Unit name | The American West: An Environmental History (Level I Special Field) |
---|---|
Unit code | HIST26004 |
Credit points | 20 |
Level of study | I/5 |
Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 2 (weeks 13 - 24) |
Unit director | Professor. Coates |
Open unit status | Not open |
Pre-requisites |
None. |
Co-requisites |
None. |
School/department | Department of History (Historical Studies) |
Faculty | Faculty of Arts |
Welcome to Marlboro Country. The twentieth century’s most successful advertising campaign underscores the powerful allure of what is arguably the world’s most heavily mythologized region - the American West. A strong sense of physical place and emphasis on nature as mythic landscape has been a distinctive feature of the region’s study since the 1890s, but a more overt focus on the nonhuman world has emerged since the 1970s with the advent of environmental history.
This unit aims to rise above the facile polarization of good and evil and the lamentation of a lost, pre-colonial Eden, paying particular attention to ‘activist’ scholarship. Roaming from Yellowstone to Las Vegas, it encompasses topics such as nuclear testing, fear and loathing of wolves, desert cities, dust bowls, controversy over Western paintings, advertising motifs, the sanctification of wilderness, the Americanism of the national park and the hallowed ‘Green’ Indian. No previous knowledge of US history required, nor background in geography or ecology.
Aims:
By the end of the unit students should have:
1 x 2 hour exam
William Cronon, ‘A Place for Stories,’ Journal of American History 78 (March 1992)
Donald Worster, Under Western Skies: Nature & History in American West (1992)
Patricia Limerick, Legacy of Conquest: Unbroken Past of the American West (1987)
Limerick, ed. Trails: Toward a New Western History (1992)
Clyde Milner, ed. Oxford History of the American West (1994): chapters 7 & 17
Peter Coates, ‘Chances with Wolves: Renaturing Western History,’ Journal of American Studies 28 (1994)