What Went Down on the Farm:

Stanford Campus as a Laboratory for Environmental History

History 53S
Sources & Methods Seminar
Winter Quarter 2007

Tuesdays and Thursdays
3:15 - 4:45 p.m.
Building 160, Room 325

Instructor: Jon Christensen

E-mail: jonchristensen@stanford.edu

Course Description:

Environmental history is made of earth and trees, maps and dreams, plans and problems, a world made and a world that might have been. The 8,400-acre Stanford campus and surrounding community from foothills to bay is our laboratory for digging into archives and exploring the landscape, learning hands-on techniques to uncover the past, understand the present, and think about the future in any place. Sources include archaeology, ecology, university business files, letters, photographs, trees, buildings, and the land itself, with field trips to Jasper Ridge, Stanford Shopping Mall, and points in between.

Class homepage: http://www.stanford.edu/~jonallan/history53s.html

Online Course Readings:

Please download, print out, read, and mark up these materials before the class session for which they are scheduled for discussion. And please check back regularly as this list will be updated.

Tuesday, February 13:

David Starr Jordan, "The Eugenics of War," Journal of Heredity 4 (3) 1913, 140-147.

Selections from David Starr Jordan, The Days of a Man, Yonkers-on-Hudson, New York: World Book Company, 1922.

Selections from Edward McNall Burns, David Starr Jordan: Prophet of Freedom, Stanford University Press, 1953, 59-55, 211-226.

Thursday, February 15:

Paul Ehrlich, Interview by MotherEarth News, 1974.

Paul Ehrlich, National Academy of Sciences Interviews, 2002. Please listen to tracks 2, 3, and 4.

And on "the bet," please read John Tierney, "Betting the Planet," and Paul Ehrlich, "The Two Simon Bets."

Thursday, March 8:

Jenny Price, "Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in L.A.," The Believer, April 2006: Part One; May 2006: Part Two.

Q&A with Jenny Price in Grist magazine: "The Nature of a Plastic Pink Flamingo."