Search Results
Your search for courses · tagged with HIST Environment and Health · returned 8 results
-
HIST 100.06 Food and Public Health: Why the Brits Embraced White Bread 6 credits
Food, health, medicine, public policy and the built environment… all were transformed as Britain industrialized in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This course explores how cultural, social and economic changes shaped the culture of food consumption during this transitional period. We also explore changing ideas in medical history and public health from the early modern to modern period. We will consider how our historical understanding can inform our views of the present through an academic civic engagement project that will connect students to Northfield communities.
Held for new first year students
- Fall 2024
- AI/WR1, Argument & Inquiry/WR1 IS, International Studies
-
Student is a member of the First Year First Term class level cohort. Students are only allowed to register for one A&I course at a time. If a student wishes to change the A&I course they are enrolled in they must DROP the enrolled course and then ADD the new course. Please see our Workday guides Drop or 'Late' Drop a Course and Register or Waitlist for a Course Directly from the Course Listing for more information.
-
HIST 111 Uncharted Waters: The History of Society and the Sea 6 credits
This course introduces students to maritime history, marine environmental history, and issues in contemporary marine policy. While traditional histories have framed the sea as an empty space and obstacle to be traversed, or as a battleground, we will approach the ocean as a contact zone, a space of labor, and as the site of focused scientific research, thereby emphasizing human interaction with the oceans. We will examine how people have come to know, utilize, and govern the world’s oceans across time and space, and we will explore how this history informs contemporary issues in maritime law, governance, and ocean conservation.
-
HIST 205 American Environmental History 6 credits
Environmental concerns, conflicts, and change mark the course of American history, from the distant colonial past to our own day. This course will consider the nature of these eco-cultural developments, focusing on the complicated ways that human thought and perception, culture and society, and natural processes and biota have all combined to forge Americans’ changing relationship with the natural world. Topics will include Native American subsistence strategies, Euroamerican settlement, industrialization, urbanization, consumption, and the environmental movement. As we explore these issues, one of our overarching goals will be to develop an historical context for thinking deeply about contemporary environmental dilemmas.
- Winter 2025, Spring 2025
- HI, Humanistic Inquiry IDS, Intercultural Domestic Studies
-
HIST 245 Ireland: Land, Conflict and Memory 6 credits
This course explores the history of Ireland from Medieval times through the Great Famine, ending with a look at the Partition of Ireland in 1920. We examine themes of religious and cultural conflict and explore a series of English political and military interventions. Throughout the course, we will analyze views of the Irish landscape, landholding patterns, and health and welfare issues. Finally, we explore the contested nature of history and memory as the class discusses monuments and memory production in Irish public spaces.
-
HIST 264 A History of India Through Food 6 credits
Indian cuisine is today famed worldwide and known for its complex diversity. This course will explore food as a gateway through which to understand a broader history of society, economy and politics in the Indian subcontinent. An analysis of the production, distribution, and consumption of food and spices, beginning in the ancient era and ending in contemporary times, will allow us to examine community formation, patterns of wealth distribution, and state-building strategies. We will look at topics including farming and the environment, medical and religious systems, culture, caste, and colonialism.
- Winter 2025
- HI, Humanistic Inquiry IS, International Studies
-
HIST 287 From Alchemy to the Atom Bomb: The Scientific Revolution and the Making of the Modern World 6 credits
This course examines the growth of modern science since the Renaissance with an emphasis on the Scientific Revolution, the development of scientific methodology, and the emergence of new scientific disciplines. How might a history of science focused on scientific networks operating within society, rather than on individual scientists, change our understanding of “genius,” “progress,” and “scientific impartiality?” We will consider a range of scientific developments, treating science both as a body of knowledge and as a set of practices, and will gauge the extent to which our knowledge of the natural world is tied to who, when, and where such knowledge has been produced and circulated.
- Spring 2025
- HI, Humanistic Inquiry WR2 Writing Requirement 2
-
HIST 308 American Cities and Nature 6 credits
Since the nation's founding, the percentage of Americans living in cities has risen nearly sixteenfold, from about five percent to the current eighty-one percent. This massive change has spawned legions of others, and all of them have bearing on the complex ways that American cities and city-dwellers have shaped and reshaped the natural world. This course will consider the nature of cities in American history, giving particular attention to the dynamic linkages binding these cultural epicenters to ecological communities, environmental forces and resource flows, to eco-politics and social values, and to those seemingly far-away places we call farms and wilderness. HIST 205 is recommended but not required.
HIST 205 is recommended but not required.
-
IDSC 258 Consensus or Contentious? Controversies in Science Then and Now 2 credits
Almost every global challenge confronting humankind requires some level of engagement with science and technology. However, finding solutions to our most pressing problems also requires an understanding of how science operates within its social, political, and cultural context. This course will explore the relationship between science and society by examining a series of controversies in science from both the past and the present. We will investigate topics such as biological and social concepts of race, the use of unethically obtained scientific results, the ethics of genomics research, legislation over vaccination mandates, “parachute” science, and climate change denial. Examining the role of science in society will help us understand issues related to the use of evidence, expertise, and the relationship between science and politics. By wrestling with current and historic scientific controversies, we will examine the ways in which scientific disagreements are often as much about values as they are about research methods.
- Fall 2024
- No Exploration