Hum/H 16 - Environment and Environmental Expertise in Premodern World

This course offers an introduction to environmental history with a particular focus on the field's intersection with the histories of science and knowledge. We will discuss how historians write about the environment in the past, how they approach the interactions of states and societies with the environment, as well as examining what and how people in the past knew about their environments. The course will stretch chronologically and geographically and cover a broad range of topics from Graeco-Roman Antiquity in the Mediterranean, through the early modern Atlantic world, to the early nineteenth-century United States. We will examine people's interactions with climate, forests, waterways, wildlife, and natural disasters, to name just a few themes, and learn how societies understood, described, and managed the natural world in premodern times.