Postgraduate Course: Global Environmental History (online) (PGHC11485)
Course Outline
| School | School of History, Classics and Archaeology |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
| Course type | Online Distance Learning |
Availability | Not available to visiting students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | Global Environmental History offers a broad introduction to environmental history through a series of case studies of environmental change in the 19th and 20th centuries. Over the course of the semester we will read monographs that examine the relationship between nature and nations, urbanization, industrialization, globalization, conservation, warfare, colonialism, and capitalism. |
| Course description |
This course is designed to introduce students to the historiography and topics of global environmental history. We will do so by locating and exploring environmental histories within larger histories of nationalism, urbanization, industrialization and other historical epochs of the modern era. We will also discuss the rise of the environmental movement, and the topics that have come to shape the movement in the past fifty years such as preservation, wilderness, pollution, toxicity, the nuclear age and the Anthropocene. To address these topics, this course will focus on transnational histories to highlight the ways in which 'nature', as well as ideas about the natural world, crosses borders both at the behest of human agency and despite humans' best efforts to contain it.
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- through online posts and a final paper, students by the end of this course will have demonstrated detailed and critical command of the events and themes of modern global environmental history.
- through engagement in online posts, students will be able to analyse and reflect critically on the work of scholars who work in the field of Global Environmental History.
- through assigned readings and online forum posts, students will demonstrate an ability to analyse and reflect on primary source materials concerning global environmental history.
- through writing a final research paper, students will demonstrate the ability to develop and sustain original scholarly arguments in written form.
- through online forum posts students will be able to demonstrate originality, academic integrity, and ability to evaluate the work of their peers.
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Reading List
Andrews, Thomas G. Killing for Coal America's Deadliest Labor War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.
Brown, Kate, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford, 2015).
Cronon, William. 'The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.' Environmental History 1, no. 1 (1996): 7-28.
Guha, Ramachandra. Environmentalism: A Global History. Longman World History Series. New York: Longman, 2000.
Hurley, Andrew. Environmental Inequalities Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945-1980. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1995.
Laveaga, Gabriela Soto, Jungle Laboratories: Mexican Peasants, National Projects and the Making of the Pill (Duke University Press, 2009).
Macekura, Stephen, Of Limits and Growth: The Rise of Global Sustainable Development in the Twentieth Century, (Cambridge 2015).
McNeill, J. R., John Robert McNeill, and Paul Kennedy. Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World. W. W.
Norton & Company, 2001.
Mikhail, Alan. 2013. 'Unleashing the Beast: Animals, Energy, and the Economy of Labor in Ottoman Egypt.' The American Historical Review 118, no. 2
(2013): 317-48.
Mitchell, Timothy. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. London: Verso Books, 2011.
Price, Jenny, 'Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in LA,' The Believer 111 (2006).
Robin, Libby, and Steen, Will. 'History for the Anthropocene.' History Compass 5, no. 5 (2007): 1694-1719.
Shapiro, Judith, Mao's War against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China (Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Scott, James. Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. |
Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Not entered |
| Keywords | Not entered |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Emily Brownell
Tel:
Email: emily.brownell@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Mrs Lindsay Scott
Tel: (0131 6)50 9948
Email: Lindsay.Scott@ed.ac.uk |
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