AMERICAN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY - Amazon S3 · M, Feb 19 Nature to Market READ: 1. Fiege, 156-198 (“Nature’s Nobleman”). W, Feb 21 War Upon the Land READ: 1. *Lisa Brady, “The

History 4275 (Spring 2018) Page 1

AMERICAN ENVIRONMENTAL

HISTORY

Spring 2018 M/W/F 11:00-11:50 AM

Wooten Hall 104 University of North Texas

Professor Michael D. Wise

Office: Wooten Hall 259 Hours: W 12:00-2:00.

Email: [email protected]

Farm Workers and Mount Williamson, Manzanar Relocation Center. Ansel Adams, 1943.

Course Description: Nature’s powers exceed human forces, yet “nature” itself is an artifact of human invention. When we transform nature, we transform ourselves. Environmental historians write stories about the past that grapple with this paradox. The worlds that humans inhabit are both our own creation as well as the creation of nonhuman actors. Transformations we regard as “social,” “cultural,” “economic,” or “political” are all grounded in the complex material worlds in which we dwell. How have Americans lived within and against the constraints of the earth over the last five centuries? How has “nature” interwoven human and nonhuman worlds? How have the diverse cultural lives of Americans remained rooted in physical and biological processes? By exploring answers to these questions, this course offers a survey of important topics and ideas in American environmental history as well as providing specific training in the theoretical and methodological approaches that environmental historians use to practice their craft. Students will study the historical contexts of present-day environmental controversies, learning how to put contemporary issues into deeper historical perspective. The goal of this course is for students to become more explicitly aware and thoughtfully critical of the ways that historical processes have affected and continue to affect environmental relationships. Course Texts: Mark Fiege, The Republic of Nature (Seattle: University of Washington Press). Edward Everett Dale, The Cross Timbers: Memories of a North Texas Boyhood (Austin: University of Texas Press).


Grading Criteria: Place-Making Paper 10% Exam #1 20% Exam #2 20% Discussion Responses (10@3%) 30% Historical Context Paper (final) 20% 100%

Course Policies: Attendance and Participation Attendance is mandatory and students are expected to attended all class sessions. Four or more absences will result in an “F.” Blackboard Grades and digitized course materials, including all assigned readings, will be available on Blackboard. Please note, however, that this is not an online course, and that changes to the syllabus and other important information will not always be available on Blackboard. Discussion Responses On the ten class days devoted to class discussion, students will be responsible for responding, in writing, to a question regarding that day’s reading assignment(s). This exercise is intended to help prepare students for class discussion and will be graded on a “check/plus/minus” basis. More information will be provided in class. Exams (March 2nd and April 30th) Each in-class examination will require students to respond, in detail, to one essay question (out of a choice of three) as well as answering ten “objective” questions. Place-Making Paper This assignment asks students to write an essay of no longer than three pages discussing their own historical relationship to a specific place. It will be due on Friday, February 2nd. I will provide detailed information in class on Friday, January 26th. Historical Context Paper The twenty-first century surrounds us with environmental controversies. This assignment asks you to research a current environmental issue in the United States and write a minimum 1,000-word analysis paper that situates the issue into a deeper historical perspective. You will have opportunities to discuss your research in small groups over the course of the semester. The paper will be due during finals week and will stand in the place of a traditional final exam. Accessibility This course is committed to accessibility. If you need certain accommodations, please notify me (Professor Michael Wise) in person as soon as possible. If it is not possible to discuss accommodations in person, for whatever reason, then please email me at [email protected] or call me at (940) 891-6774.


AMERICAN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY – Spring 2018 *(denotes reading assignment available on Blackboard)

Week 1: W, Jan 17 no class (Professor Wise at a memorial service) F, Jan 19 Course Introduction: What is Environmental History? Week 2: M, Jan 22 Deep Time and the Fictions of Pre-history READ:

1. *George R. Stewart, Names on the Land (1945): 1-10 (“Of what is attempted in this book”; “Of the naming that was before history”).

W, Jan 24 Environmental History and the Material Turn

READ: 1. Mark Fiege, The Republic of Nature, 3-13; 15-21 (“Land of Lincoln”; “Mountains and Monuments”). F, Jan 26 DISCUSSION #1: DOES HISTORY HAVE A “PLACE?” READ: 1. *Keith H. Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache (1996): 8-30 (“Water Lies with Mud in an Open Container”; “Snakes’ Water”; “Juniper Tree Stands Alone”; “Shades of Shit”). Week 3: M, Jan 29 Body and Environment in Early Modern New Spain READ: 1. * Rebecca Earle, The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America, 1492-1700 (2012): 20-30 (“Spanish Bodies, Indian Bodies”; “Humoral Bodies”). W, Jan 31 Environment and Disorder in Colonial New England READ: 1. Fiege, The Republic of Nature, 23-56, 139-141 (“Satan in the Land”; “Animal Familiars”). F, Feb 2 DISCUSSION #2: HOW DID LES HABITANTES “KNOW NATURE?” READ: 1. * Jean-Baptiste Bernard de la Harpe, “La Harpe’s First Expedition to Oklahoma, 1718-1719,” trans. Anna Lewis, Chronicles of Oklahoma 2:4 (1924): 331-349. 2. * Shannon Lee Dawdy, “’A Wild Taste’: Food and Colonialism in Eighteenth-Century Louisiana,” Ethnohistory 57:3 (2010): 389- 414. DUE: PLACE-MAKING PAPER (minimum 500 words)


Week 4: M, Feb 5 Nature and the Age of Reason READ: 1. Fiege, 57-99, 142-147 (“By the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God”; “Political Ecology). W, Feb 7 Biogeography and the Early Republic READ: 1. *Zebulon M. Pike, “Pike’s Dissertation on Louisiana,” in The Journals of Zebulon Montgomery Pike with Letters and Related Documents (Volume 2), ed. Donald Jackson (1966): 19-41. F, Feb 9 DISCUSSION #3: WERE JEFFERSONIANS REALLY “ENLIGHTENED?” READ: 1. *Michael D. Wise, “Seeing Like a Stomach: Food, the Body, and Jeffersonian Exploration in the Near Southwest, 1804-1808,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 120:4 (2017): 463-491. Week 5: M, Feb 12 Time, Distance, and the Origins of Modern Agriculture READ: 1. *Kate Wersan, “The Early Melon and the Mechanical Gardener: Toward an Environmental History of Timekeeping in the Long Eighteenth Century,” Environmental History 22 (2017): 282-310. W, Feb 14 HISTORY GARDEN DAY #1:

In North Texas, Valentine’s Day is potato-planting day! Meet at the UNT Community Garden (located outside Legends Hall) to plant potatoes.

READ: 1. *Nat Mills, Denton County Master Gardener Association, “Growing

Potatoes in North Texas,” <https://dcmga.com/north-texas- gardening/vegetable-gardening/growing-potatoes-in-north- texas/>

F, Feb 16 The Political Ecology of the Antebellum Plantation READ: 1. Fiege, 100-138, 148-150 (“King Cotton”; “Hard Labor”). Week 6: M, Feb 19 Nature to Market READ: 1. Fiege, 156-198 (“Nature’s Nobleman”). W, Feb 21 War Upon the Land READ: 1. *Lisa Brady, “The Wilderness of War: Nature and Strategy in the American Civil War,” Environmental History 10 (July 2005): 421- 447.


F, Feb 23 DISCUSSION #4: DID THE CIVIL WAR CHANGE AMERICANS’ IDEAS ABOUT NATURE? READ: 1. Fiege, 199-227, 151-155 (“The Nature of Gettysburg”; “Butcher’s Bill). WEEK 7: M, Feb 26 FILM: Ric Burns, Death and the Civil War (2012). READ: 1. *Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Random House, 2008): 266-272 (“Surviving”).

EXTRA CREDIT OPPORTUNITY Tuesday, February 27, 9:30 AM, location tbd UNT Black History Month Lecture: “Deamonte Driver and the Subaltern History of Dentistry” Professor Richard M. Mizelle (Univ. of Houston)

W, Feb 28 EXAM REVIEW SESSION F, Mar 2 EXAM #1 WEEK 8: M, Mar 5 The Transcontinental Railroad READ: 1. Fiege, 228-270 (“Iron Horses”) W, Mar 7 The Destruction of the Bison READ: 1. *Andrew Isenberg, “The Returns of the Bison: Nostalgia, Profit, and Preservation,” Environmental History 2 (1997): 179-196. F, Mar 9 DISCUSSION #5: HOW DID RAILROADS CHANGE “NATURE?” READ: 1. *William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991): 97-147 (“Annihilating Space: Meat”). SPRING BREAK (March 12-16) WEEK 9: M, Mar 19 Conservation and the Progressive Era, Part 1 READ: 1. *Karl Jacoby, “Class and Environmental History: Lessons from the ‘The War in the Adirondacks,’” Environmental History 2 (1997): 324-342. W, Mar 21 Conservation and the Progressive Era, Part 2


READ: 1. *Michael D. Wise, “Killing Montana’s Wolves: Stockgrowers, Bounty Bills, and the Uncertain Distinction between Predators and Producers,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 63:4 (Winter 2013): 51-67, 95-96. F, Mar 23 DISCUSSION #6: WHAT IS “CONSERVATION?” READ: 1. *Theodore Roosevelt, “Speech at Denver Before the Colorado Livestock Association,” in T. Roosevelt, The New Nationalism, ed. William Leuchtenberg (New York, 1961), 49-76. Week 10: M, Mar 26 HISTORY GARDEN DAY #2 Spring is in the air! Meet at the UNT Community Garden (located outside Legends Hall) to harvest radishes and plant chiles. READ: 1. *William Carleton, “Crossing Chiles, Crossing Borders: Dr. Fabian Garcia, the New Mexican Chile Pepper, and Modernity in the Early Twentieth-Century U.S-Mexico Borderlands,” in Food Across Borders, eds. Matt Garcia, Melanie DuPuis, and Don Mitchell (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2017): 105- 120. W, Mar 28 Food and Health in the Progressive Era READ: 1. *Adam Shprintzen, “Looks Like Meat, Smells Like Meat, Tastes Like Meat: Battle Creek, Protose and the Development of Modern Vegetarianism,” Food, Culture, and Society 15:1 (2012): 113-128. F, Mar 30 DISCUSSION #7: ARE YOU WHAT YOU EAT? READ: 1. *Jennifer Jensen Wallach, “Dethroning the Deceitful Pork Chop: Food Reform at the Tuskegee Institute,” in Dethroning the Deceitful Pork Chop: Rethinking African American Foodways from Slavery to Obama, ed. Jennifer Jensen Wallach (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2015): 165-180. Week 11: M, Apr 2 FOOD HISTORY LECTURE - location tbd Professor Krishnendu Ray (New York University) READ: 1. *Krishnendu Ray, “Dreams of Pakistani Grill and Vada Pao in Manhattan: Re-inscribing the Immigrant Body in Metropolitan Discussions of Taste,” Food, Culture, and Society 14:2 (2011): 243- 273.


W, Apr 4 The Dust Bowl READ: 1. *Donald Worster, The Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979): 148-163 (“The Wheat Farmer and the Welfare State). F, Apr 6 DISCUSSION #8: WAS “NATURE” A LIBERATING FORCE DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR? READ: 1. * Connie Y. Chiang, “Imprisoned Nature: Toward an Environmental History of the World War II Japanese American Incarceration,” Environmental History 15 (April 2010): 236-267. Week 12: M, Apr 9 no class (Professor Wise at the Sid Richardson Museum in Fort Worth) W, Apr 11 no class (Professor Wise at the Association of American Geographers) F, Apr 13 no class (Professor Wise at the Association of American Geographers) Week 13: M, Apr 16 DISCUSSION #9: WHAT WAS LIFE LIKE IN NORTH TEXAS 100 YEARS AGO? READ: 1. Edward Everett Dale, The Cross Timbers: Memories of a North Texas Boyhood, all. W, Apr 18 Mass Production During the Second World War READ: 1. *Kellen Backer, “Constructing Borderless Foods: The Quartermaster Corps and World War II Army Subsistence,” in Food Across Borders, eds. Garcia et al: 121-139. F, Apr 20 Mass Destruction During the Second World War READ: 1. Fiege, 271-274, 281-317 (“Nature Study”; “Atomic Sublime”). Week 14: M, Apr 23 The Environmental Movement READ: 1. *Ellen Stroud, “Troubled Waters in Ecotopia: Environmental Racism in Portland, Oregon,” Radical History Review 74 (1999): 65-96. W, Apr 25 HISTORY GARDEN DAY #3 Temperatures are rising. Time to plant okra and sweet potatoes!

READ: 1. Fiege, 275-277, 318-357 (“Natural Hazards”; “The Road to Brown vs. Board”).


F, April 27 Cars and the Making of Postmodern America READ:

1. Fiege, 278-280, 358-402, 403-429 (“Lipids and Liberty”; “It’s a Gas”; “Paths that Beckon”).

Week 15: M, April 30 EXAM #2 W, May 2 DISCUSSION #10: WHAT CAN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY TELL US ABOUT THE PRESENT? Finals Week: M, May 7 DUE: Historical Context Paper (minimum 1,000 words) by email to [email protected]