History / Geography / Environmental Studies 469
The Making of the American Landscape

Beltline in Southwest Madison, 1949 and 2010

This course surveys the history of the United States and its colonial precursors from an unusual perspective: the evolution of the American landscape. Designed to complement existing courses on American environmental history and the history of the American West, it begins by orienting students to the geography of the North American continent, paying special attention to those features--geology, physiography, climate, vegetation, ecology--that have had the greatest influence on human lives in different regions. It also offers tools for interpreting landscape: different ways of periodizing the American past, different ways of mapping American space, different ways of narrating American historical geographical change. Once this basic introduction has been completed, the course explores different elements of the national landscape at moments when they became prominent features of American life, tracing their stories forward in time. Eclectic rather than encyclopedic, it focuses on landscape elements and processes most likely to be helpful to students as they try to understand the world around them.

For many years, my survey course on American Environmental History (History / Geography / Environmental Studies 460) asked students to write a "place paper" in which they select a place they know well and write an environmental history of that place. Although this proved to be a wonderful assignment, and many students report having benefitted a great deal from it, I was never completely confident that a lecture course focusing mainly on systemic environmental change, ideas of nature, and environmental politics really gave students the tools they needed to write these place papers. This new course on "The Making of the American Landscape" is my solution to this pedagogical problem: by tracing the physical, cultural, economic, and material evolution of the nation's different landscapes, it seeks to lay much firmer foundations on which student place papers can be constructed. With this in mind, I moved this semester-long final research assignment from 460 to 469, which means that the various resources I developed for the place paper are now available for this course.

Although 469 is every bit as much a survey of environmental history as 460 is--and the two courses are designed to complement each other with as little repetition as possible--469 focuses much more on the evolution of the material landscape and the various historical relationships that have shaped it over the long sweep of American history. As such, 469 places more emphasis on historical geography than 460 does, and it also spends more time teaching students concrete skills for reading the landscape: interpreting maps and aerial photos; using natural features to understand settlement patterns; tracing the growth of transportation networks; the evolving infrastructures of water supply, sewage, energy, and other such systems; the history of architectural construction and the built environment; and so on and on. By the time students complete this course, they should have in their personal toolkits a set of skills for interpreting landscapes that they can use for the rest of their lives. As such, the course is an intentional homage to Aldo Leopold's famous Wildlife Ecology 118 course at the University of Wisconsin, first taught in 1939, in which "reading the landscape" was one of his chief goals.

"The Making of the American Landscape" aspires to give students not just a survey of the changing landscapes of the United States from colonial times to the present, but also different ways of seeing those landscapes, so that our national history and geography come alive in new ways. By the end of the course, students will have learned to:

1. Identify numerous features of the American landscapes and understand their origin and evolution;

2. Think spatially and geographically about historical change;

3. Improve their skills in reading maps, satellite photographs, and other cartographic documents;

4. Do digital and archival research to trace the history of a particular American landscape;

5. Learn to juxtapose sources and research questions to yield original historical interpretations;

6. Apply alternative periodizations to changing landscapes in order to narrate their pasts;

7. Synthesize historical geography at the national scale to interpret local landscape change;

8. Learn to view landscape as the extraordinarily rich historical document in which they themselves live.