Environmental History

Readings

Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. Revised ed. Hill & Wang, 2003. ISBN: 9780809016341.

Anderson, Virginia DeJohn. "The Wild Gangs of the Chesapeake: Livestock Husbandry in the South." Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America. Oxford University Press, 2006, pp. 107-140. ISBN: 9780195304466.

Ritvo, Harriet. "Counting Sheep in the English Lake District: Rare Breeds, Local Knowledge, and Environmental History." In Brantz, Dorothee. Beastly Natures: Animals, Humans, and the Study of History. University of Virginia Press, 2010, pp. 264-279. ISBN: 9780813929477.

McNeill, J. R. "Revolutionary Mosquitoes of the Atlantic World: Malaria and Independence in the United States of America." In Squatriti, Paolo. Natures Past: The Environment and Human History. University of Michigan Press, 2007, pp. 145-171. ISBN: 9780472069606.

Questions

1. Changes in the Land is a work of environmental history. As he writes about the history of the natural environment, what questions does William Cronon pose that other historians we have read this term have not asked? What methodologies does he employ that we have not yet encountered? What types of sources and archives does he study that we have not previously seen exploited?

2. What is the relation, if any, of the pieces by Anderson, McNeill, and Ritvo to Cronon's work? In what ways do they build on Cronon's historical and methodological insights, and in what ways do they set out in new directions?

Partial Bibliography

Ritvo, Harriet. The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age. Harvard University Press, 1989. ISBN: 9780674037076.

———. The Platypus and the Mermaid and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination. Harvard University Press, 1998. ISBN: 9780674673588.

———. The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere, and Modern Environmentalism. University of Chicago Press, 2009. ISBN: 9780226720821.

McPhee, Peter. Revolution and Environment in Southern France: Peasants, Lords, and Murder in the Corbières, 1780-1830. Oxford University Press, 1999. ISBN: 9780198207177.

Whited, Tamara L. Forests and Peasant Politics in Modern France. Yale University Press, 2000. ISBN: 9780300082272.

Blackbourn, David. The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany. W. W. Norton, 2007. ISBN: 9780393329995.

Cronon, William. Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. W. W. Norton, 1992. ISBN: 9780393308730.

Crosby, Alfred. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. Praeger, 2003. ISBN: 9780275980924.

———. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900. Cambridge University Press, 2004. ISBN: 9780521546188.

Melville, Elinor G. K. A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequencess of the Conquest of Mexico. Cambridge University Press, 1997. ISBN: 9780521574488.

Richards, John F. The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World. University of California Press, 2006. ISBN: 9780520246782.

McNeill, John R. Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914. Cambridge University Press, 2010. ISBN: 9780521459105.

———. Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World. W.W. Norton, 2000. ISBN: 9780393321838.

Miller, Shawn William. An Environmental History of Latin America. Cambridge University Press, 2007. ISBN: 9780521612982.

Meyer, Michael C. Water in the Hispanic Southwest: A Social and Legal History, 1550-1850. University of Arizona Press, 1996. ISBN: 9780816515950.

Turkel, William. The Archive of Place: Unearthing the Pasts of the Chilcotin Plateau. University of British Columbia Press, 2008. ISBN: 9780774813778.

"A Round Table: Environmental History." Journal of American History 76 (March 1990): 1087-1147.