Geography 45: Exploring Nature and Culture in New England

Fall 2017 · Dartmouth College

From stone walls to red-brick mill towns, segregated cities to grass-lawn suburbs, the people and places of New England tell many stories about how nature and culture overlap. In the crooked streets of centuries-old neighborhoods or on the rolling hills of organic farms, the landscape itself offers clues about how human history and the natural world influence one another. This course starts with Dartmouth’s immediate surroundings and works outwards to make sense of New England as a regional whole.

Meetings: MWF, 2:10–3:15 pm, in Fairchild TBD

X-hour: Th, 1:20–2:10 pm (several used for research workshops)

Required field trips: Morning through early afternoon, Saturday Sept. 23 and Sunday, Oct. 22

Instructor: Garrett Dash Nelson; 603–646–2033; garrett.g.d.nelson@dartmouth.edu

Office Hours: Wednesday, 11:00 am – 1:00 pm, and other times by appointment, in 009A Steele.

Course website: http://people.matinic.us/garrett/teaching/geog-45/fa-17/

What you will learn in this course

This course is designed to introduce students to the landscape immediately surrounding Dartmouth in order to work out the ways in which categories of “nature” and “culture” overlap in the human environment. For students who are from New England, this course offers an opportunity to see a familiar place through a new lens; for those who have come to Dartmouth from elsewhere, it offers a comprehensive orientation to the college’s local context. The course emphasizes how New England, as both a material place and an imagined regional entity, has changed over time, and how it bears the traces of social and environmental forces which stretch far beyond its borders. You will learn:

• How the New England landscape has transformed from the precolonial era to the present
• Why New England has been described as “the quintessential American region”
• How individual and group choices about resource management, economic development, aesthetic representations, and social structure have determined the characteristics of human landscapes
• Where to see examples of how “nature” materializes concentrations of wealth, poverty, cultural authority, and vulnerability

The topical material of this course is focused on New England, but the methodological skills which you will learn are broadly relevant to research in geography, history, and the social sciences. In particular, you will learn:

• How to treat places of various scales as objects of study, particularly the “region”
• How to interpret visual evidence in ways that make “seeing” a critical engagement
• How to think about the reciprocal cause-and-effect structure between humans and the natural world
• How to use historical sources (including maps) to enrich your understanding of the present day

In addition, this course will help you sharpen several skills which will be broadly useful to you as a student, a professional, and a citizen: 

• How to critically evaluate academic arguments and respond to different kinds of evidence and opinions
• How to converse intelligently and respectfully with your peers on complicated subjects
• How to construct good arguments, and where to look for sources to support your arguments
• How to express your ideas through clear, persuasive writing

Themes at-a-glance

Week 1: Introduction; From seeing to interpreting

The landscape as evidence — The little Here and the big Here — Stories that forests tell — Identifying fast and slow change — Ecology as a social text

Week 2: Nature remade

Indian land, colonial land — Agriculture, forestry, livelihoods — From prophets to profits — Where is nature, where is culture? — Seeing the past through old maps

Week 3: Inventing New England I

Selling the outdoors — Tourists as power brokers — History as commodity — Different tourists, different tours — Burying the past, hiding difference

Week 4: Inventing New England II

Miniature community meets modernity — Making six states into one region — Regionalism in theory and practice — From covered bridges to multicultural community

Week 5: Farm village, mill town, global city

Towns that go downhill — Waterfalls and smokestacks — Transportation, connection, and exploitation — Nature in the city — Questioning the rural-urban divide

Week 6: Uneven landscapes

Poverty and plenty sharing the same town — Racialized spaces in the nation’s whitest states — Materializing class distinctions — Who is allowed to go where — New England in a global system

Week 7: Producing and consuming regional identity

From hill farms to hobby farms — Marketing the pristine myth — Organic food and the dream of purity — Spoofing historic memory

Week 8: Planning the land

Regulation, management, and the state — Infrastructure and development — When nature crosses borders — Environmentalism and its discontents — New England as a neighborhood

Week 9: A history of the next hundred years

New England’s Prospect — Global spaces, local places — Justice, sustainability, and progress in the new New England

Week 10: Wrap-up and conclusion

Assignments and evaluations

The assignments in this course are designed with the intention of distributing your work through the term, and producing material that will be of lasting use rather than being filed away in a cabinet.

Annotated bibliography: 45 points. 20 of the class meetings have at least one assigned reading. For any 12 of these meetings (you may choose which 12), you will write a 400–600 word review, critically analyzing the arguments of the author or authors and offering your own perspective on their work. Each of these 12 reviews is worth 3 points, and is due in class the day the reading is discussed. (If you wish, you may write up to 14 reviews, and your two lowest scores will be discarded.) An additional 9 points is earned by writing a summary reflection of approximately 1500 words, due on November 10, which will elaborate on any theme which you found recurring in your 12 reviews.

Field photojournal: 25 points. During each of our field trips, you will take photos of landscapes which you feel to be particularly signifiant for the them at hand. (If you do not have access to a phone or standalone camera, I’ll provide one for you.) You will choose your best photograph and write a 300–500 interpretation which explains what is in the image and why it is significant. Photojournals from two major field trips are each worth 10 points; one from the minor field trip is 5 points.

Place project: 90 points. The central assignment of this course is a project in which you will interpret a single place in terms of its intertwined natural and cultural history. This project involves the collection of primary sources, the visual interpretation of clues from landscape, and scholarly analysis. Though these projects should have the rigor and style of a traditional research paper, we will be presenting them together to produce an electronic atlas of New England Landcape & Culture. More information on this assignment is available in the Place project handout.

Participation and discussion: 40 points. Being prepared for class and willing to share your knowledge and opinions is a crucial part of making this course work for everyone. That doesn’t mean you have to answer every question, and it certainly doesn’t mean you have to know the answer to every question. But it does mean you need to be interested, alert, generous about what you do know, honest about what you don’t know, and respectful of the other members of the course. 15 points are for attendance; 25 points are for your contributions when you attend.

It is possible to earn a total of 200 points in this course. If you earn a total number of points above the cutoffs in the table below, you will be guaranteed that grade. You may be bumped above the cutoffs by demonstrating particular commitment, growth, or engagement throughout the term.

A	A-	B+	B	B-	C+	C	C-	D
190	180	170	160	150	140	130	120	110

Required materials

We will be reading major sections of the following books, which I recommend purchasing if you have the financial resources. These books are also available on reserve at Baker–Berry (except for Reading the Forested Landscape, which is on reserve at Kresge). All other material will be available electronically on Canvas.

• Tom Wessels, Reading the Forested Landscape: A Natural History of New England (Countryman Press, 1999/2005). ISBN 978-0881504200 (paperback), 978-0881503784 (hardcover).
• Dona Brown, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Smithsonian, 1997). ISBN 978-1560987994.
• Mona Domosh, Invented Cities: The Creation of Landscape in Nineteenth-Century Boston and New York (Yale, 1998). ISBN 978-0300074918.
• Blake Harrison and Richard W. Judd, eds., A Landscape History of New England (MIT, 2011). ISBN 978-0262525275.

Note that this course has a no screens policy during discussions (see Distractions in the classroom below), so you should expect to have material on hand in a format which does not require a computer or tablet. If you do not print out full copies of the reading material, you should plan to take detailed notes to which you can make reference during our discussions.

Course schedule in detail

Week 1: Introduction; From seeing to interpreting

Monday, September 11

• Meeting each other and a roadmap for the course

Wednesday, September 13

• Read D W Meinig “The beholding eye: Ten versions of the same scene,” in The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays, ed. D W Meinig (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 33–48, http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/859571502.
• Browse the resources available at William Cronon’s “Learning Historical Research: How to Read a Landscape” page at http://www.williamcronon.net/researching/landscapes.htm

Friday, September 15

• Read Chapter 1–4, Chapters 7–8, and Appendices A & C in Tom Wessels Reading the forested landscape: a natural history of New England (Woodstock, VT: Countryman Press, 1999), http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/830344861.
• Browse the images from the Harvard Forest Fisher Museum Dioramas at http://harvardforest.fas.harvard.edu/dioramas
• Campus landscape walk during class

Week 2: Nature remade

Monday, September 18

• Read Ch. 3, “From Corn Mothers to Puritan Fathers,” pp. 69–111, in Carolyn Merchant Ecological revolutions: nature, gender and science in New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/872116614.

Wednesday, September 20

• Read Ch. 2, “Landscape and Patchwork” and Ch. 4, “Bounding the Land,” in William J Cronon Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/9413569.

X-hour Thursday, September 21

• Map Library orientation: using historical sources for cultural geography

Friday, September 22

• Read Joseph S. Wood, “New England’s Legacy Landscape,” in Richard W Judd and Blake Harrison A landscape history of New England (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011), http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/842500077.

Saturday, September 23: Valley section field trip

Week 3: Inventing New England I

Monday, September 25

• Read Introduction, Ch. 2, “The Uses of Scenery,” and Ch. 4, “‘Manufactured for the Trade’” in Dona Brown Inventing New England: regional tourism in the nineteenth century (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/31009743.

Wednesday, September 27

• Read Ch. 5, “That Dream of Home,” and Ch. 6, “The Problem of the Summer,” in Brown, Inventing New England

Friday, September 29

• Read Kimberly A. Jarvis, “Women in the White Mountains,” in LHNE

Week 4: Inventing New England II

Monday, October 2

• Read Scott C. Roper, “‘Wrought in the Spirit of Our Ancestors,’” in LHNE
• Read Dale Potts, “Traditional Landscapes: Henry Red Eagle and the Native American Presence in the New England Woods,” in LHNE

Wednesday, October 4

• Read Ch. 6, “The North Country and Regional Identity,” in Joseph A Conforti Imagining New England: explorations of regional identity from the pilgrims to the mid-twentieth century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/812754740.

Friday, October 6

• Read Lewis Mumford “Orozco in New England,” The New Republic (October 1934): 231–235.

Week 5: Farm village, mill town, global city

Monday, October 9

• Read James Walter Goldthwait “A Town That Has Gone Downhill,” Geographical Review 17, no. 4 (October 1927): 527, doi:10.2307/207997.
• Read John K Wright, “The Changing Geography of New England,” pp. 459–475 in John K Wright, ed. New England’s prospect: 1933 (New York: American Geographical Society, 1933), https://archive.org/details/newenglandsprosp00amerrich.
• Place project: Prospectus due beginning of class

Wednesday, October 11

• Read James C. O’Connell, “The Evolution of Twentieth-Century Boston’s Metropolitan Landscape,” in LHNE
• Read Introduction and Ch. 1 in Mona Domosh Invented cities: the creation of landscape in nineteenth-century New York and Boston (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/502312633.

Friday, October 13

• Read Ch. 4, 5, and Conclusion in Invented Cities

Week 6: Uneven landscapes

Monday, October 16

• Read Ch. 7, “Open Suburbs vs. Open Space,” in Lily Geismer Don’t blame us : suburban liberals and the transformation of the Democratic party (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), http://site.ebrary.com/id/10988155.

Wednesday, October 18

• Read Jennifer Hock “Bulldozers, Busing, and Boycotts,” Journal of Urban History 39, no. 3 (2012): 433–453, doi:10.1177/0096144212467310.

X-Hour Thursday, October 19

• Special Collections orientation, Rauner Library

Friday, October 20

• Place project collaboratory session: Annotated outline due

Sunday, October 22 Landscapes of Poverty Field Trip

• Read the following articles as reference on the field trip; they are not eligible for bibliography entries:
• Elizabeth Carpenter-Song, Joelle Ferron, and Sara Kobylenski “Social exclusion and survival for families facing homelessness in rural New England,” Journal of Social Distress and the Homeless 25, no. 1 (January 2016): 41–52, doi:10.1606/1044-3894.3770.
• Articles from Valley News

Week 7: Producing and consuming regional identity

Monday, October 23

• Read Ch. 2, “Ecologies of Production,” and Ch. 3, “Economies of Sentiment,” in Heather Paxson The life of cheese: crafting food and value in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/875124002.
• Place project: Peer review of annotated outline due

Wednesday, October 25

• Read C M Dunkley “Risky Geographies: Teens, gender, and rural landscape in North America,” Gender, Place & Culture 11, no. 4 (January 2007): 559–579, doi:10.1080/14733280302192.

Friday, October 27 No class

Week 8: Planning the land

Monday, October 30

• Read Eve Vogel and Alexandra Lacy “New Deal vs. Yankee independence: The failure of comprehensive development on the Connecticut River, and its long-term consequences,” Northeastern Geographer 4 (2012): 66–94, http://nestvalonline.org/images/stories/documents/new-deal-vs-yankee.pdf.
• Read Michael Rawson, “Rethinking Conservation,” in LHNE

Wednesday, November 1

• Read Sarah Jones, “A New Solidarity in the North Country,” The New Republic (August 10, 2017)
• Browse “Go Boston 2030” transportation plan, http://goboston2030.org/en/ [Not eligible for bibliography]
• Infrastructure field trip during class

Friday, November 3

• Read Kent C Ryden “Big trees, back yards, and the borders of nature,” Michigan Quarterly Review 40, no. 1 (2001): 126–140.
• Listen to VPR interview with Ben Cosgrove (5 min, 30 sec)

Week 9: A history of the next hundred years

Monday, November 6

• Read Amanda J Walker and Robert L Ryan “Place attachment and landscape preservation in rural New England: A Maine case study,” Landscape and Urban Planning 86, no. 2 (2008): 141–152, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169204608000315.
• Browse Wildlands and Woodlands project at http://www.wildlandsandwoodlands.org/ [Not eligible for bibliography]
• Read “New England Deserves a Regional Food Plan” Boston Globe, August 22, 2015, at https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/editorials/2015/08/22/new-england-deserves-regional-food-plan/WLJgYnQQsFaHUBPGok41TM/story.html [Not eligible for bibliography]

Wednesday, November 8

• Read Cheryl E Morse et al. “Performing a New England landscape: Viewing, engaging, and belonging,” Journal of Rural Studies 36 (October 2014): 226–236, doi:10.1016/j.jrurstud.2014.09.002.

X-Hour Thursday, November 9

• Roundtable with Cherie Morse

Friday, November 10 No class

Week 10: Conclusion

Monday, November 13

• Place projects presentations
• Place projects due

What I expect from you

Above all else, I expect you to take the privilege of being a student at Dartmouth College seriously—which means putting your genuine care and effort into this class, your own experience, and the experience of your peers. I don’t expect you to know the answer to every question or to slam-dunk every assignment on your first try. But I do expect you to engage sincerely and seriously during the ten weeks we spend together.

What you can expect from me

You can expect me to “play on your team” for the semester, helping each of you individually and all of us collectively to think about the topics of this course, grow intellectually, and enjoy ourselves while doing so. You can expect me to work as hard as I possibly can to ensure that we all cross the finish line together. Finally, you can expect me to do everything in my power to make sure that you never feel lost, left behind, or uncomfortable in this class. 

Classroom conduct

You have an unbreakable right as a student to be treated fairly, respectfully, and equally by me as well as by your peers, regardless of any feature of your identity, opinions, or learning style. If you ever feel uncomfortable in class, for whatever reason, you should not hesitate to let me know. We’ll try to resolve conflicts with other students in a friendly manner than encourages personal reflection and growth. My job is to make this class as welcoming as possible for you, and if there’s anything I can do to change my teaching to make it a better place for you, I hope you’ll feel comfortable speaking with me about it. If for some reason you need to speak to someone other than me about what’s going on in the class, the Dean of Students Office has resources; see http://student-affairs.dartmouth.edu/policies.

Distractions in the classroom

This course has a no laptops, no cellphones policy. On lecture and discussion days, I’ll provide a sketch of notes each day in class, and you can add to them using paper and pencil, a fantastic technology now in its sixth century of useful service. If you have a special reason why you need a laptop or other digital device for taking notes, please speak to me so we can discuss an exception.

Accommodating all learners

If you need accommodation due to any part of your learning style, please see me as early as possible in class so that we can make every effort to shape the course design accordingly. The field trips in this course may involve sections which are not ADA-compliant, and alternative options will be available for those with limited mobility. Much of the topical material on visual studies assumes an ability with proficient or corrected eyesight; accomodations are available for those who have limited or no sight. For more on Dartmouth’s policy on accessibility, see: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~accessibility/.

If you expect to miss class due to a scheduled religious observance, please contact me in the first two weeks of class so that we can discuss how to offer a make-up plan.

Academic honesty

You have no greater responsibility as a student than to ensure that the work you present is your own. It can be tempting, when you’re late on an assignment or unsure of your own work, to borrow someone else’s and pretend that it is your own. This is no different than using a stolen credit card or driving a stolen car—it is dishonest, as well as illegal.

In the world of electronic sources, it can also be easy to accidentally copy-and-paste sources without proper attribution. This, too, is plagiarism, even when it is carried out unintentionally. You can read more about quoting and attributing sources at: http://writing-speech.dartmouth.edu/learning/materials/sources-and-citations-dartmouth.

This course has a zero-tolerance policy for plagiarism. Any case of intentional plagiarism will be forwarded to the dean’s office for review, and result in an automatic failing grade. Any case of unintentional plagiarism will result in an automatic zero on the assignment and additional make-up work. For the official university policy on academic honesty, see: http://www.dartmouth.edu/judicialaffairs/honor/index.html.

Remember: any words or ideas that you didn’t create, even if you paraphrase them, must be attributed. If you’re unsure if something is plagiarism, ask. 

Where to go for questions

Before you come to me with a question, make sure the answer isn’t in this syllabus!

By far the best way to get more help is at my office hours, which are held on Wednesday, noon–2 pm in my office. If those times don’t work for you, we can try to set up another appointment. You don’t necessarily need to have a question to stop in to office hours—I’m always happy to talk about the course, geography, your career plans, or anything else.

The second best way to contact me is by email, at garrett.g.d.nelson@dartmouth.edu. I will usually try to reply to any emails which I receive by 5:30 pm on a weekday by 9:00 am the next morning. On the evenings before major assignments are due, make sure to have any questions to me by email before 8:00 pm. I don’t answer emails on the weekends.

If you need me immediately, you can call me at 603-233-6213—but please don’t do that unless it’s truly an emergency!

You can also find me on Twitter @en_dash, where I’ll often post articles which relate to this course and geography more generally.

Full reference list