Exam study guide

environmental history Exam study guide

How did the Native American perspectieves towards plants, animals, and their landscape differ from the attutudes of the Europeans? (identify those concepts reflecting these divergent viewpoints)

What is the importance of the Colonial period (1600-1780) to your mind, based on the readings?

What precise reforms took place with respect to land policy, settlement and agricultural development due to the changes brought about by the revolutionary (1776-1814) withdrawal from the British Empire?

How did landscape painters depict variety of Ameica's landscapes?

Which old forms of institutions for land use and commerce emerged into often conflicting ideologies in the Early National period (1800-1860) ?

Mary Austin's home

Mary Austin's home in Lone Pine, Owen's Valley, California

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The weekly topics

Terms to know:

Reclamation
Irrigation
Ecosystem
aqueducts
pueblo
Spanish borderlands
Racial prejudice
California gold rush 1848-49
Forest’s relation to water, fisheries and erosion.
Castor Canadensis

Agrarianism
Physiocrat
Utilitarianism
Labor Theory of Value
manumission
abolition
commercial, internal improvements
sectionalism
frontier
Land Ordinance of 1785
Hamilton
Jeffersonian
preemption
transcendentalism

Homestead Act

Donald Worster's ideas

people | thought questions | art | terms | dates | contrasting themes | web sites | course index | readings | final

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People to know:


Franklin	Emerson	Powell	Douglass	Richards	Muir	Austin	DuBois	Roosevelt

            Frederick Law olmstead Sr. John Wesley Powell
            William Mulholland
            William Bradford
            Jonathan Winthrop
            John White
            Benjamin Franklin
            Thomas Jefferson
            George Catlin
            John James Audubon
            Ralph Waldo Emerson
            William Cullen Bryant
            George Perkins Marsh
            Frederick Douglas
            Harriet Beecher Stowe
            Frederick Law Olmsted
            Spencer F. Baird
            Ellen Swallow Richards
            John Muir
            Mary Austin
            W. E. B. Dubois
            Eleanor Roosevelt
            Lewis Mumford

Frederick Law Olmsted by John Singer Sargent, 1895.

Source

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Catastrophic events in history.

Comparative Dates to know:

1603 - The settlemet on the Chesapeake Bay, Jamestown, Va.
1763 - The Ordinance by King George declaring Indian sovereignty west of the Appalachian Mountains
1776 - The settlement of the pueblo and mission at San Diego de Alcala in southern California
1789 - The Constitution was adopted by half the states
1803 - The Louisiana Purchase made by Jefferson from Napoleon
1849 - The Interior Department created as a consequence of the Mexican Cession
1860-65 - The civil war and emancipation (1863)
1862 - The report of Frederick Law Olmsted on Yosemite Valley leads Lincoln to set the site aside as a park
1862 The Homestead Act -- gives 160 acres of land away to settlers for free.
1869 - John Wesley Powell's iniital expedition down the Coloradoo River.
1877 - The repeat explorations leads to John W. Powell's Arid Regions Plan as an example of land realism.
1885 - Adirondack Mountains preserved by NY State for all time.
1886 - The bureau of the Biological Survey created - The bureau of the Biological Survey created.
1890 - The US Forest Reserve Act
1900 - The Reclamation Act
1906 - The Ballinger-Pinchot Controversy over Alaskan Oil lands
1909 - Theodore Roosevelt hosts the National Governor's Conference on Conservation
1913 - The completion of the Owen's Valley aqueduct
1916 - The National Park Service established
1926 - The Boulder Canyon Dam project on the Colorado River
1933 - - The New Deal enacts a comprehensive riverine management approach to conservation and planning
1942 - - The USFWS created
1945 - The atomic bomb
1962 - The wilderness act
1969 - The creation of CEQ under NEPA
1972 - The Clean Water Act
1978 - Three Mile Island nuclear disaster
1979 - The Alaskan Native Claims Settlement Act and National interest lands set aside

red dates denote wartime.

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Themes:

Current US agencies
The misunderstood frontier
Sublime versus the picturesque
Public Domain versus Sovereign lands
land reserves versus land grants
Implied powers versus delegated powers
Strict versus loose construction of the constitution
Hamiltonianism versus Jeffersonianism
scenic monumentalism versus land realism
riparian woodland versus grazing lands -- an allocation problem
utilitarian versus laissez faire ideologiy's clashed
geographical regeneration versus manifest destiny
commercialism versus agrarianism
pragmatism versus transcendentalism (idealism)
preservation versus conservation
ecological (naturalistic) versus (mystical) spiritual values

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Sources on the web: Maps

William Cullen Bryant's home in the Berkshires, near Pittsfield Mass.

William Cullen Bryant inspired the creation of New York City's Central Park and was an avid defender of liberty in the early republic as a newspaper reporter and poet .

The American West

The Library of Congress.

U. of California Berkeley Libraries.

American Art History

American literature.

THE HISTORY CHANNEL.

University of California at Berkeley Map Room.

University of Texas Map Collection.

Yale University Map Collection.

University of California & Stanford University Collections.

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Final exam question:

What is worth protecting in America and how do we preserve that for future generations to appreciate, use, or pass on?