Geography 122: "The American Scene (GH; US)"

The American Scene offers a broad introduction to the historical geography of the United States through analysis of distinctive elements of regional landscapes. Archival evidence and contemporary photography are utilized to assist in an understanding of "landscape," "place" and "region", each important frames for geographical inquiry. For some students, GEOG 102 is one of a suite of 100-level courses that are part of the Major in Geography. For a second set of students, it is one of several recommended courses for particular programs, such as Landscape Architecture, Secondary Education or Elementary Education. And for yet other students across 48 different majors that typically take the course, it offers a humanistic perspective on the world around them, a perspective rich with empirical evidence of the transformation of the United States from a wilderness first occupied by Indians, then colonists from specific European realms, some supported by indentured or enslaved labor, as well as later immigrants that pursue agricultural and industrial economies in an array of rural and urban settlement systems. No matter what the rationale for taking the course, at the conclusion of GEOG 102 The American Scene, students should have a deeper understanding of some of the issues involved in the analysis of place at a variety of spatial scales, and a better sense of the historical layering in the landscapes that they encounter each day and on their travels. The course is organized regionally and temporally to follow the evolving historical geography of the area today known as the United States. Case studies are drawn from a dozen regions, each emphasizing a different historical moment in the transformation of landscape since the end of the last Ice Age. Some examples draw on material at the scale of a single house or farm and others at the level of a multi-state industrial corporation such as US Steel in the early twentieth century. Although the course shares with other courses in human geography an intellectual concern for spatial organization of human activities, the ways in which social processes and structures can be understood through a geographic lens, and geographic perspectives on human-environment interactions" (GEOG 020 course description), this course, along with GEOG 040, World Regions, stresses the regional settings of such organization, processes and interactions. Any student interested in how the distinctive landscapes of the United States evolved to this point should enroll in The American Scene. It draws on scholarship in historical and cultural geography, as well as architectural history and art history. Students' final grades are based on attendance, participation, four tests, a final exam, and a walking-tour landscape analysis assignment. Currently offered once a year in the Fall semester.

Professor: Dr. Deryck Holdsworth