My Environmental Histories
In American Environmental History, we emphasize the idea that everybody makes history every day, and that ideas and institutions have long-term environmental impacts that are often unobserved in history or in life. This final exam allows students to integrate their learning, and personalize it, seeing how their own lives are historically constructed, and how they can make history by constructing their lives differently. The exam also allows me to read papers that are academic and practical and personal, and a lot more interesting than conventional test questions.
- let students show what they learned in the course
- identify ideas and institutions that come from history, and still shape American history (and our own lives)
- understand themselves as historical agents, people who make history by all of their activity and inactivity
- empower them to shape the history of the future, if they choose to