Environmental History -- second class of the term: doing environmental history on campus

This week we had our second class of Environmental History (ERST-CAST-HIST 4670H).  Our focus was on the practice of history: how to do it, and why, and with what materials.  The students read these sources in preparation:

Donald Worster, "Doing Environmental History," in: D. Worster, ed., The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 289-307.

William Cronon, "The Uses of Environmental History," Environmental History Review, 1993, 17(3): 10-22.

Alan MacEachern, "An Introduction, in Theory and Practice," in: Method & Meaning in Canadian Environmental History, Alan MacEachern & William J. Turkel, eds. (Nelson, 2009), pp. ix-xv

For the class itself, I used the Trent campus as the subject of environmental history, profiling its history, and demonstrating along the way the use of a wide range of historical resource materials: field observations of human and ecological change, old photos and maps, government reports, newspaper articles and cartoons, documents produced by Trent itself, and oral histories. The local history here is rich and complex, encompassing Indigenous ways of life, European settlement and agricultural development, the timber saw mill industry, formation of transportation networks (railroad, waterway, and roads), the removal of communities to make way for the university, and the planning and building of the university itself.

This class was the first step in a more extensive review of the methods of environmental history, to be continued in a couple of weeks with a field trip, and after that, a visit to class by the Trent Maps and Documents Librarian and the Trent Archivist.

So here's the path we followed this week, with much discussion along the way: