The purpose of this course is to familiarize undergraduate students with environmental history as a discipline, as well as introduce them to the Atlantic World as a region of study by focusing on the late fifteenth through mid-nineteenth centuries. This course does not assume previous experience with history courses and is intended to be a broad survey that encompasses several global regions. The course is arranged both thematically and geographically and emphasizes environmental change in the context of the eastern and southern coasts of the United States, the Caribbean, central and southeastern Mexico, Brazil, West Africa, and the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts of Europe throughout the early modern period. 

In this introductory course, students will study history from a distance. It will cover tens of thousands of years of time and touch upon all the locations that humans have ever inhabited. The class will be about looking for patterns and comparisons rather than memorizing facts about names and places. By the end of the course, students should be able to identify and understand long-term and large-scale dynamics of complex change in the past. In particular, this course thinks about what happens when formerly disconnected peoples come into contact with one another. This is a class about connections (some violent and exploitative, others creative and productive), not about places in isolation. It explores the movements of people, goods, ideas, and non-human species—from microbes to mammoths—and the results of the encounters among them. This is also a course about the craft of history. In addition to learning about big structures of change in the human past, students will be practicing the skills and habits of the history major. 

This course studies history from a distance, covering tens of thousands of years and touching upon all the locations that humans have ever inhabited. Its focus is on finding patterns and comparisons rather than memorizing facts about names and places. By the end of the course, students should be able to identify and understand long-term and large-scale dynamics of complex change in the past. Themes of the course include connections between groups of people, the movements of people, goods, ideas and non-human species, and human exploitation of the earth and its inhabitants. 

This course provides a survey of World History through the lens of human interactions with the environment. From the evolution of ​Homo Sapiens​ through to the present we will examine the ways in which the environment shaped, and has been shaped by, world historical events. Among the major topics this course will focus on are the importance of water to the rise of sedentary societies and empires, natural disasters, disease, capitalism and the environment, the impacts of European expansion and imperialism, and climate change. This syllabus is for a six-week course taught online.