This course has four primary goals: First, to understand the historical origins of what remains one of the most enduring regional cultures of the United States; second, to explore from within the social, political, economic, and environmental context of the South some of the major events and historical processes that shaped the history of the U.S., for example, the American Revolution, westward expansion, the spread of capitalism, the politics of slavery and abolition; third, to consider southern history from the perspective of southerners, free and enslaved, men and women. Finally, this course will help students to understand and participate knowledgably in present-day discussions about the legacy of the Old South and how it ought to be remembered and memorialized, if at all.
This course covers the South’s tortured but fascinating journey from plantations and slavery at the end of the Civil War to skyscrapers, high-tech industry, segregation, and civil rights. This is a course in U.S. regional history, and so we will discuss how the South remained a distinct region even after the end of slavery and the decline of plantation agriculture, and what the South as a distinct region has meant for the United States. Finally, we will consider the extent to which the South today remains distinct in meaningful ways. Major topics will include: the promise and disappointment of emancipation; the Lost Cause; the Ku Klux Klan; Jim Crow segregation; civil rights, white resistance, and the police; the rise and fall of cotton agriculture; single party politics and populist demagogues; the South in film, religion, literature, and music; and the rise of the Sunbelt South. If you want to know where Stacy Abrams and her movement is coming from in Atlanta, or how the same Republican Party that ended slavery and passed the first civil rights act in the 1860s came to be the party of voting restrictions by the 1990s, or how the land of cotton agriculture became the land of high tech, banking, airlines, and sprawling suburbs (Atlanta, Dallas, Charlotte, Houston, Nashville), or why so many Black southerners left the South in the early twentieth century but their grandchildren and great grand children are now returning, this is the class for you. (And on the side we have: B. B. King, Elvis, grits, barbecue, collards cooked with lots of bacon, Coca Cola, Dr. Pepper, moonshiners and stock car racers, and so much more).
This course will introduce students to basic concepts necessary to understand and engage present-day debates over policy, politics, and science of sustainability and the relationship between people and the natural environment. This will be accomplished primarily be exploring the history of sustainability and the human-environmental relationship in the United States. The history of the United States has been shaped by a close relationship between people and the North American environment, relationships that have not always been sustainable. The land has altered human behavior and touched human consciousness as surely as people have transformed the land in ways both constructive and destructive. From the colonial period when nature mediated relations between Europeans and Native Americans to cattle ranching in the West to modern environmental engineering to conservation and environmentalist politics, this class will explore the largely unconsidered but crucial role non-human nature has played in the human history of America (and vice versa).
This course will examine four disasters that occurred about 100 years ago: the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, the Paris Flood of 1910, and the world-wide Influenza Epidemic of 1918. Students will be asked to consider the causes, responses, and consequences of these catastrophes (environmental, social, political, economic, and scientific understanding), and to compare them to present-day disasters by seeking to understand past and present in terms of policy, politics, and science of sustainability. Along the way, the class will interrogate the meaning of the word “sustainable,” (and related concepts) by considering how it has been used, by whom, with what reasons, to sustain what, with what effect.
This course explores some of the roles rivers have played in the history of the United States, including providing Europeans with access to the interior of North America, powering the initial phase of industrialization, serving as the nation’s first interstate highway system, and later, as the first interstate sewer system, irrigating western farms and golf courses, and offering playgrounds for sporting people of all sorts. America’s rivers have also played a central role within the natural environment that is home, not only to the nation’s people, but to all its non-human residents. Throughout much of U.S. history, the determination to make rivers serve the purposes of the nation and its peoples, to understand them scientifically, and to measure their value in those terms, has resulted in their being disconnected from the rest of the environment in ways that have worked against U.S. interests in sustainability.
This course examines the social, cultural, economic, and environmental history of the fur trade between 1500 and 1850. The goal of the course is to consider one of the earliest global businesses as historical precedent for many global businesses of the present-day. The following themes will be addressed:
These themes intersect and overlap over the course of three and a half centuries, between the first trading of furs between French and Mi’kmaq (1534) to the demise of the American Fur Company (1847). However, rather this course will be organized thematically, rather that chronologically. For example, the section on the economy of the fur trade will mover from the early 1500s to the 1800s. The next section will return to the early 1500s. While each of them will be the point of focus for a section of the semester, each will be developed in light of the others. The intention is to understand the complex multidimensionality of the fur trade as it developed over time. The course will combine readings, lecture, films, and discussions.