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2024-2025 Academic Year

Fall 2024

HIST 151 History of Environment
Examines the interaction between humans and the natural environment in long-term global context. Explores the problem of sustainable human uses of world environments in various societies from prehistory to the present. Also serves as an introduction to the subfield of environmental history, which integrates evidence from various scientific disciplines with traditional documentary and oral sources. Topics include: environmental effects of human occupation, the origins of agriculture, colonial encounters, industrial revolution, water and politics, natural resources frontiers, and diverse perceptions of nature.

HIST 211 History of Climate Change
While we may think of climate change mostly in terms of the futures it threatens, it's a human-created disaster and so has a human history. So too do the solutions currently underway to respond to it. In this U.S.-focused class we'll examine and research the rise of fossil fuels, the building of unequal and vulnerable landscapes, the birth and development of climate science, the intentional construction of climate denial, and the consequent failures of climate politics. However, we'll also look at the histories of renewable energy, soil building, mass forest planting, ocean farming, organic farming, protest, movement-building, regulation, and political action. In doing so, we'll help create usable histories for a survivable and ethical future.

Spring 2025

HIST 117 American Hist 1607 to 1877
This course covers colonial, revolutionary, and national America through Reconstruction. Include attention to historical interpretation. Multiple sections offered.

HIST 211 Food and American Environment
This class examines the ways that the culture and politics of food have reshaped North American landscapes and social relations from colonial to modern times. We will explore, for example, how the new taste for sweetness fueled the creation of plantations worked by enslaved, the ways that the distribution of frozen meat helped build cities and clear rangeland, and the ways that the eating of fresh fruit came to depend on both a new population of migrant laborers and a new regime of toxic chemicals. Other topics will include catastrophes such as the Dustbowl, the controversial transformations of the Green Revolution, and the modern debates about the obesity epidemic.

HIST 500 Independent Study