Fossil fuel powered the making–now the unmaking–of the modern world. As the first fossil fuel state, Pennsylvania led the United States toward an energy-intensive economy, a technological pathway with planetary consequences. The purpose of this seminar is to perform a historical accounting–and an ethical reckoning–of coal, oil, and natural gas. Specifically, students will investigate the histories and legacies of fossil fuel in connection to three entities: the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the City of Philadelphia, and the University of Pennsylvania. Under instructor guidance, students will do original research, some of it online, much the rest of it in archives, on and off campus, in and around Philadelphia. Philly-based research may also involve fieldwork. While based in historical sources and methods, this course intersects with business, finance, policy, environmental science, environmental engineering, urban and regional planning, public health, and social justice. Student projects may take multiple forms, individual and collaborative, from traditional papers to data visualizations prepared with assistance from the Price Lab for Digital Humanities. Through their research, students will contribute to a multi-year project that will ultimately be made available to the public.
This course explores the changing relationships between human beings and the natural world from early history to the present. We will consider the various ways humans across the globe have interacted with and modified the natural world by using fire, domesticating plants and animals, extracting minerals and energy, designing petro-chemicals, splitting atoms and leaving behind wastes of all sorts. Together we consider the impacts, ranging from population expansion to species extinctions and climate change. We examine how human interactions with the natural world relate to broader cultural processes such as religion, colonialism and capitalism, and why it is important to understand the past, even the deep past, in order to rise to the challenges of the present.
Fires and floods, droughts and plagues, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions: these environmental crises are both natural and political events. They transform human environments and require large-scale, coordinated responses, but they are also cultural constructs, emerging through public discourse and debate. This course will explore how natural disasters catalyzed political, cultural, and technological change in the early modern period (roughly 1450-1800), an era of widespread political conflict, unprecedented global exchange and colonial conquest, and the climatic disruption of the “Little Ice Age.” Starting with the Black Death in Europe, we will look at natural disasters across the early modern world to address the following questions: What, and who, made something a natural disaster? How did natural disasters reshape humans’ understanding of their environments and produce new knowledge, especially in colonial contexts? How did different polities, states, and empires respond to these events? And what do these crises tell us about power and politics in the early modern world?