Adventures in the Anthropocene

Fire, irrigation, blue-water navigation, the fossil fuel revolution, the space race: no matter what time period you consider, technology has dramatically changed the material basis of human subsistence—and the environment in which we live.  Working from accessible secondary sources, this presentation explicitly engages historiographical debates about human agency and environmental change. In addition to modeling student engagement with scholarly debates in environmental history, this presentation will also provide suggestions for ways in which environmental explanations can be juxtaposed with other interpretations of historical change to bring historiography to the foreground.