This page contains an archive of major emails sent to the 460 list server during Fall 2020, arranged in reverse chronological order (most recent emails on top).
Hi, everyone. I just wanted to let you all know that I submitted all grades for 460 to the Registrar this afternoon. We have NOT been using Canvas to track grades in the course, so please check online with whatever tool you use for checking get your grades with the Registrar. Faculty don't have access to those tools, so I'm afraid I don't have instructions to give you on how to use them; I'm hoping you do. I don't know how quickly the Registrar will post grades, but hopefully it'll happen quickly.
Thanks again for your patience in working with Brianna, Thomas, Zada, and me this semester to help the course go as smoothly as we could muster under the uniquely challenging circumstances that 2020 and COVID-19 have thrown at us. I was pleased that things went as well as they did, and that's due in no small to your generosity and good will in rolling with the punches the pandemic through at us. Thank you.
I hope you enjoyed the course, and that at least some of its lessons will prove valuable to you as your own life journey continues. Have a wonderful holiday break, stay safe and well, and best of luck to all of you.
Bill
Hi, everyone. Just wanted to let you know that I'm still holding regular office hours today and also next Wednesday in case you have any questions you want to ask about the course either in preparation for the final exam or just in general. I'd be delighted to chat if you want to stop by. As always, the Zoom link is:
https://uwmadison.zoom.us/j/95938501913
Good luck with the exam!
Bill
Friends—
Hi, everyone. I'm happy to report that I've just posted the last lecture of the semester, "That Which We Tame." You're welcome to view it whenever you're ready:
https://canvas.wisc.edu/courses/210582/pages/12-slash-7-that-which-we-tame?module_item_id=3293859
If you'd like a kind of trailer for it, UW-Madison did a brief three-and-a-half-minute video about this final lecture (with music, aerial photography, and much higher production values than I can muster on my own!) as it was delivered in 3650 Humanities back in 2013. You can view it (along with many gorgeous views of Madison and the UW campus to make you homesick for pre-COVID days) on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLL9Cugf4i8
I recommend full screen for both videos: lots of beautiful photos.
Don't forget that you're welcome to attend our last town meeting of the semester during our regular lecture slot next Monday, 2:30-3:45pm on December 7.
Hard to believe we're nearly done...and that this is the last time I'll ever give this particular lecture. Best of luck reviewing for next Wednesday's exam!
Bill
Friends—
Hi, everyone. In past in-person review sessions for this course, I've read old exams to students to give them a sense of the questions they're likely to be facing. That obviously isn't feasible this year, so I'm doing the next best thing: forwarding as a PDF attachment to this email a selection of essay questions that were asked on past exams over the past decade or so. As with the exam you'll be taking, I've divided them into two sets: questions that cover material only from the portion of the course after the midterm; and, for those of you might be interested in reflecting on what you've studied in entire course, questions covering major themes of 460 since the start of the semester.
I'll also post these at the bottom of our course web page, and you can access them via this link anytime: https://www.williamcronon.net/courses/460/handouts/460_sample_questions_from_past_final_exams.pdf
Also, please remember that for this half of the course, constructing multiple timelines (each covering a different kind of information about the course: key dates, laws/policies, events, ideas, publications, individual people, etc., whatever you like) will almost certainly help you see interconnections and contexts as you review for the exam. Better still would be to build such timelines with other students in the course; in my section this morning, we did a lot of great work using Google Jamboard for this purpose. Remember that you can use the email address for your section to contact other students in that section to see if anyone wants to review for you. You won't regret doing so, I promise.
Hope this helps. Good luck!
Bill
Friends—
I’m writing to share a number of key details about the remaining days of our work together for History / Geography / Environmental Studies 460. Please read this email carefully and make sure you’ve made careful notes of the information I’m sharing here.
*Remaining Lectures*
I’ve just posted the video and note sheet for this Wednesday’s penultimate lecture on “Backlashes: Environmental Politics 1980-2020.” You’re welcome to view it anytime you’d like.
I’ll likely post the final lecture of the course this coming Wednesday or Thursday, and that one too can be viewed whenever you find it convenient to do so. It may prove helpful to you in reviewing for the final exam. I’ll send out a brief email once that lecture has been posted.
*Returning Second Paper Assignment*
The other section leaders and I are hard at work grading your second paper assignment, but I’m sure I don’t need to tell you how much work that is and how much time it takes to accomplish. We’re going to try as hard as we can to return the papers to you by next Monday, December 7, so you’ll have that information before taking the final exam on Wednesday, December 9. I’ll send out a brief email letting you know when those grades have been posted.
*This Week’s Final Discussion Section*
This week’s discussion section will have two key goals: helping you review for the final exam, and reflecting back on what you’ve learned from the course as a whole. You’ll probably find the section most helpful to you for review purposes if you’ve done at least a little reviewing beforehand, so if you can find the time to glance over the note sheets for lectures since the midterm exam (starting with Lecture #10, “Hunters and Hunted”), you won’t regret doing so. Past note sheets are most easily accessed via the course web page at https://www.williamcronon.net/courses/460/. Please spend a little time giving some thought to the lessons you’ve taken from the course that matter most to you personally; we’ll take some time to share those toward the end of this last discussion section.
Although we won’t have a lot of time to talk about Hurricane Katrina in section this week, please do try to spend an hour or two perusing the materials we’ve offered online about it. They’re designed to help you think about the ways in which that one event links to a number of different themes in the course, and if you think about those materials relative to the course as a whole, they should help you think about ways of reviewing for the final exam.
*Final Town Meeting Next Monday, 2:30-3:45pm 12/7*
5) Remember that I’ll be holding a final “town meeting” for any students interested in attending during our regular lecture slot from 2:30-3:45pm on Monday, December 7. This is not a requirement of the course, but you’re welcome to attend if you’ve got questions as you review for the final exam, things you’ve wanted to ask me about the course as a whole, or anything else you’d like to discuss about environmental history or anything else. You'll find the Zoom link for the town meeting in the emails I've sent about it.
I’m also holding a town meeting from 2:30-3:45pm on Wednesday, December 9, for senior auditors who have been attending the lectures for 460, since they have not been invited to the three town meetings I’ve scheduled for registered students. Registered students are not invited to the December 9 town meeting—and will presumably want to be working on their final exam by then anyway!
*Please Be Sure to Complete the Course Evaluation*
If you haven’t yet responded to the email course evaluation request you should have received by now, please do so as soon as you can. Although the other section leaders and I won’t be permitted to see your evaluations until after we’ve submitted our final grades for the course, we learn a LOT from what you share with us, and are more grateful than you may realize for the time and care you put into your comments. Especially helpful are any written suggestions you may have (beyond the numerical scales you fill out) indicating the parts of the course that you found especially valuable or that you think we might have improved upon. To the extent that you’ve enjoyed and learned from American Environmental History, you owe that in part to the great suggestions I’ve received from past students about how to make it as good a course as it can be. This year, I’d be especially grateful to hear what did (and did not) work well for you regarding the unusual online teaching / learning environment in which we all did this course together.
*Final Exam Format and Content*
Last but hardly least, let me describe the format of the final exam to you, which will be very similar to the midterm. We’ll publish the exam on Canvas at 2:30pm on Wednesday, December 9, and you’ll have 24 hours before you’re required to turn in your answer by 2:30pm on Thursday, December 10. (If you have a McBurney warrant and feel you need additional accommodations, please discuss these with your section leader as soon as possible.) You’re welcome to read the exam as soon as it arrives, but we ask that you spend no more than three hours outlining and writing your response (if it helps, you can break up the three hours into two or three shorter segments). It’s an open-book exam, so you’re welcome to consult any materials from the course if that’s helpful—though it would be unwise not to review beforehand, since you won’t want to waste time rummaging through everything we’ve done in the course trying to figure out what you need to answer a particular question.
As for the questions you’ll be asked, there will be several—probably 5 or 6 in all—from which you’ll select just one to answer. Because we’re giving you this exam on the last scheduled day of class, we’re not allowed to require you to cover any material from before the midterm exam (though you surely won’t regret at least briefly refreshing your memory about material from that portion of the course). So at least three of the questions we’ll offer you will cover course material since the midterm. That said, we suspect that at least a few of you would actually prefer to write about course themes that we’ve been exploring since the beginning of the semester, so we’ll include 2-3 questions that will be explicitly flagged as covering the whole course. Again: you are NOT required to select from these latter questions if you don’t want to write about topics from the earlier part of the course!
Your task will be to pick ONE of the 5-6 questions we offer, and write an essay response of 800-1200 words, which we’d prefer that you upload to Canvas as a Word file if you’re able to do so. As always, we encourage you to spend a few minutes outlining your answer, and would be grateful if you could include your outline at the end of your Word file in case we want to look at it in grading what you write. You would be wise to make sure that your answer draws widely on material from readings, lectures, and discussion sections, and even though you do not need to supply formal citations for what you write, you should definitely gesture at the sources on which you’re relying as you compose your answer.
Remember: history consists of richly textured, nuanced details that describe the lived realities of people and events in the past. It is not just a bunch of broad generalized abstractions. You should definitely make larger arguments in the essay you write, but you’ll want to make sure to ground and illustrate them with abundant details. If you haven’t recently reviewed the exemplary essay exams we collected from the midterm, now would be a good time to look at them again to get a sense of the target at which you should be aiming for the final exam. They’re accessible toward the bottom of our course web page at https://www.williamcronon.net/courses/460/.
That’s all for now. Please come to section this week (and the town meeting next week if you’re so inclined) with any and all questions you may have about the format of the exam. We’ll plan to read to you in section a sample question from a past exam so we can brainstorm possible responses together.
Home stretch!
Bill
Hi, everyone. This is a quick reminder that I'll be holding an open town meeting for any regularly enrolled students in 460 who are interested in attending from 2:30-3:45pm this afternoon. (Auditors are not allowed to attend this session, but I'll be doing a special town meeting from them from 2:30-3:45pm on Wednesday, December 9, when regular students will be starting the final exam.) Please think about any questions you'd like to ask me or topics you'd like me to discuss. (I'll be holding another special end-of-semester town meeting to reflect back on the course as a whole from 2:30-3:45pm on Monday, December 7.)
To attend today's meeting, simply click on the Zoom link I sent to your email address this morning.
Also, you'll be receiving an email for our course evaluations later this week (probably on Thanksgiving Day). These evaluations are extremely helpful to the other section leaders and me, so please take the time to fill them out. Written comments are especially useful, so please share any and all thoughts you may have about the course.
Finally, good luck with the final polishing of your second paper if you haven't already submitted it. We're very much looking forward to reading it.
And...HAPPY THANKSGIVING!
Bill
Hi, everyone. The other section leaders and I have received lots of favorable comments from students who enjoyed attending the town meeting I held back in October, and since the end of the semester is quickly approaching, I've decided to schedule three more such gatherings--two for students registered in the course, and one for senior auditors. All of them will take place during our regularly scheduled lecture slot.
If you're an auditor, please don't attend the meetings for students; if you're a student, please don't attend the meeting for auditors.
Here are the dates and times, along with the Zoom link for each. Please do NOT share these Zoom links with anyone not in the class, since that's the main thing that protects us from inappropriate Zoom bombing. You're certainly not required to attend, but you're more than welcome to do so if you're inclined.
2:30-3:45pm Monday, November 23, for registered STUDENTS only: https://uwmadison.zoom.us/j/94591919078
2:30-3:45pm Monday, December 7, for registered STUDENTS only: https://uwmadison.zoom.us/j/96119967969
2:30-3:45pm Wednesday, December 9, for registered AUDITORS only:
https://uwmadison.zoom.us/j/93986403679
(this will take place during the time slot when registered students will just be beginning to take the final exam)
I'll be happy to talk about any and all topics you'd like to ask about: preparing for the exam, reflecting back on the course as a whole, the value of studying environmental history or history generally, and so on. You should plan to come with questions you'd like to ask and topics you'd like to discuss.
Please attend if you'd like to do so!
Bill
Friends--
I'm writing to flag several new digital postings for 460 so you'll be aware that they're available to you. Please read carefully.
1) I've posted the videos and note sheets not just for today's lecture, but for next Monday's lecture as well (#15: Public Parks and Pleasuring Grounds and #16: Wilderness and the Land Ethic). Lectures #15-#16 amount to one long continuous lecture about parks and wilderness in American environmental culture and politics, and so are best thought of as a unit. (They in fact have a single combined note sheet.) Because much of our discussion next week, along with the second paper prompt, focuses on Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac, and since Leopold is covered in lecture #16, I thought it might be helpful to make that lecture available to you sooner than I ordinarily do.
2) I probably don't need to remind you that next Tuesday is Election Day, so especially for students whose sections are on Tuesdays or Wednesdays, I'd encourage you to do your reading early, given how distracted we could all be feeling next week. Remember that it's quite possible that we will not know the final outcome of the election on Tuesday night, so especially if you have a Wednesday morning section, please try to get a good night's sleep and do what you can to attend and participate fully in next week's discussion. It will lay crucial foundations for the second paper assignment, so you should do your best to be fully engaged if you possibly can be. (I trust it goes without saying that I hope you'll do everything you can to get out and vote next week if you haven't already done so.)
3) As I already did for the first paper assignment, I've just posted to our course web page at
https://williamcronon.net/courses/460/
exemplary essays for each of the four questions on the midterm exam to help give you a sense of what essay answers that received a full grade of "A" look like. Please study them and compare them with your own essay to see what you can learn about different possible approaches for writing history exams like this one. Our prompts in this course are always broad, allowing a wide range of alternative approaches, but we expect all answers to make well-structured arguments that are buttressed with rich historical evidence drawn from many different parts of the course readings, lectures, and discussion sections. These exemplary essays all do an excellent job of meeting those expectations.
4) Finally, remember that the next three discussion sections (next week's on parks and wilderness; the following week's on Rachel Carson and Silent Spring; and the week after that on the rise of the environmental justice movement) are all highly relevant to the new prompt we've posted (on Canvas, in my earlier email, and toward the bottom of the course web page) about the history of changing audience responses to Leopold's A Sand County Almanac. Because we're hoping you'll treat your own experience of the assigned readings, along with the experiences of your classmates, as historical documents of how your own generation now reads and responds to these materials, next week's discussion board may prove to be an especially valuable resource for your second paper. Our plan is to design that discussion board as a place where students can post comments about next week's readings, as we usually do, but we also encourage you to use it as a place where you can continue to post comments and ask questions of each other concerning the second paper assignment. We'll keep next week's discussion board open for ongoing dialogue and consultation until you've finished the second paper assignment, and you can of course also use the following two discussion boards to discuss with your classmates how the readings for those two weeks relate to the second paper assignment as well. If you've got ideas about how you and your fellow students can make creative use of these resources to write the best possible papers they can, please come to section next week prepared to share your thoughts.
That's all for now....
Bill
Friends--
Several students have expressed confusion about the grading curve we're using in 460, which is obviously different from the standard UW-Madison curve. So here's a quick explanation.
The standard UW-Madison grading curve looks like this, along with the numerical equivalents for calculating grade points on a 4.0 scale:
A: 4.0
AB: 3.5
B: 3.0
BC: 2.5
C: 2.0
CD: 1.5
D: 1.0
F: 0.0
The curve we're using in 460 is a more traditional one, which has more gradations for recognizing subtle differences in student performance (and which is in fact the one that UW-Madison itself used until it adopted its current scale way back when I was an undergrad here):
A: 4.00
A-: 3.67
B+: 3.33
B: 3.00
B-: 2.67
C+: 2.33
C: 2.00
C-: 1.67
D+: 1.33
D: 1.00
D-: 0.67
F: 0.00
We'll use the second of these scales for all grades we give you in 460: two exams, two papers, and your performance in section, each of which counts equally toward your final course grade. What we record in our grade books are these letter grades. Before we decide your final grades, we'll take the following steps:
1) we'll convert all your letter grades to the numbers listed in the second scale above;
2) we'll calculate your grade point average for all five grades averaged together;
3) we'll compare your GPA with the UW-Madison scale above;
4) we'll decide your letter grade based on your overall performance, taking all relevant information into account when we do.
If you have questions about any of this, please discuss them with your section leader.
Bill
Friends--
I'm writing to let you know that we've made major revisions to the prompt for the second paper in History/Geography/Environmental Studies 460, which I've just published to Canvas, where you'll find it in a new module of its own following Week 11. The assignment also has a new date, which has been moved forward in the semester to Monday, November 23 at 2:30pm (except for students in the Saturday sections, for whom the due date is Wednesday, November 25, at 10:00pm).
You'll find the new prompt in Canvas here:
https://canvas.wisc.edu/courses/210582/assignments/1019371
It's also linked from our course web page and can be downloaded as a PDF here:
Here's an overview of the most important changes:
Please read the revised prompt as soon as you can, since it will be an important part of our conversation in section next week when we talk about A Sand County Almanac and the assigned readings relating to it. In a very real sense, the next three discussion sections will all be informed by this writing assignment, since you will likely want to draw on these conversations with your classmates in writing your paper.
Bill
Friends--
This is just a quick reminder (one that I hope isn't needed!) that the midterm exam for 460 will become available to you today at 2:30pm on our Canvas page in the module called:
MIDTERM EXAM: 2:30pm Monday, October 12 to 2:30pm Tuesday, October 13
If you click on it, you'll be able to read the instructions for the exam and the four essay questions you'll be choosing among. Please read the instructions carefully before proceeding. Although you'll have until 2:30pm on Tuesday, October 13, to upload your essay response to the exam question you choose, we do NOT intend for you to spend 24 hours working on that essay! We expect you to spend no more than three hours on it, including the time you devote to outlining your response. If you'd like, you can break your three hours into 2-3 segments if you need to take a break in the middle. The exam is open-book, so you can consult any course materials you need while writing it, but we ask that you write your essay without seeking assistance from anyone else.
Please note that our Canvas module includes a version of the exam in Microsoft Word .docx format for you to download. After reading the instructions in the HTML version of the exam prompt, please download the Word file to your hard drive. Our preference is that you write your essay in Word format so we can mark up your answer if we need to do so. Please indicate which question you're answering, and if you do outline your essay before starting to write (which we strongly encourage you to do), please place your outline at the bottom of your Word file before uploading it so we can examine your outline if we need to do so.
If questions arise during the course of the exam, please email me and your section leader and we'll try to respond as quickly as we can. If any questions seem as if they might be of general interest to everyone taking the test, we may forward our replies to the whole course list server, so you may want to check your emails occasionally while taking the test in case we've offered any general clarifications.
Given the unusual nature of this exam, we've been assuming that McBurney students won't require any special accommodations for time (you can of course adjust the three-hour duration consistent with your McBurney warrant), but please be in touch with your section leader as soon as possible if for some reason you don't think that's true in your case.
Good luck, everyone! We very much look forward to reading your answers.
Bill
Brianna
Thomas
Zada
Hi, all. Our section meetings this week are focused on helping you prepare for the midterm exam, but I thought I should send along an email encouraging you to work together to continue reviewing with your classmates outside of section if you're so inclined.
Below are a few suggestions for ways you might do this even in the strange world of COVID-19.
I'll begin by observing that in my experience it's VERY helpful to study with other students in the class, not just by yourself, for several reasons. For one, as you brainstorm themes, possible exam questions, and strategies for answering different kinds of questions, many heads are generally better than one at coming up with a wide range of creative approaches to particular topics. For another, to the extent that you're trying to cram a bunch of well-organized, easier-to-remember information into your head so it'll be at your fingertips while writing your essay exam, having done this in the company of other people helps create a multitude of mnemonic "hooks" in your brain that will make it easier to recall information you're wanting to use to support an argument or construct a narrative. It's an oddity of the human mind that we remember things mainly by association, so that a particular argument about (for instance) why romantic landscape artists tended to frame their canvases using conventions pioneered by the 17th-century French painter Claude Lorrain wind up getting associated in your mind with something smart that your classmate Liz said during a review session. Your brain first remembers "Liz," and then a cascade of things you brainstormed with Liz is suddenly at your fingertips. This initially seems strange, since there's nothing about "Liz" that has anything inherent to do with Claude Lorrain, but it really is the way our minds work.
If you're interested, there's an ancient mnemonic technique closely linked to what I've just written called a "memory palace" (or, more mysteriously, the "method of loci") pioneered by the Romans (famously described by Cicero) and much celebrated during the Renaissance. You can read about and learn how to do it here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
https://artofmemory.com/wiki/How_to_Build_a_Memory_Palace
In my example, Liz is effectively sitting inside a room in your memory palace.
Sorry, I digress!
One of the best reasons for studying together is that it's more fun, and has the added bonus that you get to know your classmates better, which will significantly improve your experience of the course for the whole rest of the semester. So if you can manage to do so, we'd strongly encourage you to try.
Happily, the virtual environment in which we're operating this fall has some helpful tools for organizing group study. Remember, you can use the email address for your discussion section to send an email to everyone associated with your section, so that's an obvious way to set up an online meeting together. (If you've lost track of that address, just find the most recent email you've received from your section leader and you'll find the address in the To: field.) Remember that if you reply to an email you receive from that list server address, your reply will only go to the original sender unless you re-address your message to the whole list (this helps avoid unintentional spam).
In general, I'd encourage you just to use these email addresses to schedule get-togethers rather than hold discussions, so as to avoid needlessly filling everyone's Inboxes with stuff they may not want to receive.
If you do want to schedule a discussion, you can either just send out a proposed date and time to your class email list, OR you could send out a Doodle poll with several options to see what time would work best for the majority of your classmates. Doodle is free and easy to use, and you can access its scheduling tools here:
Any of you should be able to use your UW-Madison Zoom account to schedule a group conversation. Once you've settled on a time, just create the Zoom session and share the link via your section's email list. I'd suggest selecting a longer time for meeting than you actually intend to use to avoid getting cut off early.
Other helpful tools for group study would include the Google Jamboards we've been using in section for the past couple weeks, which you can access here at https://jamboard.google.com if you have a Google account. Just create the jamboard and share the link with members of your section, making sure to select the option that anyone with the link can edit the jamboard so that you can all contribute to it. Then share the link with members of your section and let them know what you want to do with them on it. You could also do the same thing in Google Docs if you're so inclined. Notice that you can use tools like these to review course themes, arguments, and evidence with classmates either synchronously or asynchronously: you could start building jamboards devoted to different themes and possible questions while holding a Zoom meeting together, and then keep adding to those jamboards after the live meeting is over. It'd probably be a good idea to do a little prestructuring of the jamboard or Google Doc to prime the pump for a group conversation, but the group as a whole can do that together as well.
In addition, we're creating special open-ended Canvas discussion boards for all of our 460 sections that are set up so that any student who has a question or comment can post it on the discussion board, and anyone else can respond or add comments or questions of their own whenever they want. These could be quite helpful for everyone, so we'd encourage you to check them several times a day between now and the exam.
Finally, here are a few suggestions about HOW to organize the material you're reviewing to make it as accessible and well-structured in your brain before you start the exam. These are suggestions I would have shared had we been able to do a large full-lecture in-person review session as I ordinarily do. In such sessions, I offer four different strategies for reviewing and structuring the themes, arguments, anecdotes, evidence, and other information you've learned in the course, all of which help store these things in ways that make them easier to retrieve and more generative of unexpected insights.
1) I'd encourage you to start by continuing the process we're also doing in section this week, of building a list of the major themes/arguments/ideas that have organized our study of American environmental history thus far. All of the questions we ask you on the exam will almost certainly center on one or more of these large concepts.
2) Unlike almost every other exam I've ever given, our test will have no objective matching section, in which we give you a list of "items" (people, events, organisms, places, dates, etc., etc.) that you're asked to link with associated phrases that somehow define or explain the significance of those "items." In case you're interested, I've attached a copy of the midterm exam from Fall 2017 to show you what one of my matching sections looks like; you'll also find four essay exam questions there that will give you a sense of the kinds of questions we typically ask on an exam like this one.) This kind of objective section didn't make sense for an open-book, take-home exam, but it may help you to know why I always include it: it encourages students to engage in a particular kind of "cram" studying that organizes the myriad details of this course--all of which can serve as concrete evidence to support larger claims and arguments--into a mnemonic structure where these linkages between details and arguments can be more easily retrieved. The conceptual device I suggest to students for accomplishing this goal is to imagine a very large matrix, in which the columns of the matrix consist of major themes/arguments/ideas of the course (from #1 above, the likely clusters from which essay questions will be drawn) and the many rows of the matrix (likely 200 or more) will be particular "items" of factual information. Having imagined this matrix, you ask yourself all the ways that a particular "item" of information might be linked to or used as evidence for an essay on a major theme/argument/idea. Remember, you're not actually constructing such a matrix; that would take far more time than it's worth. Rather, this is just a structured way of building associations in your mind. For instance: what are all the different themes/arguments/ideas to which you could link the item "fence"? Among the many candidates would be property, physical vs legal boundaries, fixity vs mobility, differences between colonists and Indians, livestock, co-invaders, weeds, barberry bushes, the blast, etc., etc. (even the first line of Robert Frost's famous poem "Mending Wall," though I've never actually mentioned it in our course: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44266/mending-wall). It would be quite easy to imagine an entire module of argument (see below) all centered on fences, and these are just some of the elements that might belong in such a module.
3) Another extraordinarily useful too for reviewing this material is to construct parallel timelines, one atop the other, each scaled with the same set of dates (probably on the scale of decades) but each devoted to a different theme or category of information. For this half of the course, you might have separate timelines for EVENTS, PEOPLE, IDEAS, LAWS, INVENTIONS/TECHNOLOGIES, PUBLICATIONS, and so on. You then drop relevant "items" onto the appropriate timeline. Before long, you'll start to see things that were going on at exactly the same time, even thought the lectures, with their highly thematic organization, obscured such simultaneities. For instance, the lecture on romantic ideas was more or less completely simultaneous with the following lectures on "The Flow of the River," "The Machine in the Garden," "Hunters and Hunted" (and even the lecture following the midterm on "Even the Oceans Fail") ... and in many ways, the discussion of romanticism makes much more sense when it's juxtaposed with the contents of these other lectures, since they explored about a number of the phenomena against which the romantics were reacting. But because the oddities of our semester (especially the very unfortunate fact that our discussion sections are spread across five days of the week from Tuesdays through Saturdays) required us to move up the romanticism lecture in order for it to be discussed in last week's sections, these larger contexts of romanticism were obscured by our lecture sequence. If you build timelines, these periodized contexts will almost certainly leap out at you. (Thoreau's first book, published in 1849, was called A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers; what do you know about the Merrimack River that might make it relevant to Thoreau's ideas?) By the way, timelines are an especially good study device to construct with a group of your classmates. During a normal semester, I tell people in sections to find a room with three blackboards in the Humanities Building and build (and then photograph) huge timelines to organize the details they're reviewing. I haven't figured out the ideal tool for doing this online, but maybe a shared Google Docs or Google Sheets file could do the trick.
4) Finally, and maybe most usefully, you will almost certainly find it helpful to study for this test by building what I think of as argumentative "modules" -- each filled with major claims and supporting evidence organized into a persuasive sequence -- to cover blocks of arguments or narratives or case studies relevant to big themes of the course. Any given essay question you might want to write will likely be assembled from modules like these, so pre-imagining the argumentative architecture and supporting evidence for major modules can't help but be useful--and is almost certainly a suppler, more nuanced way to review than trying to imagine essay questions in advance and outlining answers to these imagined questions. If instead you build argumentative modules on topics like "Native American pandemics"; "Romantic ideas of nature"; "Von Thunen's Rings"; "Commodification of native plants and animals"; etc., etc., each with a series of arguments, subarguments, anecdotes, vivid illustrations, and supporting evidence, you'll be able to deploy these modules in response to any question for which you might decide that they're relevant. You won't have time to do this work while actually writing the exam, so it's the perfect thing to do ahead of time--with the added bonus that you'll wind up understanding the course much better for having done this job of revisiting and reorganizing what you've learned this far.
In fact, that's the main reason in my mind why it's worth asking you to take examinations at all: helping you step back from the course as you've experienced it thus far to 1) review what you've learned; 2) ask yourself what it all means; and 3) make sense of it all for yourself. If you do this well, you'll not only understand and remember the particular material of this course far more effectively; you'll also learn invaluable skills for learning to learn.
Good luck...and enjoy!
Bill
Hi, everyone. I'm resending the message below as a reminder that tomorrow afternoon during our regular lecture slot (2:30-3:45pm on Wednesday, Sept 30), I'll be hoping an open town meeting for all registered students in 460. You are NOT required to attend, but are certainly welcome to join if you have the time and inclination.
I do NOT have predetermined agenda for this gathering, so it will work much better if you give some thought to questions you'd like to ask or topics you'd like me to discuss. I've never done this before, so we'll all be trying to figure out how to make the most of this time together. If it works well, we can do it again later in the semester.
One obvious topic might be the midterm exam that's coming up and strategies for reviewing and preparing to take it, so feel free to think of questions in that territory. But anything and everything is fair game: this course, environmental history in general, my own work, your bucket list of environmentally significant places to visit in North America, whatever intrigues you or strikes your fancy.
All that I ask is that you NOT share the link below with anyone outside the course, both to keep down our numbers and to do our best to avoid Zoombombing. When you first click on the link below, you'll find yourself in a Zoom Waiting Room, and we'll let you in as soon as we can confirm that you're in the course. A big thank-you to Zada Ballew for helping manage the Waiting Room.
(Senior auditors, please don't try to attend, with my apologies; we're going to have a large enough gathering without you.)
I'll look forward to seeing at least a few of you tomorrow.
Bill
(message of 9/21/20 repeated below)
From: 'William Cronon' via history460-1-f20 history460-1-f20@g-groups.wisc.edu
Subject: A Conversation with Bill Cronon: 460 Town Hall Meeting from 2:30-3:45pm on Wednesday, 9/30
Date: September 21, 2020 at 10:33:18 PM CDT
To: 460Lecture history460-1-f20@g-groups.wisc.edu
Reply-To: wcronon@wisc.edu
Friends--
A number of students have expressed regret about not being able to interact more closely with me because of online instruction and the other constraints of COVID-19. I've therefore decided to try the experiment of running a large Zoom town-hall meeting for any registered students in 460 who care to drop in to ask questions or raise topics they'd like to discuss with me about the course or the field of environmental history generally.
*I'll hold this large Zoom gathering during our regularly scheduled lecture slot from 2:30-3:45pm on Wednesday, September 30.*
This is NOT a course requirement--there's one of our regular required video lectures scheduled for that same slot, obviously--just an opportunity to participate in a large-group conversation or Q&A with me if you're so inclined.
Please understand that this session is NOT for auditors, for whom I might create a separate such gathering if there is interest. We'll likely have more than enough people in attendance even if a modest fraction of registered students drops by to participate, and auditors could easily overwhelm the exercise. So please do NOT try to attend if you're an auditor.
I'm also concerned that this is the kind of event that could easily be susceptible to Zoom bombing, so I beg you NOT to share the Zoom link for it with anyone not in our course.
Here's the link, which you can also find in Canvas:
All that said, please do mark this on your calendar and drop in if you're so inclined, with any and all questions about the course, Changes in the Land, environmental history, the practice of history generally, or even strategies for studying for the midterm exam that you'd like to discuss with me.
I'll hope to see at least some of you there. If it goes well, we can try to do this at least one or two more times later on in the semester.
Bill
Hi, everyone. A couple students have asked about adding illustrations to their papers, and whether such images count against your page total.
Although there likely aren't a lot of illustrations that are eligible to be included for this particular assignment, the general rule of thumb both for this paper and the second one is that images don't count against your page total; the same is true of your scholarly apparatus (footnotes, endnotes, bibliography). The assigned page total applies only to the body of your own text.
Good luck! We're really looking forward to what you write.
Bill
Friends--
As you know, the university announced today that it's moving back toward in-person classes for at least some courses, though the process and timetable for bringing this about remains a little uncertain and there are clear signals that these in-person classes might quickly go online again if conditions warrant.
The other section leaders and I have had long conversations with each other (and with many of our students as well) about how to respond to this latest policy reversal, and we've concluded that the benefits of returning to in-person class meetings (with the very real possibility that we might then have to switch back again to online) just aren't worth the disruptions and instabilities they entail.
Furthermore, we've come to realize (something I wasn't smart enough to anticipate myself) that in-person sections are inherently problematic for students who are under orders to quarantine or self-isolate, to say nothing of students who have tested positive for infection but are otherwise feeling well enough to continue doing course work. We've already had a number of such students in 460. Helping them keep up with the class would have been extremely challenging with in-person sections; it's relatively easy to do with online sections.
We've already been torqued a lot this semester. As we complete our first big writing assignment and move toward the midterm exam, it feels like a good time to settle into our groove and move forward in predictable ways that everyone can count on and get used to.
I'm therefore writing to announce that I've decided to keep 460 entirely online for the remainder of the semester, including the discussion sections that were originally scheduled to meet in person.
From what I can tell, our Zoom meetings have been going well, in part because we've all worked together to make them as lively and engaging and humane as we can. As someone who has been teaching in person for nearly four decades and has never taught entirely online before, I've frankly been a little surprised by how well Zoom has worked for my own discussion section. I hope that's been the experience for many of you as well, even those of you who were really hoping that in-person sections might continue to meet.
I want to extend a special thank-you to Brianna and Thomas and Zada for all the extra time they've put in and the extraordinary hard work they've done to make our 460 discussion sections work as well as they have...and I also want to thank all of you**** for rolling with these COVID-19 punches and helping us make the best of a very challenging situation.
This decision to continue meeting online is mine and mine alone. As Harry Truman famously declared, the buck stops here. If you're unhappy with me for this decision and would like to complain, feel free to let me know and I promise I won't take offense...but I hope you'll also join your classmates and section leader in working to make this the best possible educational experience we can.
I'll add that I continue to be impressed by some of the things that Zoom makes possible that actually were never easy to accomplish in my in-person discussion sections before. You'll likely experience one of them next week. As you'll see, next Monday's lecture is about romantic ideas of nature, for which one of my most important bodies of evidence are the remarkable landscape paintings produced by the Hudson River School during the middle decades of the 19th century. Although Monday's lecture has long been one of my favorites in this course, it's never been easy to talk about these paintings in discussion sections because doing so would require the time-consuming task of setting up a digital projector and projecting images on a screen, often in a poorly darkened room that's not well suited for doing this. So in the past we've often had to make do with passing around bad photocopies of individual images if we talked about these paintings at all. With this semester's online environment, I've been able to share a PDF of a few of these paintings with you online, and we'll easily be able to screen share them in section even if we decide to do so in break-out groups--MUCH easier to do in Zoom than under ordinary in-person conditions (especially in the large lecture halls in which our in-person sections were supposed to meet this semester).
All of which is just to say that good sometimes comes with the bad. I really appreciate everyone's efforts to help us lean into the good while we try to minimize the bad.
My heartfelt thanks to all of you.
Bill
Friends--
A number of students have expressed regret about not being able to interact more closely with me because of online instruction and the other constraints of COVID-19. I've therefore decided to try the experiment of running a large Zoom town-hall meeting for any registered students in 460 who care to drop in to ask questions or raise topics they'd like to discuss with me about the course or the field of environmental history generally.
I'll hold this large Zoom gathering during our regularly scheduled lecture slot from 2:30-3:45pm on Wednesday, September 30.
This is NOT a course requirement--there's one of our regular required video lectures scheduled for that same slot, obviously--just an opportunity to participate in a large-group conversation or Q&A with me if you're so inclined.
Please understand that this session is NOT for auditors, for whom I might create a separate such gathering if there is interest. We'll likely have more than enough people in attendance even if a modest fraction of registered students drops by to participate, and auditors could easily overwhelm the exercise. So please do NOT try to attend if you're an auditor.
I'm also concerned that this is the kind of event that could easily be susceptible to Zoom bombing, so I beg you NOT to share the Zoom link for it with anyone not in our course. You can find that link in Canvas.
All that said, please do mark this on your calendar and drop in if you're so inclined, with any and all questions about the course, Changes in the Land, environmental history, the practice of history generally, or even strategies for studying for the midterm exam that you'd like to discuss with me.
I'll hope to see at least some of you there. If it goes well, we can try to do this at least one or two more times later on in the semester.
Bill
Friends--
I've just published the Canvas Assignment for uploading your first paper in 460, which I've pasted below and which you can find online here:
https://canvas.wisc.edu/courses/210582/assignments/995905
Please note that if you are in one of Zada Ballew's Saturday sections, we have extended your deadline for this paper to 5:00pm on Tuesday, 9/29 (because we concluded the regular deadline wasn't fair to this group, for reasons explained below).
For everyone else, be sure to have uploaded your paper (preferably in a Microsoft Word document) by 5:00pm on Saturday, 9/26, unless you're pre-negotiated an extension with your section leader.
In addition to completing Changes in the Land for this week's section, don't forget to read Francis Higginson's 1630 document, "A Catalogue of Such Needful Things as Every Planter Doth or Ought to Provide to Go to New England," a two-page packing list for would-be colonists that can be remarkably helpful for this assignment. Be sure to have it on hand for your section this week. It's linked in Canvas here: https://canvas.wisc.edu/courses/210582/files/14280737Plus, just in case you missed it, you might be interested to read the January 24, 1855 journal entry in which Henry David Thoreau speculated about environmental change in the New England landscape. Although this journal entry is NOT a requirement of 460, so you don't have to read it, Changes in the Land opens by summarizing what Thoreau wrote in it. It's short, and may give you a different perspective on the kinds of sources we use when doing environmental history. Thoreau's journal entry is linked here:
Please give some thought to the assignment before this week's discussion section, and come prepared with any questions you'd like to ask or discuss about how best to approach it.
Bill
https://canvas.wisc.edu/courses/210582/assignments/995905
(3-4 double-spaced pages; 5-6 pages for Honors undergrads and graduate students)
Please Note: *The due date for this paper is 5:00pm on Saturday, Sept 26, for all students EXCEPT those who have Saturday sections on Sept 26.* We concluded that it's not fair to expect students in Saturday sections to submit their papers just a few hours after the discussion sections in which they'll be talking about the readings most relevant to this paper, when all other students in the course will have had at least two days to think about what they learned from those discussion sections before turning in their papers. Accordingly, students in Zada Ballew's Saturday sections (303 and 309) have a later due date for this assignment. They should upload their papers by no later than 5:00pm on Tuesday, Sept 29.
In this first written assignment, you’ll be asked to use materials from lectures and the assigned readings to pick 2-3 objects, materials, tools, organisms, or practices to offer a carefully argued, well-supported interpretation of what you see as some of the most important differences between the ways colonists and native peoples understood and interacted with the environments of the eastern seaboard of North America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. (If you’d like, you can include in your discussion an analysis of how these things changed over this period.) Try to make all of your arguments and examples work together to sustain a coherent argument, strive to balance abstract arguments with concrete evidence, and write as well as you can to give us a sense of your best prose.
Upload your document here. Word Documents are the best option to allow markups and feedback. But other documents such as PDFs are ok, too.
Friends--
I'm writing to let you know that I've decided to post the Monday and Wednesday lectures for this coming week a little earlier than I ordinarily would, because both may be helpful to you in writing your first paper for this course. Although Wednesday's lecture (for 9/23) is ostensibly scheduled for Week 4 of the course and won't be discussed until then, it is in fact intended to be an illustrated depiction of many of the themes and technologies addressed in your reading of Changes in the Land, the very topics about which you'll be writing in your first paper.
It won't hurt to wait until Wednesday to watch it, but if you have time and can do so sooner, you'll likely find it helpful for your paper.
Please remember that your first paper should be submitted (via Canvas upload) by no later than 5:00pm this coming Saturday, Sept 26. I apologize for this odd due date, but the alternative would have been the following Monday, Sept 28, which would have fallen on Yom Kippur. We wanted this assignment be due at about the same time you're reading Changes in the Land, but also far enough away from the midterm exam that the two wouldn't interfere with each other. If you find that this timing poses a significant problem for you, we're willing to give short extensions if they're pre-arranged, so if it feels that you'll need a little more time, please be in touch with your section leader soon.
Your section leader will be sending out instructions for how to upload your paper to Canvas.
The prompt for this paper is included in the course syllabus at
https://www.williamcronon.net/courses/460/460_syllabus_fall_2020.html
and reads as follows:
First Paper:
(3-4 double-spaced pages; 5-6 pages for Honors undergrads and graduate students, due by 5:00pm on Saturday, September 26): This first written assignment should be submitted by no later than 5:00pm on Saturday, September 26. In it, you’ll be asked to use materials from lectures and the assigned readings to pick 2-3 objects, materials, tools, organisms, or practices to offer a carefully argued, well-supported interpretation of what you see as some of the most important differences between the ways colonists and native peoples understood and interacted with the environments of the eastern seaboard of North America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. (If you’d like, you can include in your discussion an analysis of how these things changed over this period.) Try to make all of your arguments and examples work together to sustain a coherent argument, strive to balance abstract arguments with concrete evidence, and write as well as you can to give us a sense of your best prose.
Finally, after extended deliberations, we've resolved several more details about the midterm exam for 460 that we hope will answer some of the questions you've likely been having about it. Given the online nature of the lecture slot in which the exam is scheduled to take place, we're going to treat it as a take-home, open-book essay exam. At 2:30pm on the day of the exam (Monday, October 12), we'll post the exam to Canvas (and likely send it out as an email as well). You'll be given a choice of 3-4 questions, and will have your choice of which ONE of those 3-4 questions you'd like to answer in an 800-1200 word essay. We would like you to take no more than three hours to write your essay, though it's OK if you'd like to break up your writing of the essay into 2-3 different time blocks if that suits your schedule; just don't spend more than three hours maximum to write your answer (and please don't stay up all night preparing to write this essay)! Because we have students taking the course in many different time zones--a few of them on the far side of the planet--we're going to give you until 2:30pm on Tuesday, October 13, to submit your essay. Once we've worked out the technical details for administering the exam, you'll receive instructions from about where to find it and how to upload your essay once it's written. We'll spend our discussion sections during the week of Oct 6-10 (Week 5) reviewing for the exam, so please come to that section with any and all questions you may have about it. The final exam will likely have a similar format unless we experience significant problems with the midterm.
By the way, one of our best science writers, David Quammen, has an excellent brief op-ed in today's New York Times about the evolutionary success of COVID-19. It's relevant to this course, and well worth reading if you're so inclined:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/19/opinion/sunday/coronavirus-covid-evolution.html
See you soon!
Bill
Friends--
This is a follow-up to my late-night email yesterday in the wake of the announcement UW-Madison is moving instruction entirely online for at least the next two weeks because of the exploding rates of infection in Madison and Dane County.
I've just posted a special 13-minute video linked from our Canvas page discussing how Brianna, Thomas, Zada and I are trying to respond to this change in the university's instructional protocols, along with some extended reflections on my part about what we can learn by thinking about COVID-19 as an environmental historical event. Please watch the video at your earliest convenience.
(I apologize ahead of time for the quality of the sound; I produced the video as quickly as I could, and didn't adquately control the fan noise on my computer, which generated a rumble in the background of the audio track that I ordinarily work hard to try to suppress for your benefit.)
Crucially, I want you all to understand that we've made the decision NOT to cancel this week's in-person discussion sections as the Chancellor's announcement suggested, but rather to move them online as quickly as possible so that all students in 460, no matter what section they're in, will have had the same introductory meetings by the end of our first week of section meetings.
So if you're in any of the following sections, please if at all possible try to attend the online Zoom meetings that will now take place at the same time that your in-person section would have occurred:
303: Sat 9:55-10:45am Zada 309: Sat 11:00-11:50am Zada 312: Thurs 4:35-5:25pm Thomas 313: Thurs 5:40-6:30pm Thomas
Zada and Thomas have sent links to all their students for accessing these meetings; if by chance you haven't received those links (as might be true if you've recently changed sections), please get in touch with them as quickly as possible to obtain them.
As I said in the special video I've just posted, an irony of our current situation is that we're living through a major human pandemic at precisely the moment when the history of pandemics--their causes and consequences--is at the heart of what we're discussing in the course.
Rarely have I more deeply felt myself to have been handed a "teachable moment" for one of my courses--and never has such a "teachable moment" felt less welcome.
But given the relevance especially of next Monday's lecture--which analyzes the terrible epidemics that swept across the western hemisphere and devastated native populations from the 16th century forward--I've decided to post it now rather than wait until Monday afternoon as I might ordinarily do. I'll offer the trigger warning that it is easily the most horrific lecture I'll give all semester long, so please prepare yourself for that fact...but the lecture could hardly be more relevant to what we're all now experiencing.
If you haven't already bookmarked and aren't already consulting regularly the dashboards of COVID infections for the geographies that matter most to you, I'd encourage you to do so. Here are the three most relevant links in case you haven't seen all of them:
UW-Madison:
https://smartrestart.wisc.edu/dashboard/
Dane County:
https://cityofmadison.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/e22f5ba4f1f94e0bb0b9529dc82db6a3
The World:
https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6
As I say in the video, we're hoping you'll work with us to make this now all-online version of 460 as engaging and exciting and valuable as we hoped its hybrid (or, for that matter, its former all-in-person) versions would be. If we all work together toward that end, we can still make this a great learning experience for all of us.
Please let us know what we can do to help make that happen, and please join us in working to make it a reality.
And...take good care of yourselves. Stay safe.
Bill (and Brianna and Thomas and Zada)
Friends--
By now, you've probably read the Chancellor's announcement
https://news.wisc.edu/university-shifts-to-two-weeks-remote-instruction/
that she's planning to move all UW-Madison instruction online for at least the next two weeks because of rapidly rising infection rates. I've only just read the email myself, and haven't yet had time to consult with the TA's about how we'll manage this, but I'm writing you now urging you to check your emails tomorrow morning (Thursday) to see if we can move quickly enough to switch this week's remaining in-person sections online quickly enough that we can still meet this week.
The affected sections are:
303: Sat 9:55-10:45am Zada
309: Sat 11:00-11:50am Zada
312: Thurs 4:35-5:25pm Thomas
313: Thurs 5:40-6:30pm Thomas
The Chancellor has announced that all in-person classes from tomorrow through the weekend are simply cancelled, but this seems to me extremely problematic from an educational point of view because it will put four groups of students a week behind everyone else in our course in terms of discussion sections. I'd really like to avoid that if at all possible.
I don't know whether it will be possible for us to get everything in place to handle online meetings tomorrow and Saturday, but I'm hoping it will be. I'll consult with Zada and Thomas about this tomorrow, and you should expect to hear from them, and perhaps again from me, as soon as we can give you an update.
In the meantime, I'd be very grateful if those of you in the affected sections would give serious thought to where you can locate yourselves during your scheduled meeting times so you'll have adequate Internet access and the hardware you need to be able to attend online Zoom sections during your regularly scheduled time for these sections. It's possible we won't be able to pull this off quickly enough...but it's my very strong preference to try if we possibly can.
Please accept my apologies for the massive inconvenience this is causing everyone. We'll do our best to make this work for everyone, I promise.
Such times we live in. My environmental history colleagues in the future will surely be teaching this story in future versions of this course.
Hang in there, everyone.
Bill
Hi, everyone. I apologize for the flurry of emails you continue to receive from me and from your section leaders, but we're scurrying to address unusual problems arising from this new online environment and from the university's efforts to lower COVID-19 risks, so please forgive us if it feels like we're over-communicating.
I'm writing now just to remind you that my office hours as the lecturer of the course are on Wednesdays from 10:00am-12:00noon. You'll find me at the following Zoom link if you want to drop in to chat:
https://uwmadison.zoom.us/j/95938501913
You can also dial in with this one-tap mobile phone number
+13126266799,,95938501913# US (Chicago)
which translates to 312-626-6799, though I'd much prefer to see you via a video link if at all possible (and I'm not sure how well the Zoom waiting room works on audio).
Please record and bookmark this information, since they should continue to be active for the full semester.
When you arrive, you'll be placed in the Zoom waiting room until I admit you, and since that could take a while, please be sure you've got something productive to do while you wait. I'll be trying to figure out optimal protocols for not wasting students' time while they wait to see me, and may (for instance) admit everyone in the waiting room all at once to try to determine whose questions can be dealt with quickly, who needs more time, and so on, before queuing people up and sending them back to the waiting room.
Please bear with me as I try to figure the best ways to do this that are as respectful as possible of your time. (We're all learning the many ways that online learning consumes time all sorts of unexpected ways!)
Please remember too that for those of you not in my own Honors / Grad discussion section, your first line of communication about the syllabus, assignments, and other questions you may have about 460 should be your individual section leader, so please reach out to that person first, especially since they're the ones who will be evaluating and grading your work, and whom I hope you'll get to know well over the course of the semester.
For your reference, here are our email addresses again, which you should add to your Contacts list for the course:
Zada Ballew: zballew@wisc.edu
Bill Cronon: wcronon@wisc.edu
Thomas Kivi: kivi@wisc.edu
Brianna Lafoon: lafoon@wisc.edu
With nearly 230 registered students in 460, and more than a hundred auditors as well, there's no way I can meet and get to know all of you individually, much as I might like to be able to do so. But I'm always happy to talk with you if you've got something you'd especially like to share or ask about.
In general, please drop by my office hours if the topic you'd like to discuss can be covered in 5-15 minutes; if you need longer than that, it's probably best to send me an email to set up a separate time to chat.
I hope you're doing OK now that classes are fully under way, even despite the many new challenges that COVID-19 are posing. I'll have another video lecture posted tomorrow afternoon, and hope you enjoy your first 460 discussion sections this week.
Bill
Hi, all. This is a brief but very important heads-up about a software problem we've just discovered in the email lists for 460.
Please read carefully.
One of our section leaders realized early this afternoon that the messages that had just gone out with reminders about our first section meetings tomorrow seemed not to have gone to the correct students: some students who had changed sections last week were not yet reflected in the Google Groups email lists that the university is supposed to maintain so we can communicate in real time with the students in our sections.
I had a long conversation with DoIT about this, and confirmed that Google Groups appears not to be updating properly. Unfortunately, the DoIT team that works on Google Groups is on holiday because of Labor Day, so the problem won't be fixed until tomorrow at the very earliest.
This means that we've had to develop a workaround strategy for sending another round of emails to everyone we know to be registered as of 2pm this afternoon in each of 460's 13 sections. You should be receiving one of these updating emails for your section sometime later this afternoon. Crucially, it will contain the Zoom link for your section if you are meeting online this week. Any such Zoom link you receive this afternoon should supercede any Zoom link you may have received earlier--*especially* if you've recently changed sections.
(If you're meeting in person this week, this is less of a problem for you--you're meeting in-person as originally scheduled--but you should still make note of any Zoom links your section leader sends you, for instance, for office hours.)
By the way, please treat these Zoom links as confidential. It's very important that only the students registered for a particular section attend that section, so we'd be very grateful if you'd share them with no on else--though you should record and bookmark them carefully, since you'll be using them all semester long.
I apologize for this snafu, which is hardly the first we've had to deal with. (My last-minute decision last Tuesday night to switch from Kaltura to Vimeo for video-streaming the lectures was even more white knuckle than this one.)
I think that's all for now. Thanks for your patience as we debug all the unanticipated glitches and challenges we're encountering in this strange new COVID world....
Bill
Friends--
As I've already communicated to you, the only one of our assigned books for which I was unable to arrange online digital access through the UW-Madison Library portal is my own Changes in the Land. We'll be reading and discussing it for the next couple weeks and it's central to your first writing assignment--so you definitely need to find a way to read it for the course.
Many of you have already made arrangements for obtaining access to that book (and I've already suggested that it may be preferable for you to own your own physical or ebook copies not just of this volume but the others we've assigned as well).
But for those of you who are having trouble finding a copy of Changes, I wanted to remind you that scribd.com appears to provide online access to the book as part of its regular subscription. So any of you who already subscribe to scribd.com can read Changes there if you'd like.
I'm sending this additional note to let you know that if you DON'T already subscribe to scribd.com, you can sign up for a "free trial membership" of 30 days, which means you could read the book via that route if you haven't found another way to access it. If you adopt this strategy, just remember that your "free" subscription will start charging a monthly fee ($8.99, I think) to your credit card if you don't cancel it at the end of your trial month. (Also, don't forget that if you subscribe today, your access to the book via this free trial membership would run out just before our midterm exam, so this may at best be a temporary solution to the problem.)
I hope this is helpful to those of you who are having trouble finding copies of the book.
Bill
Hi, all. Apologies for yet another email...hopefully these will die down once the dust of the semester has settled a bit.
One of your classmates pointed out that the assignments for Changes in the Land during Weeks 2 and 3 of the semester are given as a series of pages in the physical book, which aren't typically visible to students reading ebooks. This is a great reminder that we should list book assignments not just in terms of pages but also in terms of chapters.
arep>So...for your section meeting in Week 2 of the semester you should plan to have read the Foreword, Preface, and Chapters 1-4 of Changes (in addition to the selection from Susan Hill's The Clay We Are Made Of that is linked in Canvas, which is Part I of that book, and the short article by Alfred W. Crosby, also linked in Canvas).For Week 3 of the semester, you should read the rest of Changes in the Land, including Chapters 5-8 and the Afterword, along with the brief two-page document by Francis Higginson that is linked from Canvas. If by chance you're reading the first edition of Changes, which lacks the afterword (about how the book came to be written), there's a link to that text in Canvas as well.
Remember, for our first section meetings, next week is Week 1 of the semester (consisting of this past Wednesday's lecture, Monday's non-existent Labor Day non-lecture, and the following section), so the assignments for Week 2 are for the sections that meet from Sept 15-19. (Next Wednesday's lecture begins Week 2 of the semester, but you won't discuss its contents until the following week's section.)
I know this is confusing at first, but you'll get used to it soon, I promise.
I'll try to redescribe any other assignments in the syllabus and Canvas that originally referred to book pages to clarify which chapters they are, though this should affect only a handful of the assignments.
Enjoy the long weekend!
Bill
Friends--
Because we've been receiving many requests from students seeking to change their discussion sections for History / Geography / Environmental Studies 460, I want to provide some updates about section availability and repeat what I said in an earlier email.
Please remember that if you are currently registered for a section you cannot attend, the fact that you are registered for that section gives you NO claim to a seat in any other section. You'll help everyone, including yourself, if you drop that section as soon as possible so that other students will see that it has a seat available. If they move to it from another section, that may open a seat for you in their section.
I've just given permission to several students who were registered in other sections to shift over to Section 301, the Honors / Grad section on Wednesday mornings, and have told them to drop their current section as soon as possible. This should open up at least a few seats. Furthermore, we're at the moment in the semester when many students make final decisions about whether they really want to take the courses for which they're currently registered (and also, this year, whether they might want to consider taking a leave of absence this fall because of the strange circumstances imposed by COVID-19).
So I would expect at least a few other seats to become available between now and September 11, when fall registration effectively ends. If you're trying to find another section, keep a close eye on the Registrar's web page, and grab any section that will work for you.
I'm sorry, but we cannot do this for you by hand. The system simply makes that too difficult, especially under the very challenging circumstances of this particular fall.
Finally, remember that although you can add your name to waiting lists for sections you'd like to take, it would be better to grab an open seat if you can find one. A big frustration of the waiting list system is that it doesn't make it easy to see how many people are waiting in a queue so you can guesstimate the chances that you'll actually be admitted. (I can't see that information any more easily than you can.)
For what it's worth, I can with considerable difficulty report the following, which may be helpful if you're still looking for a section. As of this instant, here are the numbers of students in waiting lists for particular sections:
306: 1
308: 4
310: 3
As far as I can tell, no other sections have waiting lists right now, so if I were hunting, I'd probably stay away from the waiting lists for 308 and 310 and try to look elsewhere.
Believe me, I'm no fan of this system, but it's all we have to work with. Best of luck to you, and I really hope you're able to take the course.
Bill
Friends--
This is not an email I expected to send, but I hope you'll see my reasons for doing so by the time you've finished reading. I apologize ahead of time for its length. It's addressed mainly to 460 students who will be attending in-person sections next week, but I hope everyone will read it so we can all be thinking about how we can work together to make this the best semester we can under the challenging circumstances we're all facing.
As you know, UW-Madison made the decision early this summer that it would open this fall with half of its classes meeting in person and half online. 460 is an example of a hybrid class, since its large size prevents us from meeting in person for lecture. Half of our discussion sections are scheduled to meet in-person, trying to protect everyone's safety with COVID-driven requirements like mandatory masks, 6-foot social distancing, etc. The other half of our discussion sections are scheduled to meet online.
No one knows how well this will work, or for how long, since a spike in on-campus COVID-19 cases could easily send in-person classes online, as has already happened at many colleges and universities all across the country.
Zada, Brianna, Thomas, and I are deeply committed to making this the best educational experience we can for all of you, no matter what the environment in which we're sharing this course for you. I hope you can already see the care and attention I've been trying to pour into my online lectures, an unexpected assignment for which I've been trying to prepare most of the summer. They're not the same as doing this in a large lecture hall, and I frankly miss that.
But they do have some advantages. You can probably see what's on the screen better than when you're at the back of a big lecture hall like 3650 Humanities. You can almost certainly see me better. You can watch the more than once if you'd like, and there's no problem with missing a lecture because you couldn't attend a particular class. The videos are more conversational, and arguably more intimate. Most of all, I hope you can still feel the ways I'm trying to connect with you as I speak. That matters a lot to me, since I think a lot of your learning experience (as well as my own) depends on it.
Next week, we'll be meeting our discussion sections for the first time, and I'd like to ask you to think carefully about whether the sections of ours that are scheduled to meet in-person will actually be preferable to the ones we'll be holding online.
One of my beliefs as a teacher--unsurprisingly, I guess--is that the environment in which our classes take place can have a huge impact on how students experience and learn in a course.
My standard practice before teaching any class is to go visit the classroom in which I'll be teaching to make sure I understand the special challenges it may pose and how I'm going to navigate those challenges to make sure they don't get in the way of my students' experience.
This summer, "visiting my classroom" has meant trying out a wide range of different software/hardware combinations, studio setups, and workflow protocols for recording and editing my lectures to yield the production values that I hope will give them some of the same impact they would have in a lecture hall; only time will tell how successful I'll be at that.
In the case of physical classrooms, this rule of mine that I always visit rooms ahead of time has enabled me, for instance, to swing into action if I'm ever assigned a room with fixed seating for leading an 18-person discussion section. When that has happened in the past, I've adamantly insisted that I be changed to a room with moveable desks, with a large enough seating capacity so that all of my students can sit in a single circle (not in two concentric circles so some students wind up looking at each other's backs). That way students can see each other's faces, hear each other, listen to each other, and hopefully build the kinds of real relationships, even friendships, that in my experience are vital resources for the time we spend learning together and getting to know each other.
The precautions the university has rightly put in place to try to reduce the risks of spreading COVID-19 have the unfortunate consequence of undermining right from the start some of the things one wants for building a good discussion section. When everyone in a room has their face half covered with a mask (and the instructor is wearing a shield in addition to a mask), we lose at least half the information on which we usually rely when we read each other's body language about how we're all feeling. When you add to the masks the 6-foot social distancing rule, you make it much harder for everyone to see each other even if their faces weren't so covered up. Worse, masks and 6-foot separation make it much harder for everyone to hear and be heard, even those with naturally loud voices.
Although my own Honors / Grad discussion section has been scheduled to meet online right from the start, I've been worrying all summer about how to help Thomas, Zada, and Brianna mitigate these COVID-imposed challenges to generate lively, engaging, valuable discussions for those of you registered for in-person sections.
Amid all my anxieties getting my video lectures launched this semester, I didn't focus until just this past weekend on the actual rooms to which our in-person discussion sections have been assigned for their meetings. That was a mistake on my part. This weekend, I "visited" those rooms online, and was frankly appalled that the university expects us to hold discussions in such spaces (though I completely understand and sympathize with the decision that was made to use such rooms given the limited alternatives available for reducing the risk of COVID exposure).
Although our rooms will enable us (easily) to meet our COVID social-distancing requirements, that's about the only good thing I can say about them.
As you'll see from the pictures I've pasted below, they are all VERY large lecture halls, with tightly spaced, fixed seating, all facing toward a lecture platform at the front of the room. All are designed to seat well over 100 people. This means that the space will feel cavernous for 18 people, and will swallow sound even more than your masks will. Worse, unless we come up with some workaround arrangement whereby some people sit on desks facing backwards (hardly the most comfortable arrangement for a 50-minute section), these rooms almost require that everyone sit facing toward the front of the room, looking at each other's backs instead of faces, making it much harder to hear each other and essentially impossible to see facial expressions.
When I saw these photographs, my heart sank. I've been assuming for some time that our in-person sections might be forced to go online if COVID infection rates start to spike at UW-Madison as they have on so many other campuses. But these pictures now make me think that if these are the spaces in which we're being asked to have real conversations with each other, we'd actually be better off going online--for purely pedagogical as opposed to epidemiological reasons.
My sense that online might actually be preferable is heightened by the news earlier this week that we'll finally have access to Zoom, which all of my colleagues with greater online experience than me agree is vastly superior to most other software for holding group discussions -- because everyone's faces can appear on one screen at the same time, and also because Zoom's breakout group functions make it so easy to divide sections into on-the-fly smaller groups that if used well can really help energize the larger conversation. My wife (a Middle Eastern historian) taught her seminar-sized classes on Zoom when her university went online last spring, and I marveled at how much positive energy I could sense in the online discussions I occasionally overheard in her "classroom."
None of us four discussion leaders is experienced with Zoom, so we're all going to be learning this technology as we go along. We're really hoping you'll come to section committed to partnering with us to make online sections become a great learning experience for all of us.
But my question now is about our in-person sections. I know from the results we've received thus from the poll we sent out -- please be sure to complete it if you haven't already done so -- that many of you are really looking forward to in-person classes, and many of the rest of you are worried about whether you can stay motivated and engaged in an online environment.
I will say for myself that if I had to choose between leading a discussion on Zoom as opposed to leading a discussion in one of these (I think awful) rooms while wearing masks with six-foot separation and everyone looking at each other's backs (or constantly twisting around to look over our shoulders for 50 minutes), I think I'd probably choose Zoom in a heartbeat. I think it's going to be really difficult to make these big lecture halls work for us.
I'm not asking you to agree with me about this. I'm asking you think about the points I've made here, reflect on them, recognizing the strengths and weaknesses of these different learning environments for the kind of semester we're hoping to have together, and come to discussion next week prepared to talk about these questions if your section is being held in one of these rooms.
If you're persuaded that Zoom might be better, it would be good to hear that from you. If you'd like to keep meeting in person even under COVID regulations in rooms like these, please come with ideas about how we render this very challenging environment as humane and engaging and user-friendly as possible.
For what it's worth, I do believe we can stay reasonably safe in these rooms. I'm much less sure we can have a great learning experience in them.
It's going to be a challenging semester for all of us, but I believe that if we work together with creativity and generosity, we can still have a great experience and learn a lot together. As the old cliche says, when given a lemon, make lemonade.
Thanks for hearing me out.
Bill
Here are the rooms to which our in-person sections have been assigned. Please understand that I'm not blaming the people who made these assignments. They're doing the best they can to keep people safe, even if the decisions they're having to make may have unintended consequences for the quality of our classroom experience.
Section 302, 5106 Sewell Social Science (Brianna):
Sections 303, 309, 180 Science Hall (Zada):
Section 304, 5206 Sewell Social Sciences (Brianna):
Sections 312, 313, 22 Ingraham Hall (Thomas):
Friends--
Having resolved the remaining details of the syllabus and assignments earlier this week (and making other modifications now that we know we'll be able to use the much-preferable Zoom for our online discussion sections), I'm happy to report that the first lecture for 460 is now available for you to view...but not quite in the way I expected, so please read carefully.
Although I was able last week to upload a couple course lectures to Kaltura, the video-streaming software that the university makes available with Canvas, I had such a nightmare this evening trying to upload the 15-minute introductory segment of this first lecture that I lost confidence that we can count on Kaltura to transfer lectures from my computer to yours reliably and at a high enough quality that we'll all be happy with it. Mid-evening, I made the decision to purchase a personal subscription to Vimeo, the premier online video-streaming website, and will now plan to make the lectures available to you via that medium. This should result in a much-improved experience for you on several fronts.
1) Vimeo is already proving itself to be a far more reliable environment for me to upload and process the video files for these lectures.
2) It will almost certainly provide much more reliable streaming for you.
3) Furthermore, please be aware that Vimeo can deliver videos to you at different resolutions, much as you may be accustomed to doing on YouTube. Its default will be to automatically decide on the resolution that is best suited to your device and the speed of your Internet connection. I've found that it often picks a lower resolution than I would like (probably because that means it doesn't have to output such large files), but I would strongly encourage you to stream the lectures at the highest resolution your system and connection can handle without generating too many pauses or other glitches. To change the streaming resolution in Vimeo, click on the little white gear in the lower right-hand corner of the Vimeo screen (see screen shot below). When you do, you'll be presented with several different resolution settings, and you can pick the one that works best for you. (This also means I can upload higher-resolution videos for those of you who can handle them, without creating problems for those of you who might find those files too large.)
I'd be grateful if you wouldn't share these Vimeo links with anyone outside the class.
I'll still plan to create lecture pages in our weekly modules, where you'll find links to the note sheet and video(s) for each lecture. Please let me know if you experience technical problems with any of these arrangements, but I'm hoping Vimeo will significantly improve your experience of the lectures.
Bill
Friends--
In addition to the long email we've just sent to help you get off to a good start in History / Geography / Environmental Studies 460, "American Environmental History," we'd be VERY grateful if you'd be willing to fill out this brief survey in Google Docs
Here's the URL to paste into your browser in case that doesn't work:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Ny5R5cYdf_iQYikDaWtmE0avjRp0w0TwLG1_x-tTH8I/edit?ts=5f4d6fcc
It won't take long, we promise, but it'll really help us as we try to get things off to the best possible start as we try to figure out how best to meet everyone's needs this semester. Please fill it out at your earliest convenience.
Thanks!!
Bill
Brianna
Thomas
Zada
Welcome to History/Geography/Environmental Studies 460, "American Environmental History," in which you are currently enrolled. We're delighted you've decided to join us for the semester!
Although you'll find much more comprehensive details about the course in our syllabus, here are a few immediate announcements to get you started. Please read this email carefully so you'll know how to begin navigating this strangest of all semesters, which is unfolding in ways none of us could have imagined even just half a year ago.
FIRST LECTURE WILL BE ON WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 2:
Our first lecture, which like all the others will be accessible online all semester long, will go live by mid-day on Wednesday, September 2. Lectures will always be posted by no later than the dates and times we would originally have met in person had COVID-19 not intervened on all of our lives: Wednesdays and Mondays at 2:30pm. One benefit of the epidemic is that you'll be able to watch (and, if you'd like, re-watch) these lectures at any time that's convenient for you, though you should always plan to have viewed them at least once before the discussion section when we'll be talking about them. They're designed as traditional UW-Madison power lectures, and typically run 60-75 minutes in length, so please plan accordingly.
FIRST DISCUSSION SECTIONS WILL BE HELD AFTER LABOR DAY SEPTEMBER 8-12:
Discussion sections, whether held online or in-person, are a very important part of this course, so please be sure to attend regularly right from the start!
An oddity of this class is that our thematic "weeks"--all identified in the syllabus--aren't calendar weeks, but consist instead of a Wednesday lecture, the following Monday lecture, and whatever discussion section follows after those two lectures. Although this takes a little getting used to, it guarantees that all discussion sections have access to the same material so they can all progress in parallel through the same general topics all semester long.
Today's big news, by the way, is that we learned literally this afternoon that the university has finally acquired an institutional subscription to Zoom, which a great many of my colleagues believe is superior to most other software environments for class discussions (not least because discussion members should all be able to see each other's faces at the same time in the Zoom environment, though the software has many other advantages as well). The other section leaders and I are now scurrying to modify arrangements we originally put in place to teach online sections in BB Collaborate Ultra, shifting them over to Zoom instead, which is why I'm not able in this email to give you full details about Zoom access to your section (if your section is meeting online).
Please be on the lookout for an email from your section leader in the next few days providing the link for access the Zoom meeting of your section. You'll use the same Zoom link for your section all semester long, so PLEASE make careful note of it and store it in a safe place. The last thing you want to do is to lose track of it just before a class meeting. I'd suggest making a recurring entry in your electronic calendar and pasting the URL there where you can always find it. (Zoom is not yet integrated with Canvas, so there's no easy way for us to give you access to the URL there.)
IMPORTANT: SWITCHING SECTIONS:
If you are currently registered for the course in a section that you cannot actually attend, you *must* drop that section and register for another section that you are able to attend. You cannot simply switch sections informally, and you can only change to a section that has available openings. Be forewarned that being registered in a section you cannot actually attend gives you NO claim on any other sections of the course, so there is no incentive to remain registered in a section you know will not fit your schedule. Remaining in such a section prevents other students from registering for it, so you will be doing everyone a favor if you drop that section as soon as possible. If you're still trying to find a section that will work for you, you should check the Registrar's website for 460 as frequently as you can between now and next week to see if anything opens up; if it does, you should grab the open slot that works for you as quickly as possible. (This may involve putting your name on the waiting list for a section, given the high demand for this course.) This is the only way you'll be able to take the course. Section leaders will NOT permit students to attend sections in which they are not actually registered.
This unfortunately also applies to switching between in-person and online sections. Although none of us knows for sure whether in-person sections will continue meeting, given the nature of the epidemic, you cannot use your enrollment in an in-person section to request transfer into an online section. If you test positive for COVID-19 and are no longer able to attend in-person sections, we'll do everything we can to help you navigate that situation, but it's the only way at this stage that you could migrate (at least temporarily) from an in-person to an online section. The university has built very careful protocols for tracing contacts as it monitors for the spread of COVID-19, and one of the expectations of those protocols is that students will continue to attend the sections to which they have been assigned. So: please do not plan on being able to switch between sections unless you actually become infected.
IF YOU'RE INTERESTED IN THE HONORS / GRAD SECTION 301:
The one exception to this rule about transfers between sections not being possible is if you are an Honors undergraduate or a graduate student not already registered for Section 301, which I myself teach from 8:30-9:45am Wednesdays. Please note: it it is an online, NOT an in-person, section. If you would like to be considered for permission to transfer into this section, please send an email to me at wcronon@wisc.edu at your earliest convenience (and no later than by 4:00pm on Wednesday, Sept 2) so I'll know of your interest and your reasons for wishing to enroll in the Honors/grad section. I'll make decisions about admitting a few more students into that section shortly after the first lecture. The sooner you can be in touch with me if you're interested in transferring, the better. Even if you've written me about this before, please do so again, explaining your reasons for wishing to be admitted to the Honors/Grad section. You must be either registered as an Honors undergraduate or as a graduate student to be considered for admission--and should be aware that you'll be expected to write longer papers if you are admitted.
COURSE WEBSITE, CANVAS PAGE, AND SYLLABUS:
We have a course page on my personal website at
http://www.williamcronon.net/courses/460/
which you should bookmark and get to know well. (You can also always find it by Googling the string "cronon 460.") Handouts will appear on that page containing outline notes for each individual lecture, and you'll probably want to follow along and mark these up as you view the lectures. I've just uploaded and provided links to the full syllabus, which you'll find formatted both for printing and for on-screen viewing. The full syllabus is given there in both HTML and PDF format, the former best for viewing on screen, the latter better for printing.
The syllabus gives a comprehensive overview of all assignments, including all readings, exams, and writing assignments. Please read it very carefully, and refer to it often as the semester unfolds.
The syllabus is reproduced in weekly modules on the Canvas page for our course, which you should also bookmark. You'll find it here:
https://canvas.wisc.edu/courses/210582
Although it's not quite as good for giving a broad overview of the course, it does give you the links you'll need for finding the online lectures and for accessing most of the course readings.
Given the challenges of the epidemic, we worked hard to try to make as many of the readings available online as we could, and you'll find links to most of them in Canvas. Unfortunately, the only book for which we were unable to get online access is my own Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (any edition). Since we start reading it the week after next, you should move as quickly as you can to track down a copy for yourself. The University Bookstore should have copies, and it should also be available readily for purchase from your favorite online bookseller; ebook versions can be purchased via the links on this page:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780809016341
If you're able, we'd also encourage you to purchase your own copies of the other four books we'll be reading, since in our experience students retain more of their content when these are read and annotated either on paper or in the form factor of a tablet computer; but you're also welcome to access them through the links to the UW-Madison Library that you'll find on our Canvas modules.
EMAIL COMMUNICATIONS:
As you can probably already tell, we rely heavily on email to communicate with students in 460, so please get in the habit of checking email regularly for communications like this one, which will come either from me or from the leader of your discussion section. (Most won't be nearly as long as this one!) We archive all of the most important of these emails on the course website at
http://www.williamcronon.net/courses/460/460_emails.html
which is accessible along with everything else via the course web page at
http://www.williamcronon.net/courses/460
...another good reason to make sure you bookmark this last link and visit it regularly. Give it a try now and you'll find this email already there.
That's all for now, though you'll be hearing from us again soon about section meetings next week. We're looking forward to "seeing" you soon. Welcome aboard!
Bill Cronon
and the rest of your section leaders
Zada Ballew
Thomas Kivi
Brianna Lafoon