Courses:

Technology and Nature in American History >> Content Detail



Study Materials



Readings

This section contains documents created from scanned original files, which are inaccessible to screen reader software. A "#" symbol is used to denote such documents.


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Required Reading and Writing


The following books are required for the course. Additional articles and book excerpts will also be assigned and distributed.

Amazon logo Basso, Keith. Wisdom Sits in Places. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1996. ISBN: 9780826317247.

Amazon logo Cronon, William. Changes in the Land. New York, NY: Hill & Wang, 2003. ISBN: 9780809016341.

Amazon logo Solnit, Rebecca. River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and Technological Wild West. New York, NY: Penguin, 2004. ISBN: 9780142004104.

Amazon logo White, Richard. The Organic Machine. New York, NY: Hill & Wang, 1996. ISBN: 9780809015832.

Amazon logo Worster, Donald. Dust Bowl. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2004 [1979]. ISBN: 9780195174885.


LEC #TOPICSREADINGSSTUDY QUESTIONS
Week 1. Introduction and problems of definition
1Course overview and introductory lecture
2Discussion: defining Technology and Nature

Amazon logo Williams, Raymond. "Ideas of Nature." In Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays. London, UK: Verso, 1996, pp. 67-85. ISBN: 9780860917298.

Marx, Leo. "Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept." Social Research 64, no. 3 (Fall 1997): 965-988.

(PDF)
Week 2. Colonial American land use
3A brief history of ecological change in North America in the eighteenth centuryCronon, pp. 3-107 and 159-170.(PDF)
4Discussion
Week 3. Places and how we know them
5DiscussionBasso, pp. 3-104.(PDF)
Week 4. Industrial America in the countryside
6Imposing an industrial order on the antebellum landscapeAmazon logo Steinberg, Theodore. Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 1-75. ISBN: 9780521527118.(PDF)
7Discussion
Week 5. The aesthetics of the industrial landscape in antebellum America
8

"Devilish iron horse" and "Aeolian harp": artistic responses to industrialization

Thoreau, Henry David. "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For," "Sounds," "Solitude," "Spring," and "Conclusion." In Walden. 1854. (View text and download from The Thoreau Reader.)

Amazon logo Marx, L. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 242-265. ISBN: 9780195133516.

9Discussion(PDF)
Week 6. Railroads and colonization
10View film: The Iron Road. Directed by Neil Goodwin. PBS: The American experience, 1990, 60 min.(PDF)
11Discussion

Amazon logo Stilgoe, John. Metropolitan Corridor: Railroads and the American Scene. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985, pp. 189-221. ISBN: 9780300034813.

Amazon logo Cronon, William. Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 1992, pp. 55-93. ISBN: 9780393308730.

Week 7. Making an agricultural landscape
12

View films: The Plow That Broke the Plains. Directed by Pare Lorentz, 1936, 25 min. (View and download at the Internet Archive.)

The River. Directed by Pare Lorentz, 1938, 31 min. (View and download (Part 1, Part 2) at the Internet Archive).

Amazon logo Cronon, William. Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 1992, pp. 97-147. ISBN: 9780393308730.

Amazon logo Steinberg, Theodore. Down to Earth: Nature's Role in American History. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 71-115. ISBN: 9780195140101.

(PDF)
13Discussion
Week 8. Technological systems and the transformation of time and space in the late nineteenth century
14Networking nation and nature: a case study of weather telegraphy, 1870-1891Amazon logo Solnit, Rebecca. River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and Technological Wild West. New York, NY: Penguin, 2004. ISBN: 9780142004104.
15Discussion
Week 9. Creating American parklands
16Conservation and the scientific management of nature
17Discussion

Pinchot, Gifford. "Prosperity," "The New Patriotism," and "The Present Battle." Chapters 1, 11 and 12 in The Fight for Conservation. New York, NY: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1910. (PDF)# (Download complete work from Project Gutenberg.)

Muir, John. "The Wild Parks and Forest Reservations of the West." Chapter 1 in Our National Parks. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1901, pp. 1-36. (PDF - 4.3 MB)# (View and download the complete work from The Internet Archive.)

Amazon logo Cronon, William. "The Trouble with Wilderness." In Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature. Edited by William Cronon. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co., 1995, pp. 69-90. ISBN: 9780393038729.

Amazon logo Steinberg, Theodore. Down to Earth: Nature's Role in American History. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 138-56. ISBN: 9780195140101.

(PDF)
Week 10. Water and the hydraulic society
18View film: Cadillac Desert. Directed by Jon Else and Linda Harrar, 1997, 60 min.Worster, pp. 10-25 and 100-180.(PDF)
19Discussion
Week 11. Labors of and in nature: rivers, energy, and work
20DiscussionWhite.(PDF)
Week 12. The landscape of postwar suburbia
21Levittown and the building of the suburban family ideal
22DiscussionSelected primary sources from Amazon logo Nicolaides, Becky M., and Andrew Wiese, eds. The Suburb Reader. New York, NY: Routledge, 2006, pp. 260-272, 298, 303, and 316-320. ISBN: 9780415945936.
Week 13. The landscape of food
23How food became fast, or, industrial agriculture in the twentieth century

Pollan, Michael. "Naturally: How Organic became a Marketing Niche and a Multibillion-dollar Industry." The New York Times Magazine, May 13, 2001, pp. 30-37, 57-58, and 63-64.

Amazon logo Steinberg, Theodore. Down to Earth: Nature's Role in American History. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 138-56. ISBN: 9780195140101.

24Discussion
Week 14. Presentations of student research projects
25Student presentations
26Student presentations (cont.)

 








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