Environmental History of North America

This course explores how human relations with the nonhuman world—including land, plants, water, wildlife, minerals, and disease—have helped inform, mediate, and shape broader social, political, economic, and cultural developments in North America and the United States from the pre-contact period to the recent past. The course examines the multiple ways in which human understandings, manipulations, and uses of the non-human, “natural” world—often resulting in unintended yet damaging consequences—have helped effect historical change over space and time.

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