NEW FOUR CREDIT SYLLABUS FOR FALL 2008
History 386 - Wilderness and U.S. Culture, 1492 to present
T/R 11:00-12:15
Office: 389 Holloway Hall mllewis@salisbury.edu Phone: (410) 677-5020
Office Hours: Wednesday 9-12; 1-3, and by appointment
Course Texts: William Bartram, Travels (excerpts as assigned)
J. Baird Callicott, ed., The Great New Wilderness Debate (GNWD)
Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac [order from Amazon]
Michael Lewis, ed., American Wilderness
Michael Lewis, Inventing Global Ecology (excerpts as assigned)
Jennifer Price, Flight Maps
Doug Scott, The Enduring Wilderness (excerpts as assigned)
Required Films: (all films will be on reserve in the library after September 11, and will be available to be watched in the media room)
Group One: “Grizzly Man” (director: Werner Herzog) [two hours] - popular
“Into the Wild”(director: Sean Penn) [two hours] - popular
“Cree Hunters” (director: unknown ) [one hour] –SU only
“The Wilderness Idea” (directors: Lawrence Hott and Diane Garey) [one hour] – SU only
Group Two: “Wild by Law” (directors: Hott and Garey) [one hour] – SU only
“The Greatest Good” (director: James Lewis) [two hours] – SU only
“Rachel Carson” (American Experience) [one hour] – SU only
One additional popular movie of your choice that confronts the question of how Americans understand, respond to, and act upon wilderness. Justify your choice in your response.
Course Description and Objectives: This is an enhanced course, in keeping with the Fulton School’s decision to transform our courses from 3 to 4 credit hours. The enhancements to this course will require a substantial increase in your out-of-class work, as reflected in the new required readings, films, and written responses. This course will center on the changing ways in which Americans have thought about, talked about, and acted upon wilderness over the last five hundred years. This trajectory will take us from the early colonial encounters with wilderness, through the romantics of the mid-1800s, to the debates between conservation and preservation that continue today. We will finish the course by analyzing the role of wilderness and nature in contemporary U.S. culture – a culture in which we shop in suburban malls in the “Nature Company,” we advertise beer with pictures of snow-capped mountains, and we buy S.U.V.’s in ever-increasing numbers so that we might drive to and from the grocery store in wilderness-ready style.
Grading Scale: A 90-100%
B 80%-89%
C 70-79%
D 60-69%
F 59% and below
Course Requirements:
Attendance: Treat this class professionally. You are responsible for making up any material missed. Excessive absences will result in a substantial reduction in your grade. Please note that, while we all are occasionally forced to be late, a continued pattern of tardiness to class will also result in a reduction in your participation grade.
Preparation: You are responsible for completing the assigned readings for each class meeting. In this course I will be using a mixture of lectures and discussions. I reserve the right to give unannounced quizzes over the readings at any time. Also note that your examinations will not just be derived from in-class discussions and lectures. You are responsible for all of the material assigned, even if it was not directly discussed in class.
Participation: Your participation in class, or lack thereof, will be noted. Active participation is not optional, but is a precondition for success in this class.
Examinations: You will have one in-class examination, and a final exam. If you miss a scheduled examination, you will not have the opportunity for a make-up, barring some truly spectacular and documented reason, cleared with me PRIOR to the examination.
Movies: There are eight films – fiction and documentaries – you will have to watch as part of this course. They have been divided on your syllabus into Group One and Group Two, each group representing six-seven hours of film. You are responsible for watching all of these films outside of class, and writing a 250-word response to each film in which you analyze what the film suggests about how Americans understand wilderness. All of the films in Group One will be included in your midterm exam, and all of the films in Group Two will be included on your final. Your film responses will be due no later than, respectively, the midterm and the final. Late responses will not be accepted. I would encourage you to pace yourself and turn in your responses as you complete them throughout the semester, but you can turn them in all at once at the mid-term or final exam, if you choose to do so.
Papers: You will be responsible for one major essay in this class. This essay will be derived from course readings and discussions. The assigned topic will be passed out in class. The papers will be 5+ pages long. History majors who chose to do so can write one of their required 12-15 page papers for this class (if you chose this option, please talk with me by September 24). You will also be assigned brief (1-2 pages) essays and book reviews to complete at home and in-class as a pre-cursor to discussions.
Out of Class Trips: We will take two trips out of class this semester. Both trips are required and essential parts of the class. I recognize, though, that some of you may have other commitments that preclude your attendance on these class trips. If you cannot attend a class trip, please let me know in advance and we will arrange the make-up assignment.
Mid-Term Examination: 20%
Paper: 20%
Short Essays, Film Reviews, assignments: 25%
Final Examination: 25%
September 2: Introduction to class, go over the syllabus
September 4: Into the Wild pp. 1-97
September 9: Into the Wild completed
Due: What did wilderness mean to McCandless?
September 11: In-class speaker: Doug Scott, Campaign for America’s Wilderness
American Wilderness, American Wilderness
The Wilderness Act of 1964, GNWD pp. 120-130
Scott, Enduring Wilderness, pp. 1-18
MANDATORY LECTURE: THURSDAY NIGHT, 7:00 PM, DOUG SCOTT: ENDURING WILDERNESS. Additional opportunities:
Thursday 3:30 – Honors House: Should we Trust the Federal Government to Save Wilderness?
Friday 10:30-11:30am: Making a Living Saving the World, place TBA
September 16: American Wilderness and First Contact: American Wilderness
Denevan, “The Pristine Myth,” GNWD (414-443).
September 18: Religion “irradiates” the Wilderness: American Wilderness Selections from Jonathan Edwards, GNWD (23-27)
September 23: Farm against Forest: American Wilderness,
Bartram, Travels (excerpts on reserve in library)
September 25: Natural History, Romanticism, and Thoreau: American Wilderness
Excerpts from Emerson, GNWD, (28-30); Excerpts from Thoreau, GNWD (31-47)
Turner, “In wildness …” GNWD (617-627)
September 27: Mandatory class trip to Washington DC – depart at 7:00 am, return no later than 8:00 pm.
September 30: The Fate of Wilderness in American Landscape Art, American Wilderness;
October 2: Wilderness Parks and their Discontents, American Wilderness
October 7: A Sylvan Prospect, American Wilderness
Muir excerpts from GNWD (48-62)
October 9: Leopold,
Sand County Almanac, completed
October 14: Cronon essay, GNWD (471-499)
October 16: Mid-Term Examination and all Reviews for Group One films
October 21: Callicott essay, GNWD (337-66)
Rolston essay, GNWD (367-86)
October 23: Gender and Wilderness Conservation, American Wilderness;
Roosevelt excerpts from GNWD (63-74)
October 28: Price: Flight Maps chap 1-2; Reading Questions Due
October 30: Putting Wilderness in Context, American Wilderness;
Marshall and Leopold excerpts, GNWD (75-96; 513-520)
November 4: Loving the Wild in Postwar America, American Wilderness;
Excerpt from Sigurd Olson, GNWD (97-102);
November 6: Wilderness and Conservation Science, American Wilderness
Wildlife Management in the National Parks, GNWD (103-119)
Wilderness Recovery, GNWD (521-539)
November 11: Creating Wild Spaces from Domesticated Landscapes, American Wilderness
November 13: Guha, Johns, and Guha essays in GNWD (231-279)
November 15: Trip to Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, leave at 9:30, return no later than 5:00.
November 18: Lewis, Inventing Global Ecology¸ pp. 1-24; 54-60; 199-233
Due: Is Blackwater a Wilderness?
November 20: Arne Naess essay in GNWD (280-292)
Make-Up Lecture: November 20, Gerald Winegrad, Nanticoke A, 10:00 am
November 25: NO CLASS MEETING – Dr. Lewis at a conference in London
December 2: The Politics of Modern Wilderness, American Wilderness
December 4: Price: Flight Maps: Chapters 3 and 4; Reading Questions Due
December 9: Price, Flight Maps chapter 5; Reading Questions Due
December 11: Epilogue, American Wilderness; Formal Essays due. No late papers accepted.
December 15: Final Exam, 10:45-1:15, and all Film Reviews for Group two due.
Writing Across the Curriculum: Writing across the Curriculum is a nationally recognized initiative that is designed to improve students’ learning through encouraging different types of writing in all university courses. This course is committed to this program, and will use the following tools:
You will be required to refine your note-taking skills in class
Your examinations will be essay based. These essays will require you to think broadly about the primary themes of the course, and to marshal specific evidence in support of an argument.
You will be required to do short writing assignments in-class and at home to allow you the opportunity to think through some general course questions.
You will write one longer essay in which you develop and pursue a historical argument demonstrating your mastery of the course themes.
Academic Integrity:
The best learning environment is one based on mutual respect and trust. However, the desire to achieve a good grade without doing the necessary work may tempt some students to cheat on exams or to represent the work of others as their own – plagiarism. There are no mitigating circumstances to justify academic dishonesty. IF you are unclear about what constitutes academic dishonesty or plagiarism, please ask – Ignorance is no excuse. Discovery of academic dishonesty will bring stiff penalties, including a failing grade for the assignment in question and possibly a grade of F for the course. The maximum penalty at Salisbury University for plagiarism is possible expulsion from the entire USM system, so for your own sakes, do not plagiarize.
University Writing Center (directly above the Fireside Lounge in the Guerrieri University Center). There are trained consultants ready to help you at any stage of the writing process. It is often helpful for writers to share their work with an attentive reader, and consultations allow writers to test and refine their ideas before having to hand papers in or to release documents to the public. In addition to the important writing instruction that occurs in the classroom and during teachers’ office hours, the center offers another site for learning about writing. All undergraduates are encouraged to make use of this important student service. For more information about the writing center’s hours and policies, visit the writing center or its website at www.salisbury.edu/uwc.