NATURAL RESOURCES IN AMERICAN HISTORY
Syllabus

Schedule

Announcements

AHIM

Lecture Objectives

Teaching Team
Contact & Office Hours

Dr. Vonhof's Faculty Page
Edward Hicks, Penn's Treaty with the Indians, c. 1840/1844

"If knowledge is power, ignorance cannot be bliss."
~ James Loewen
Natural Resources in American History is a general overview of the forces that have shaped America from indigenous settlement to the present. Understanding the development and evolution of America's political, economic, and social institutions and their relation to natural resources is important to understanding our current American society; it is a foundation which underlies many other topics and issues that students will encounter in their academic studies, and in their personal self-discovery.

The course explores important historical themes (people, places, events) from the “discovery” and colonization of the New World through the development and evolution of America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These themes are explored across a number of disciplines, including history, philosophy, religion, sociology, geography, and political economy. Students consider the impact of these historical themes both on contemporary America and on natural resources in historical and contemporary contexts.

This course is taught from a general, big picture perspective. The large scope of this course encourages more inference, integration and synthesis of ideas and less in-depth analyses of particular topics. Students will learn to consider the whole of history and its impact on the present by studying various crucial moments throughout the centuries. Consideration of this big picture is an important skill because natural resource and environmental professionals and scientists will consider a larger spatial and temporal context in the future as they address issues such as globalization and sustainability.

The historian Jacob Burckhardt relates the importance of a broad understanding of history:

In learning . . . one can attain mastery only of a limited field, namely as a specialist, and this mastery one should attain. But if one does not wish to forfeit the ability to form a general overview— indeed to have respect for such an overview— he should be a dilettante in as many fields as possible— at any rate, privately— in order to enhance one’s own knowledge and enrichment of diverse historical viewpoints. Otherwise one remains an ignoramus in all that lies beyond one’s specialty, and, under the circumstances, on the whole, a barbarous fellow.

Although this course is basically chronological, we will introduce and revisit important themes across history throughout the course. We will focus on the defining moments in history and their implications for our contemporary institutions, political economy, and society. History is not just a sequence of events, not just a series of facts and dates. The essence of history is the critical comparison and contrast of continuity and change over time. We will take a fresh and critical look at some of the traditional stories in American history and at the historical relationships between Americans and natural resources.