Oct 31, 2024  
2024-25 Catalog 
    
2024-25 Catalog
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HIST 240 - World Environmental History


This course approaches the study of “world environmental history” as a fascinating problem of historical methodology. We begin by introducing environmental history at its largest scales of time and space, investigating how climate, biodiversity, natural resources, and commodities have affected human history on a global level. We will then move on to a series of more specific case studies that complicate these large-scale historical analyses. As we visit the pastoral landscapes of Nazi Germany, the toxic waters and fields of modern Japan, the denuded countryside of imperial China, and the socially stratified villages of northern India, we will see how culture, memory, religion, and power shape reciprocal relationships between humans and their geographically unique surroundings in a number of different ways. Finally, we will investigate how these different valances of environmental history have informed a twentieth-century regime of global environmental governance-a regime born of good intentions, but one replete with problems of efficacy, equitability, and justice.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Not offered: 2024-25
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
  • Evaluate data and/or sources.
  • Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.



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