W. G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape (1955). The great classic of English landscape history.
A. Wainwright, A Coast to Coast Walk (1973).
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (1949). Among its other claims to fame, this is from my point of view a great classic of American landscape history.
Holling C. Holling, Paddle to the Sea (1941).
Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth (1961).
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (1954-55).
C. S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia (1949-54).
Alan Garner, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960); The Moon of Gomrath (1963). Two English fantasy novels imagined into the actual landscapes of the county of Cheshire with remarkable verisimilitude.
William Cronon, "Landscape and Home: Environmental Traditions in Wisconsin," Wisconsin Magazine of History (Winter, 1990-1991), 82-105. An essay on how cave exploring became a doorway into environmental history, downloadable here:
https://www.williamcronon.net/writing/cronon_landscape_and_home.pdf
William Cronon, "Storytelling," AHA Presidential Address, 2013:
https://www.williamcronon.net/aha-writings.html
Alex MacLean, Designs on the Land: Exploring America from the Air (2002). MacLean is arguably the greatest aerial photographer seeking to depict human transformations of the American landscape; his work is always worth pondering. For samples of his work, see:
http://www.alexmaclean.com
Georg Gerster, Below from Above: Aerial Photography (1986). Striking aerial photographs of landscapes with complex environmental transformations going on in them. For examples, see:
http://georggerster.com/en/aerial-photography-worldwide
Carl E. Hiebert, This Land I Love: Waterloo County (2003). Aerial photographs of Amish landscapes in Ontario.
Mark Hirsch, That Tree (2013). Extraordinary photographs of a single tree in a field near Platteville, Wisconsin, taken by a master photographer using only his iPhone. See also Hirsch's website and Facebook page:
http://www.thattree.net
and
https://www.facebook.com/photosofthattree/
Hirsch's account of how he came to take these remarkable photos can be found here:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mark-hirsch-how-a-tree-helped-heal-me/
In this final lecture, I'd like to reflect back on the whole semester of the course. There are at least two quite different ways I could do this: one would be to revisit all the lectures and ask "What are the grand ideas and particularly important details that I want to reemphasize for students?" But another way to remind you what this class has been about would be to tell you the story (or stories) of how I myself fell in love with doing landscape history. I'll try do some of both these things in this lecture, but more of the latter than the former.
(I'll include fewer links with this note sheet than I have on earlier ones, since the relevant links for topics I mention below can best be found on the earlier note sheets that discuss them in more detail.)
In this course, we've spent a lot of time looking at Erwin Raisz's classic 1954 pen-and-ink map of the United States. When you now look at this remarkable map, I hope you see many places and patterns and processes reflected on it than you were able to see when you saw it for the first time. Those patterns operate at all scales, extending to include all sorts of relationships in both the past and the present.
What are some major ideas and themes of this course?
I might start by reviewing physical geography themes, reminding you of the places and regions and watersheds of North America: a mountainous western section, a lower set of mountains in the east, the great central valley between these mountain chains, the rivers we pay so little attention to today, and the watersheds they drain. Then there are the physiographic provinces that group parts of North America into regions more alike than not: the coastal plains in the East, the Piedmont, the Appalachians, central lowlands, the Great Lakes, the Laurentian upland pointing us toward the great Canadian Shield, the Great Plains and Canadian Prairies, the Rocky Mountains, the Colorado plateau, Basin and Range, and the coastal and Cascade provinces of California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia.
In each of these physiographic provinces, we find very different histories, geologies, ecologies, and human migration patterns. Those differences correlate with different vegetation systems: grasslands, wetlands, boreal woodlands, temperate and mixed forests, deserts and semi-deserts, and scrublands. And these different vegetation systems divide the continent into landscapes that have profoundly influenced the kinds of choices that different groups of human beings from different cultural backgrounds have made about how to live in the places they call home. In building their lives, they have inscribed their signatures on the landscapes around them. The act of marking land with human lives is a part of history.
So that's one grand set of themes: physical geography, and how it has shaped and been shaped by human history.
Another theme is how how human beings in the past have come to know the different landscapes of this continent: how, for instance, they became able to map space, particularly to represent three-dimensional space on two-dimensional sheets of paper. So we've tracked a history of cartography: from Ptolemy's map of the world from Antiquity, a map rediscovered by the Arabs and then transmitted to Europe in the 15th century; maps of the African coast created by the Portuguese at the same time that the slave trade was coming into being;, the Mercator Map of 1569 with the solution it offered for maritime navigation; and maps focused more on coastal areas than in the interior of the North American continent. We tracked the story of how the interior of the North American continent came to be mapped: the voyage of Marquette and Joliet from the St. Lawrence River up the Fox, then down the Wisconsin and Mississippi rivers, carrying that name Ojibwa name "Mississippi" downstream with them and on into history so that it is the word we now use to name the vast river that defines the mid-continent of the United States. The extraordinary map from William Clark in 1810 captured knowledge about the interior of the United States just after Thomas Jefferson expanded the boundaries of the nation westward with his Louisiana Purchase from Napoleon. Such efforts pointed toward subsequent governmental surveys of western landscapes, for instance in the 40th Parallel Survey in the 1860s under the direction of Clarence King--a man we encountered several times in thsi course--who would go on to be the first Director of the U.S. Geological Survey from 1879-81.
Topographic maps of sections of the U.S. begin to be developed in the late 1880s. Also developed in the years following the Civil War were thematic demographic maps to accompany the U.S. Census. It was based on such maps that the historian Frederick Jackson Turner would declare that the frontier, a line of Anglo-American settlement which since the founding of the republic had been steadily moving westward, was ending. Partly based on his work, the frontier became a defining colonial myth of American history which was nothing if not related to landscape—whether as depicted in Emmanual Leutze's 1861 painting "Westward the Course of Empire" or Thomas Cole's 1836 "The Oxbow." All of these maps and images were about the transformation of landscape. In them, the making of the American landscape was a defining narrative of American history itself.
Of course, all of these processes involved the appropriation and transformation of Indian Country, the term that so many native peoples in the United Statestoday use to describe the places depicted in Leutze and Cole's paintings. I reminded you that Indian Country is not just a part of the American past, as the myth of the "vanishing race" would you believe, but also of the American present. Native peoples remain just as central to the United States and its history today as any of the immigrant peoples (ancestors of most of the people in this room) who now also call America their homeland.
You'll remember that I made Thomas Jefferson do heavy work for us in this course: Monticello and the slave quarters that lay around it were an extraordinary vision of Enlightenment geography, and the 1787 Northwest Ordinance that he helped author defined the territories and how territories would become states. More important still for this course was the 1785 Land Ordinance that mapped the abstract Cartesian coordinate system of the Grid onto heterogeneous topography, vegetation, and cultural geographies, turning land into real estate so it could be bought and sold at market. Jefferson was also a slave owner: so we thought about how the ownership of human bodies and the laboring of human bodies characterized not just the southern states, but the entire U.S. economy along with our national political system. The great struggle over slavery would lead to the Civil War, but also had implications for the kinds of intimate relationships that were and were not possible within its strictures. Jefferson's relationship with his slave Sally Hemings is a powerful sign of the intimate geographies and boundary crossings that are also part of American landscapes and social relations, as were the children and grandchildren of that union, some of whom, remarkably, lie buried in graves here in Madison's Forest Hill Cemetery (itself an echo of the romantic landscape tradition first laid out at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts).
The course also directed our attention toward industrial, political-economic, and technological activities that each left signatures on the landscape. One of those was mining, as epitomized by the California Gold Rush starting in 1848. Placer-based mining that would characterize the beginning of the gold rush was augmented by new technologies requiring more capital: more elaborate flume systems and hydraulic mining systems, eventually culminating in large-scale quartz mining for silver and gold in Virginia City, Nevada, and base-metal mining for elements like copper, most famously in the nineteenth century at Butte, Montana. Governmental activity underwrote many of these mining activities in the form of transportation infrastructure and scientific surveys. We talked about Clarence King as the head of some of these land surveying efforts, with his revelations of the Great Diamond Hoax in the early 1870s serving for us as a symbol of new scientific approaches to geology and mapmaking. We also learned the story of his secret marriage to an African-American woman named Ada Copeland, to whom he represented himself to be an African-American man from the West Indies, working the railroads as a Pullman porter...again helping us understand the intimate as well as landscape meanings of the color line.
In addition to mining, we also talked about the movement of logs across the landscape, and wood as the essential material before iron and steel. Wood was the great material that up until the middle of the 19th century was essential for most buildings, fences, and fuel—and remade farming as well as many other activiites.
The migration of farmers to North America shaped farming in this country as immigrants brought practices from their homelands. With the advent of new farming technologies and new ways of moving things to market, those farming strategies changed. In the books Nature's Metropolis and Car Country, we saw a whole series of landscape transformations that were foundational to landscape change--first driven by the railroads, then by automobiles and highways--since at least the 1830s and 1840s.
Charles O. Paullin's Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States (1932) -- well worth revisiting for the final exam
http://dsl.richmond.edu/historicalatlas/
-- showed pheneomena like changing rates of travel ushered in by changing transportation infrastructure. This pushed us to consider all the other infrastructure changes governing our lives today: electricity, telephones, broadcast television, fiber optics … all technologies changing flows of information. We forget how information flows change how landscape is used. The news of the California Gold Rush took months to get from Sacramento to New York, creating lags in landscape transformation—so different from the virtually instantaneous flow of information today. Car Country has been our symbol of the twentieth-century transformations of the United States, but the electrical grid has been at least as important in remaking the daily lives we take for granted today.
We also spoke of the invisible landscapes that we typically ignore until they do not work: steam tunnels, water mains, sanitary sewers, storm sewers, and other essential utility networks. Most of us have little knowledge of how these systems work or even where they're located, since they are often underground and so "out of sight and out of mind." Yet they are no less a part of the landscape despite our surprising ignorance of their existence and operations.
But I now want to turn from highlighting major themes for this course in historical geography and landscape history, to talk for a while about the pleasures of landscape history. Early in the semester, I shared with Kevin Lynch's powerful question, "What time is this place?" and want to suggest that there's almost nothing in the world that doesn't become more interesting when you remember to ask that question. An equally powerful question for me, which you all got to practice in your place papers, is "How did this place get to be this way?" For me, this is one of the most interesting questions in the world.
So I hope you won't mind if I spend a little while here at the end of the semester telling you the story of how I learned the power of these questions, and how I came to my admittedly eccentric passion for practicing landscape history. I'd be lying to you if I didn't say that my not-so-secret hope is that at least a few of you have come to share that passion over the course of the semester.
We can start with Wendell Berry, the poet, novelist, and farmer. He once wrote: "If you don't know where you are, you don't know who you are." This class has been about thinking about where you are in the richest senses of the words. Each of you have made different journeys to get to the places that have marked your lives: to this room, to this University, to this state, to the parts of this continent that you've called home—as did your ancestors, who journeyed to the places that made your own life possible. These different journeys mean that we all share different identities, experiences, ideas, and values--different senses of place--but it also means that we often share enough values to call ourselves collectively residents of a country called the United States, or people who (among other names) call ourselves "Americans"--however differently we may understand and feel about those words and those places.
I am admittedly eccentric in my passion for landscape and its history. But each of you is eccentric, too. Remember that "eccentric" doesn't mean crazy. Its literal meaning etymologically is "off center." The complex mixtures of eccentrities that are uniquely your own enable you to see and know things that no one else can see or understand in quite the ways that you do. You see and know things that make you you. One of the things I hope this course has done for you is give you tools for taking your eccentric habits and using them to look again at the places that around you that have helped make you who you are.
I am a baby boomer, born and raised in car country. My father had been an Eagle Scout, and my mother was willing to indulge him in taking us as a family on long car trips. So for much of my childhood, we spent vacation time going on car camping trips together. We lived in several different parts of the U.S.: New Haven, Connecticut; Washington, DC; Lincoln, Nebraska; and finally, from third grade on for me, here in Madison, Wisconsin. We used car-pulled canvas-topped trailers because my dad loved camping and wanted to share it with his family, but also because car camping was cheap and traveling by air was too expensive for middle-class families like mine in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1963, we made our first trip around Lake Superior, a formative experience for me. In 1965, we spent five or six weeks driving from Madison up through the Canadian Rockies, down to Seattle and along the West Coast to San Francisco and Los Angeles, then back through the Grand Canyon and Colorado Rockies and Black Hills. I probably would not now do the work I do today were it not for that trip. That trip opened up the American West and the American landscape for me, and also helped me understand the time depth of landscape, the deep human and geological history that shaped that vast, beautiful countryside. The stories of the landscape were also opened up for me by my father, a U.S. historian who loved sharing stories about the past with his sons. Grand Canyon, which we first visited on that 1965 trip, is another sacred place for me, a place I've hiked and floated many times.
Toward the end of that 1965 trip, we stopped at a national monument (now a national park) in the Black Hills—Jewel Cave. It had no electricity in those days, so the park rangers led our tour with the adult tourists carrying gas-fueled Coleman lanterns to light our way. When we came out of the cave, I bought a paperback book in the park gift shop: Franklin Folsom's Exploring American Caves (1956). Among other things, that book listed all of the caving organizations in the U.S., and it was there that I first learned of the Wisconsin Speleological Society based here in Madison, Wisconsin. Though its members were all college students and older, they proved amazingly generous in letting an eleven-year-old boy come join their explorations of Wisconsin caves. I spent the next several years wandering the rural Wisconsin countryside looking for caves to explore. In particular, my fascination with caves motivated my first really serious effort to learn how to "read the landscape": trying to figure out how to find openings in the ground in the dolomites and sandstones of Wisconsin's Driftless Area that might lead to the underground wonderland of a cave. As I already told you earlier in the semester, I also learned to do historical research in the Wisconsin Historical Society, just as you've done for your place papers. One of my most treasured possessions was Lawrence Martin's The Physical Geography of Wisconsin (1916). One of the best ways to find caves was by talking to farmers on whose land a cave might be located, so my interest in caves also helped me learn more about what it means to live and farm in rural America. Going down into caves was a childhood delight for me, but it was also a sustained course in landscape history.
Even then, back in junior high school, I knew I wanted to be a writer. Reading, writing, and storytelling have been central to my life since early childhood. So there are other texts that lie behind this course beyond the historical works I've named for you in past lectures--texts that may surprise you. These other books, primarily works of fantasy, are not trivial, because they actually helped define who I am as a scholar and how I write the kinds of historical narratives that most engage me. C. S. Lewis finished The Chronicles of Narnia in the year of my birth, 1954; I read J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit (1937) when I was in 4th grade and slowly accumulated the other books in the Lord of the Rings (1954-55) over the next couple years before they even became available in paperback here in the U.S.. What the Narnia and Middle Earth books of Lewis and Tolkien both have in common are maps: both involve journeys across landscapes where the landscape is absolutely foundational to how the story unfolds and what the characters in the story experience over the course of the narrative. So the descriptions of landscapes found in Lewis's and Tolkien's books became foundational to my imaginative life. Even today, some of the stories that most resonate for me concern people or objects journeying across landscapes. Although this may be an odd way to describe Nature's Metropolis, its chapters on grain, lumber, and meat are all "journey tales" about commodities moving across landscapes from country to city, from wild places to civilized ones. Other formative books of my childhood also fit this description of "journey stories": Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth (1961), one of the most whimsical (and profound) fantasies about human knowledge ever written; Alan Garner's Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960) and The Moon of Gomrath (1963), with their extraordinary ability to find magic in the actual landscapes of Cheshire's Alderley Edge, south of Manchester in England; and Holling C. Holling's Paddle-to-the-Sea (1941), a book that absolutely entranced me as a boy.
Holling's Paddle-to-the-Sea is the story of an Ojibwa Indian boy living on Lake Nipigon, north of Lake Superior, who carves a model canoe with a wooden paddler seated inside it; on its bottom, the boy carves the words "I am Paddle-to-the-Sea. Please put me back in water." One of the many things that is wonderful about the book is that it includes diagrams that give you myriad lessons about the geography of the Great Lakes and the mid-continent of Canada and the United States. Landscapes in the book that intersect with our course include logging and sawmills; iron mines in Minnesota; ore freighters on the Great Lakes; canals and locks at Sault Ste. Marie; Niagara Falls; and many other things you'd recognize. In the story, the model boat is rescued and dropped back into the water multiple times as it continues from Lake Nipigon to Duluth, through the Soo Locks, to Chicago and Lake Erie, over Niagara Falls, then past Montreal to enter the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where it is finally picked up by a French fishing boat and taken all the way to France. Here's part of the map in the book that show's Paddle's route:
http://hollingcholling.blogspot.com/2017/06/
One of the things I learned from Holling's Paddle-to-the-Sea is the way a story can make a map come alive: logging, forest fires, ore freighters, the flow of the Great Lakes, the fur trade, Canada and United States and North America all threaded together by the journey of a little wooden canoe. It may not be a brilliant work of literature, but as a story for young people it does do a remarkably effective job of making geography come alive. It filled me with enthusiasm. So in 1971, my best friend and I cycled up from Madison, around Lake Superior through Minnesota, Ontario, and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, on what wound up being a 2000-mile bike trip. I spent the trip writing in a journal to narrate our journey while also taking photographs to document it visually—which, you'll notice, is what I'm still doing in this course. It's a big part of who I am, and a big part of what I've tried to share with you in this course.
After that bike trip, I came to the University of Wisconsin-Madison as an undergrad. My love for the world of J. R. R. Tolkien encouraged me to take a class during the second semester of my first year with a professor named Richard Ringler, a faculty member in English and Scandinavian Studies who taught English 360, "The Anglo-Saxons." It was in that class that I began to learn Old English and eventually Old Norse, the languages in which Tolkien himself had been expert and that served as the linguistic foundations on which he constructed the world of Middle Earth in which he set his stories of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. It was also there that I learned the linguistic knowledge I shared with you in our lecture on place names, in which I talked with you about English as an accretive language where its vocabulary and syntax—as expressed in place-names—reflect the history of the British Isles. It was in Dick Ringler's class that I came to understand what I've argued to you in past lectures: that the names we give the world are among the most important ways we assign human meanings to the things we care about so we can tell stories about the world that make our own lives meaningful. If you're interested, my Presidential Address to the American Historical Association (called simply "Storytelling") was in large measure an homage to what I learned from Dick Ringler that I've tried to weave into the fabric of this course. You can read, watch, or listen to that lecture here:
https://www.williamcronon.net/aha-writings.html
I thought I would be scholar of Old English and Old Norse until my senior year in college, when, almost by accident, I took a class on the history of the American West. After graduating, I spent two years studying in England at Oxford University on a scholarship. In preparation for that trip, I read a classic book that Ringler had recommended to me entitled The Making of the English Landscape (1955) by W. G. Hoskins.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._G._Hoskins
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Making_of_the_English_Landscape
Hoskins' book is now dated in some of its content, but it remains a classic. The very name of this course is meant as an homage to what I learned from it. More than anyone else except possibly Aldo Leopold, Hoskins taught me how to read and periodize landscape. He shows the ways you can read the English landscape many layers down, like a palimpsest (a word Hoskins himself uses), from the Neolithic to the Celts to the Romans to the Anglo-Saxons to the Normans to the Black Death to Henry VIII's destruction of the monasteries to the enclosing of common lands in the eighteenth century to the coming of the industrial revolution to the rise of modernity. He arrays all these changes on his timeline and reads them all in the landscape.
I came back to the U.S. to study American history, and became part of an intellectual movement to create a new scholarly field called environmental history, which tracks the history of changing human relationships with the non-human world. The books I have written feature landscapes prominently, but they've been more about environment than about landscape per se.
It took another experience to persuade me to teach this course and to write a book focused centrally on landscape as opposed to environment. In July 2015, I made a long-distance hiking trip with my son Jeremy. We decided to make a coast-to-coast walk across northern England, from the Irish Sea in the west to the North Sea in the east, as a three-week exercise in reading the landscape. In the 1950s, Alfred J. Wainwright, who loved walking and climbing in the peaks of the English Lake District, began to produce a series of hand-written and hand-drawn guides to the walks throughout that beautiful landscape, with routes for climbing and traversing all the peaks and ridges in the park. He self-published these guides and sold them in local grocery stores until their popularity eventually made them among the most famous guidebooks sold anywhere in England in the 20th century. He finished his eight guides to the Lake District in the late 1960s, but wasn't quite finished with guidebook writing. In 1973, he published a book called A Coast to Coast Walk. The 192-mile route across northern England that he laid out in that book is not a national park like the Appalachian Trail here in the U.S.; indeed, much of it isn't even on public land. Instead, Wainwright strung together old medieval rights of way to create an unbroken and largely unmarked walking route which is now widely regarded as one of the most beautiful hiking experiences anywhere in the British Isles. You can read more about the route here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coast_to_Coast_Walk
My July 2015 trip was a wonderful father-son experience, but also a wonderful experience in reading landscapes and practicing landscape history. It let me visit at a walking pace all sorts of the kinds of places I cherish: the Lake District as home to the poet William Wordsworth, whose works and ideas of nature I've been teaching for years; the ruined abbeys that W. G. Hoskins blamed Henry VIII for destroying; active and abandoned farms; a lead-mining landscape that reminded me of what parts of southwestern Wisconsin may have looked like in the early nineteenth century; old railroad routes; and many others. All sorts of artifacts and markers are scattered across the landscape waiting to be found along the Coast-to-Coast route, in part because Wainwright was a great artist when it came to route-finding: visible traces of an iron-age community 2500-3000 years ago; abandoned railroads; agricultural fields; ancient woodlots; wheat fields; pastures whose boundaries are hundreds of years old; castles; ruined monasteries.
Jeremy's blog from that trip is here:
http://chasingcairns.com/overview-coast-to-coast/
and if you care to navigate back to my Facebook page from July 2015 (you don't need to be my "friend" to do so, since the page is public), you can explore the images and stories I posted there. Here's the first entry as a starting point:
https://www.facebook.com/wcronon/posts/10104445347125607
Jeremy's and my two-hundred-mile coast-to-coast walk convinced me to teach this class and to undertake a book similar to Hoskins' for the landscapes of North America. I'll be on sabbatical this coming year, and my main project will be working to turn this course into a book. I tell my friends that if ever there were a book I was born to write, it's this one.
On the second day of class, I made the statement that everything you know, do, and care about can be brought to bear on understanding the places where you live--and that both those places and your own life will become more interesting when you do so. I also built the course as an explicit homage to Aldo Leopold's Wildlife Ecology 118 course, nicknamed by his students "Reading the Landscape."
Recall these words from Leopold's Sand County Almanac: "We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in."
Landscape is something we can see and feel and seek to understand. So I want to close with a collection of images that may suggests the new ways of seeing you've been experiencing as you ponder landscape on multiple scales in space and time.
One key scale on which we've often relied this semester is landscape as photographed from above: aerial images. I'd argue that, as we can see in these photographs, one of the topics this class has been about is "kith" from the phrase "kith and kin": kith as knowledge of one's native land, and of the community of neighbors and friends with whom we share those native lands.
But landscape from above is not the main way we experience place. Far more intimate are the places we call home, where we live and work and spend our daily lives. The Kiowa novelist N. Scott Momaday has a wonderful passage in his 1969 book The Way to Rainy Mountain in which he describes the journey his main character makes to reground his life in local landscape:
Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth, I believe. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience, to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it. He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it. He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of noon and all the colors of the dawn and dusk.
For me, a beautiful symbol of this intimate relationship to small, local landscapes can be found in the work of Mark Hirsch, a professional photographer who makes him home near Platteville, Wisconsin. In 2012, after losing his job as a newspaper photographer in Dubuque and then suffering a terrible car accident, Hirsch bought his first iPhone and spontaneously snapped a photograph of a tree in an open field that he was passing on his drive home. Pondering the resulting image on his iPhone, Hirsch decide to shoot and post on Facebook a photograph of that one tree on every day of the subsequent year. The results are a breathtaking array of images of one small landscape, from myriad different perspectives during all times of day and seasons of the year. To sample this remarkable series of photographs, see
http://www.thattree.net
and
https://www.facebook.com/photosofthattree/
History / Geography / Environmental Studies 469 has been a course on landscape history, and it has also been a course on storytelling. But it also been a course about trying to make sense of the places that surround us, the places where we work, travel, and make our homes.
As a kind of moral for this long story I've been telling you all semester long, let me offer you this line attributed (probably not quite accurately) to the great French novelist Marcel Proust: "The voyage of discovery lies not in finding landscapes but in having new eyes."
I hope this class has helped you see landscapes -- both past and present -- in new ways with new eyes. Thanks so much.