Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

An investigation into the major themes and arguments in the environmental histories of North America, emphasizing how different individuals and groups have used, perceived, and managed their environments over time. Content may vary from offering to offering; see course outline for further information. HIST 432 may be repeated for credit only when a different topic is taught. Students with credit for GEOG 432 may take HIST 432 for credit only when a different topic is taught.

COURSE DETAILS:

Too Much Geography, Not Enough History?: Nature and People in Canada’s Past

Environmental history might just be the most important type of history you’ve never heard of! It studies the many relationships between humans and nature in the past, including political, economic, intellectual, and cultural ones. It examines how people have imagined, understood, and interacted with the non-human world over time and across space—with animals, plants, minerals, microbes, landscapes, water bodies, and climates, for example. Environmental history further examines how non-human actors and forces have shaped the course of human history, both independently of human action (as in the case of volcanic eruptions or earthquakes) but also, and more frequently, as a result of human action. It argues that history is not made, and has never been made, by humans alone. To understand how we have been able to live on this planet and how we continue to live here, hopefully far into the future, we must study agents and phenomena beyond the human.

This seminar will introduce students to key concepts, methods, and issues in the field of environmental history, broadly speaking. Its specific focus will be on historical humans, non-humans, and environments in the lands presently known as Canada. We will analyze some of the big, overarching arguments that historians have made and the stories they have told about human-nature relationships in this country. We’ll look at some longstanding topics of interest within the field of Canadian environmental history, such as the creation of parks. We’ll also engage with cutting-edge research, on subjects that may include energy, animals, and social or inclusive environmental histories – that is, ones that centre 2SLGBTQ+ people, Black people, people of colour, and Indigenous people. We’ll study nature and people in Canada’s past through a variety of media, including comic strips, feature-length documentaries, blog posts, and oral histories as well as scholarly articles, book chapters, and textbooks.

Note: The title of this semester’s version of GEOG 432 is taken from Prime Minister W.L. Mackenzie King’s contention, in 1936, that “if some countries have too much history, we have too much geography.” By the end of this course, you’ll be able to appreciate how Canada’s nonhuman geographies have, in fact, been foundational to the making of human histories in this country.

Note 2: Forms and weightings of assessments are subject to change between now and the beginning of the summer semester.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING:

REQUIRED READING NOTES: