More than backdrop to human history, the environment and its constituents — plants, animals, geography and geology — are fundamental forces that contribute to shaping historical events and contouring human societies and cultures. This
course explores both the range of interactions between humans and the natural world over time, and the scholarly approaches to analyzing environmental history, emphasizing the methods, questions, and archival approaches central to environmental historians. Because of the scope of the field, the temporal and geographical span of this course is broad. Near global in spatial focus, this course will draw on studies of Africa, Eurasia, and the Americas, and range from the deep time history of the Earth to the early 21st century.