’t purchase all of them, and you should feel free to read library copies or share books with classmates if you prefer. Other readings are available as course handouts or via the Assignments or Files modules for our course on Canvas. *Please be sure you know how to access e-reserve readings on Canvas and find my website by the end of the first week of classes.*
This 4-credit class meets each week for a total of 4 class period hours over the fall semester: two 75-minute lectures plus one 50-minute discussion section, which together count as four contact hours according to UW-Madison’s credit hour policy. The course expects that students will work on course learning activities (reading, writing, research, studying, etc) for about 2 hours out of classroom for every class period, for an average of at least 8 hours of work outside of class per week. This syllabus includes detailed information about meeting times and expectations for student work.
Each of the two exams (which cover only their respective halves of the course) count for 20% of your grade; the first paper counts for 5%; the place paper for 30%; and section participation and exercises for the remaining 25%. For the written assignments, you’ll be expected to turn in your paper at the start of the lecture when it’s due (Monday, October 1 for the first paper, and Monday, November 19 for the final place paper). If you think you might need a short extension of these deadlines, please contact your section leader to explain your situation at least three days ahead of time. Late papers without an extension will be marked down by at least one third of a grade, and the markdown will become greater as your delay in turning in the assignment increases.
Please note in particular that we take section participation very seriously. Unexcused absences from section will negatively affect your grade, as will failure to participate in class discussion regularly. Learning how to talk intelligently and enthusiastically about significant subjects is actually one of the most important skills you can learn in college, and this course is a great place to work on that skill. We’ll be dealing with interesting readings about historical subjects that have important implications for our present and future, so it shouldn’t be hard for you to come to section with questions and comments you’d like to share with other members of the group. Try to make a special effort to get to know not just your section leader, but the other students in your section. We promise this will not only make the course more enjoyable, but will add a lot to what you learn as well.
There will be two exams, a midterm and a final, each covering their respective halves of the course and each counting for 20% of your grade. The final will occur on the last day of class, so we will *not* use our scheduled final exam slot on December 19.
This course has the graduate course attribute. Graduate students taking the course can fulfill its requirements by enrolling in the special 70-minute discussion section (301) that is taught by the professor and reserved for graduate students and Honors undergraduates, or by making special arrangements with the professor if that section does not fit their schedule. Graduate students are expected to attend lectures, participate actively in discussion section, take the regular examinations, and submit written papers that are significantly longer and more heavily researched than the written work of non-Honors undergraduates. Further details about length requirements appear in the section on Written Assignments below. Exams and papers written by graduate students will be graded by the professor.
This very brief initial writing assignment is due at the start of lecture on October 1. It asks you to use a printed satellite view from Google Maps (https://www.google.com/maps) or Bing Maps (https://www.bing.com/maps/) to illustrate a major theme or argument from Christopher Wells’ Car Country. The satellite view you select should be at least the size of a city block, and should ideally depicting some part of the place about which you’ll be writing your final paper (or, alternatively, a place in Madison or your home town). You should write a brief 1-2 page explanation of how the landscape feature you’ve chosen can be interpreted using historical-geographical arguments from Car Country (Honors and Grad students should write 3-4 pages). This assignment only counts for 5% of your grade because we don’t want you to get too stressed out about it. Its purpose is for you to exercise your map-reading skills in combination with your analysis of Car Country’s arguments to show us how well you can write a brief interpretive essay.
This is due at the beginning of lecture on Monday, November 19, and is intended to give you an opportunity actually to *do* landscape history yourself as a way of synthesizing what you’ve learned from the entire course. In it, you are to choose some place–either located in Madison or somewhere in the United States that you know well from your home or travels–and write a brief essay discussing your interpretation of some aspects of its landscape history, using the themes, tools, and perspectives we’ve studied in class. Because this is a relatively brief paper, you’ll need to think carefully about what parts of your chosen place you wish to explore in your essay: it is far better to discuss a few aspects well than many aspects superficially. Write a description or tell a story that will explain to the reader how this place came to have the shape and qualities it has today. You should think of this paper as an exercise in historical, geographical, and environmental interpretation, asking you to read a small patch of landscape as a document of past environmental change. Just as importantly, your place should illustrate one or more important themes drawn from the course as a whole, so please be careful to think carefully about which course themes can help you interpret the past of your place, and which aspects of your place can illustrate the themes of the course.
Since we’d like you to be thinking about this paper from the very start of the semester, we’d like to offer you some suggestions for the how best to approach it. *Remember that a key aspect of this assignment is for you to gain experience trying to read an actual landscape while comparing what you find in that place today with historical documents that will help you interpret how it was different in the past.* We fully understand that you don’t know enough to construct a complete or fully accurate narrative of environmental changes that have shaped your chosen place. What we’re looking for instead is that you take a long, careful look at the place and try to see it with unfamiliar eyes, taking nothing for granted but looking at everything you see there as if you’d never seen it before. Then ask how the things you see might have come to be there. The trick is to ask as many questions as you can about landscapes you ordinarily take for granted. Use materials from the readings and from the lectures to help you think about the kinds of questions you want to ask, and do the best job you can answering these questions using the evidence you can find on the ground.
To help you learn the research skills you’ll be using in investigating and writing about your place, a group of my graduate students and I created a special website on Learning Historical Research, designed especially for this place paper assignment, which I encourage you to explore in detail: www.williamcronon.net/researching/. It has many tips and suggestions that are likely to be helpful to you not just for this paper but for work you do in other courses as well. You are also strongly encouraged to read as early in the semester as you can the entirety of the classic book by Wayne Booth, Gregory Colomb, Joseph Williams, Joseph Bizup, and William T. Fitzgerald entitled The Craft of Research. Be sure to read the 4th edition, published in 2016, which has improved coverage of on-line digital research tools.
If you’re having trouble choosing a place to write about, consider these suggestions right here in Madison; most can easily be applied to other locations as well:
· Walk along a railroad track for a mile or more (the one behind the Kohl Center that has become a bike path west of the campus power plant might be a good choice) and think about its relation to the surrounding landscape. Ask how adjacent sites relate to the railroad, and how those relations may have changed with time. In what ways does the railroad divide the surrounding land, and in what ways does it connect it? How might these divisions and connections have changed with time?
· Spend an hour or two in a cemetery and see what you can learn from it as a historical document (Forest Hill and Resurrection cemeteries, on both sides of the Speedway, just beyond Madison’s West High School on Regent Street, are excellent for this exercise). What can you learn about the lives of those who are buried there: how long they lived, how they died, what their family relations were, etc.? What does the changing iconography of gravestones and monuments tell you about their attitudes toward life, death, and their place in the natural world? How does the physical form of the cemetery itself (as opposed to individual graves) reflect cultural attitudes toward nature? A group of UW-Madison graduate students produced a wonderful on-line guide to Forest Hill Cemetery that you can peruse here: foresthill.williamcronon.net. An excellent general guide to cemeteries is Douglas Keister’s Stories in Stone: A Field Guide to Cemetery Symbolism and Iconography, NB1800 K45 2004. There is a walking tour of Forest Hill Cemetery and other resources available at this link: www.cityofmadison.com/parks/find-a-park/cemetery/. And there are very detailed guides to the people buried in Madison’s two main cemeteries: Forest Hill Cemetery: A Biographical Guide to Forest Hill Cemetery and Bishops to Bootleggers: A Biographical Guide to Resurrection Cemetery. These are available for online download from the top of this page: foresthill.williamcronon.net/learn-more.
· Drive or bike west from the UW stadium along Regent Street, Speedway, and Mineral Point Road until you’re well out into the agricultural countryside (if you can, go as far as Pine Bluff, or even to the point where the road finally ends at Highway 78, which would be a round trip of 20-30 miles). (This is in fact the drive described in one of this course’s lectures entitled “A Path Out of Town.”) As you ride, look very closely at the changing spatial arrangement of streets, buildings, and settlement patterns. How do houses change? Look at their sizes, styles, presence or absence of garages and porches, nearness to neighboring houses, sizes of front and back yards, relation of residential and non-residential buildings, etc., etc. Look at the presence or absence of green space. As you drive west, you’re essentially moving through neighborhoods that were built in each succeeding decade of the twentieth century. The spatial changes you see directly reflect chronological changes in the history of Madison’s built environment and its relations to the surrounding landscape.
· Try comparing two different residential neighborhoods in Madison and writing a brief paper on the key differences you notice between them. The City of Madison’s Department of Planning & Development has put together a good series of walking tours you can take of historic neighborhoods in the city, easily accessed as downloadable documents from www.ci.madison.wi.us/planning/walkTour.html. You might try taking one or more of these tours, and then write about what you see along the way. Just be careful not to write a paper that simply reports what you learn from the tour booklet; be sure really to look carefully at what you see and write about the landscape itself, supplementing the guide with additional library research wherever possible.
· Walk to the end of Picnic Point and spend time looking at the skyline of Madison. Think about the different human elements that make up that skyline, and ask yourself how and when they might have come to be there. Then go examine those same elements close up and read what you can from their sites. You may benefit from exploring the very detailed prize-winning website and digital map for UW-Madison’s Lakeshore Nature Preserve, which includes a great deal of historical information at www.lakeshorepreserve.wisc.edu/.
Remember, the most important goal of this assignment is to look at a place, ask questions about it, and think about its past with reference to the historical and geographical phenomena you’ve learned about in this course. This is much harder when you’re worrying about it in the abstract than when you’re actually doing it. It really doesn’t matter what place you pick. You could literally go to anywhere in Madison or your hometown and take a random walk through a neighborhood, thinking about everything you see along the way, and write a great paper based on it.
We ask you to explore your place not just in the present, but in the past. Although you can partly do this by looking for remnants of the past in the place as it is today, you’ll also need to do significant archival research to locate old documents–newspapers, maps, travelers accounts, photographs, advertisements, and so on–that will give you insight into what your place was like in the past. For instance, looking at old photographs can be wonderfully suggestive about how your place has changed in the past.
If you’re writing about Madison, there are three excellent photographic histories of the city and the university on reserve at Helen C. White Library: David Mollenhoff’s Madison: A History of the Formative Years, F589 M157 M64 1982, 2003; Arthur Hove’s The University of Wisconsin: A Pictorial History, LD 6128 H68 1991; and Stuart Levitan’s Madison: The Illustrated Sesquicentennial History, Vol. 1, 1856-1931, F589 M157 L48 2006. There should be copies not just on reserve but in the non-circulating reference collection; multiple copies of Mollenhoff’s book are available in the UW libraries and the Wisconsin Historical Society Library as well. Even if you only spend half an hour looking through these, they could be extremely helpful to you, especially if you’re having trouble with the assignment. (These books are also an excellent source of images to get you thinking about the first assignment for the course.)
There are a number of ways you could learn more about your chosen place. The suggestions I’ve listed below relate mainly to Wisconsin places, but most would be equally well suited to other parts of the country as well. Many of these would likely be very helpful not just for the place paper, but for the first assignment too.
· Look at old photographs. The State Historical Society’s Iconographic Collection (located in the Archives on the 4th floor) has a vast collection of images of places from Wisconsin and elsewhere. Many of these images (though by no means all!) are now available for on-line search and access at www.wisconsinhistory.org/whi/.
· Look at a series of maps of your chosen place to see how it has changed over time. The Map Library on the 3rd floor of Science Hall can be very helpful here. Aerial photographs might also be very suggestive if they’re available; the Map Library has a large collection of these for different dates, especially for places in Wisconsin. Many maps of Wisconsin are available online via the Wisconsin Historical Society’s website at www.wisconsinhistory.org/Content.aspx?dsNav=N:1166.
· If you’ve chosen an urban place, try exploring the amazing collection of bird’s-eye views, most published during the nineteenth century, that have been digitized on the Library of Congress’s American Memory website. The URL for these is: memory.loc.gov/ammem/gmdhtml/gmdhome.html, with the bird’s-eye views under Panoramic Maps (as you’ll see, there are many other cool maps on the Library of Congress site as well!). Check under “Cities and Towns” and search for the place about which you’re writing, but don’t hesitate to explore other parts of the website as well. The American Memory website is an extraordinary source for digital documents: photos, maps, texts, almost anything you can think of. There’s a comparable collection of Wisconsin bird’s-eye views at https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Article/CS3337
· In the late 1920s or early 1930s, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources produced a remarkable series of Land Economic Inventory Maps which show the uses of land for every township in the state. You can read more about these maps at www.library.wisc.edu/steenbock/wisconsin-land-economic-inventory-the-bordner-survey-land-cover-maps/, and access the actual maps at uwdc.library.wisc.edu/collections/EcoNatRes/WILandInv under Land Economic Inventory.
· If you want to go even further back in time, you could look at the original land survey records of the 1830s and 1840s, getting a rough sense of what the land looked like when the first American surveyors came through to impose the grid system upon it. These maps, along with the original surveyors’ notes, are also now available on-line, so you can peruse them for places you know at libtext.library.wisc.edu/SurveyNotes/.
· Track the changing population of the place in the manuscript census, which is available for every year between 1840 and 1940 except 1890 (for which the census records were destroyed in a fire). Microfilms of the census for every state in the country are available at the Historical Society. These will tell you who lived in a place, their family relationships, their birth places, their occupations, etc. If you’re writing about a rural place in Wisconsin, you should also look at the manuscript records of the Agricultural Census, which give you a complete picture of the crops and animals raised on every farm in the state during the census years. These are in the Historical Society too, in the Archives on the 4th floor.
· If you’re studying an urban area, look at old city directories, which often list the residents and businesses of a community not just alphabetically but according to their street address. A directory enables you almost literally to walk down the same street in the past that you’ve walked down in the present, seeing how the people and businesses have changed in the interval. The Historical Society has a large collection of these for most cities in Wisconsin and many in other parts of the country as well.
· Look at old county atlases or histories for your place. These were published for many counties in the Midwest primarily in the 1870s through the 1890s, so can give you lots of interesting information about your place during the nineteenth century. The Historical Society has an excellent collection, and a number of them are available online.
And of course: talk with people who have lived in your place for a long time.
To document the research in your place paper, please use a consistent citation format. Our preference is for you to use the Chicago Manual of Style, which is generally the standard style guide for books and journals published in the humanities and many of the social sciences. (You may also be familiar with the abridged version of the Chicago Manual that has appeared for many years as Kate L. Turabian's A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, edited by Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, Joseph M. Williams, and the University of Chicago Press Editorial Staff [University of Chicago Press, 2013]).
You can find summary guides to citation formats using the style of the Chicago Manual on the following websites:
https://writing.wisc.edu/Handbook/DocChicago.html>
https://writing.wisc.edu/Handbook/PDF/chicago_turabian_uwmadison_writingcenter_june2013.pdf
https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/chicago_manual_17th_edition/chicago_manual_of_style_17th_edition.html
The full Chicago Manual of Style can also be accessed online via UW-Madison's Library portal. It should be able to answer most questions you may have about how to cite a particular document, especially Chapter 14 on "Notes and Bibliography."
It is very important for you to keep track of, acknowledge, and be respectful of the sources you use in writing your place paper. The Web has made it so easy for students to copy and paste information they find online that it may be tempting for you simply to paste some of this material into what we write. Don’t ever do this. Plagiarism is a serious ethical infraction–pretending that someone elses work is your own–and will get you into serious trouble if it’s discovered. To learn more about how to avoid plagiarism, consult these online resources: UW-Madison Writing Center: writing.wisc.edu/Handbook/QuotingSources.html Yale Writing Center: writing.yalecollege.yale.edu/advice-students/using-sources/understanding-and-avoiding-plagiarism
The History Department operates its History Lab as resource center where experts (PhD students) will assist you with your history papers. No matter your stage in the writing process–choosing a topic, conducting research, composing a thesis, outlining your argument, revising your drafts–the History Lab staff is here, along with your professors and teaching assistants, to help you sharpen your skills and become a more successful writer. Sign up for a one-on-one consultation online: http://go.wisc.edu/hlab. It’s best to do this early; don’t wait until just before an assignment is due.
Because the majority of lectures take place in a darkened room with PowerPoint presentations, because bright laptop screens are distracting to other students in this environment, and because the temptation to multitask has become so enormous now that wireless connections to the Internet are available in most lecture halls, *the use of laptop computers, cell phones, or other screen-based devices is NOT permitted during lectures or discussion sections.* If you have a medical reason for needing to use a laptop or other screen-based device that has been authorized by the McBurney Center, please let us know so we can discuss strategies for your use of these devices that will be minimally disruptive to other students.
If you are a McBurney student who needs any special accommodations for the course, please make sure your section leader is aware of your situation as early in the semester as possible, and well in advance of any examinations for which accommodations will be required.
IMPORTANT: In the following outline, lecture topics are arranged into thematic “weeks” that do NOT correspond with ordinary calendar weeks, so don’t be confused about this. At least prior to the mid-term exam, most “weeks” consist of a Wednesday lecture, the following Monday lecture, and the following section; this way, all discussion sections will be assured of having heard the same lectures and done the same readings by the time they meet. Occasionally, one of these thematic “weeks” may involve a number of lectures less than or more than two. The parenthetic number after each week’s title is the approximate number of pages of reading assigned for that week.
Sept 5: The Portage: A Small Place in Large Contexts
Sept 10: What Is Landscape and Why Should We Care About it?
SECTION: Sept 11-13: Introductions, first thoughts on final Place Paper projects
William Cronon, “Landscape and Home: Environmental Traditions in Wisconsin,” Wisconsin Magazine of History (Winter 1990-91), 83-105. (Downloadable from my website here and on our course Canvas page)
You should also start reading the numerous short texts assigned for our sections on Sept 18-20.
Sept 12: Exploring Past Landscapes: An Introduction to Your Place Paper…and to UW-Madison Libraries
Sept 17: An Introduction to North America
SECTION: Sept 18-20: Campus Tours
Explore the “Learning Historical Research” website at www.williamcronon.net/researching/, especially the “How to Read a Landscape” web page at www.williamcronon.net/researching/landscapes.htm.
Nadia Wheatley & Donna Rawlins, My Place (1989), 1-50 (Canvas: an Australian children’s book that is highly relevant to this course and well worth reading carefully)
Eric Sloane, “Fences and Walls,” Our Vanishing Landscape (1955), 27-35. (Canvas)
Grady Clay, “Breaks,” in Close-Up: How to Read the American City (1973), 38-52. (Canvas)
Virginia & Lee McAlester, “Looking at American Houses: Style,” A Field Guide to American Houses (1984), 4-16. (Canvas)
May Theilgaard Watts, “Camp Sites, Fires, and Cud Chewers, Or, How the Upland Forest Changes from Illinois to Wisconsin,” Reading the Landscape (1957), 109-26. (Canvas)
Sept 19: Online Cartography: Tools for Landscape Reading, Past and Present
Sept 24: Mapping the Continent: A Tour of Cartographic History
SECTION: Sept 25-27: The mapped experience of place Assignment: Map Library Exercise (see assignment on course web page).
Sept 26: A Path Out of Town from Madison: Driving West from Madison’s Capitol Square
Oct 1: Rivers and Harbors, Roads and Rails, Highways and Airports: Movement Transformed
SECTION: Oct 2-4: SECTION: Chris Wells, Car Country (entire)
Writing Assignment: Due at start of lecture on Oct 1. Use a printed satellite image from Google Maps or Bing to illustrate and explain an important argument from Christopher Well’s Car Country. See further details about this first paper assignment on p. 3 above.
Oct 3: Periodizing Landscape Change: Which (and Whose) Narratives to Choose?
Oct 8: Telling Tales on Canvas: Mythic Narratives of Frontier Change
SECTION: Oct 9-11: review for midterm exam
Oct 10: Names on the Land: Place Names as Historical Evidence
Oct. 11: 7:00-8:30pm: Special Evening Review Session for Midterm Exam
Oct 15: Midterm Exam
SECTION: no sections this week; take library tour and decide on your final place paper topic.
Please read Wayne C. Booth, et al., The Craft of Research (4th ed, 2016) in the next couple weeks as background preparation for your research and writing for the place paper.
Please also study the Learning Historical Research website at www.williamcronon.net/researching/ in the next couple weeks.
NB: During the next two weeks, the staff of the Wisconsin Historical Society will offer tours of their collections, which will be absolutely invaluable for your place paper. Be sure to take one of these tours if you possibly can.
Wisconsin Historical Society Tours (times to be confirmed):
Tuesday, Oct 16, 4:00-5:00pm
Wednesday, Oct 17, 4:00-5:00pm
Thursday, Oct 18, 4:00-5:00pm
Monday, Oct 22, 4:00-5:00pm
Wednesday, Oct 24, 9:00-10:00am
Oct 17: The Many Worlds of Indian Country
Oct 22: Course of Empires: Spain, France, Britain, and the United States
SECTION: Oct 23-25: In section this week, you’ll be asked to talk about the place you’ve chosen for your final paper, the kinds of documents you intend to use in researching it, and the themes from the course that you think you’ll be able explore while writing about how your place has changed over time.
Oct 24: Bounding Property: Survey and Sale
Oct 29: Farms and Markets
SECTION: Oct 30-Nov 1: William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1991), 5-147, 207-59, 371-85.
Oct 31: Slave and Free: Plantations and Homesteads
Nov 5: Landscapes Made Red: Military Geographies
SECTION: Nov 6-8: Mark Fiege, “King Cotton: The Cotton Plant and Southern Slavery,” and “The Nature of Gettysburg: Environmental History and the Civil War,” in Fiege, The Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States (2012), 100-138, 199-227. (Canvas)
Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels, “3. Buford,” 35-52. (Canvas)
Nov 7: Forests: The Westward March of Logging
Nov 12: Underground Landscapes of Wealth and Work
SECTION: Nov 13-15: Thomas Andrews, “Dying with Their Boots On,” Killing for Coal: Americas Deadliest Labor War (2008), 122-56. (Canvas)
Kathryn Morse, “The Nature of Gold Mining,” The Nature of Gold: An Environmental History of the Klondike Gold Rush (2003), 89-114. (Canvas)
Robert Service, “The Trail of Ninety-Eight,” Ballads of Cheechako (1909). (Canvas)
Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis, 148-206.
Nov 14: On Serendipity: The Great Diamond Hoax
Nov 19: Weaving an Often Forgotten Web: Systems, Networks, Infrastructures
Writing Assignment: Place paper due at start of lecture on Monday, November 19.
NO SECTIONS THIS WEEK Nov 20-22: (Thanksgiving)
Nov 21: (no lecture)
(Nov 22: Thanksgiving)
Nov 26: Built Environments of Domesticity and Commerce
SECTION: Nov 27-29: Come prepared to make a brief presentation on your place paper.
Kenneth Jackson, The Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (1985), 172-218, 231-71. (Canvas)
Nov 28: Color Lines, Part 1
Dec 3: Color Lines, Part 2
SECTION: Dec 4-6: Reviewing for final exam and wrapping up the semester: why read landscapes?
Mark Fiege, “The Road to Brown v. Board: An Environmental History of the Color Line,” in Fiege, The Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States (2012), 318-57. (Canvas)
Robert Caro, “One Mile,” The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974), 850-894. (Canvas)
Dec 5: Zoned America: Partitioning Places and People
Dec 10: Practicing Landscape History for Yourself
Dec 10, 7:00-8:30pm: Special Evening Review Session for Final Exam
Dec 12: Final Exam (in-class)