Led by Patty Limerick, this seminar uses focused case studies to explore the larger picture of environmental history, a subject that has grown increasingly complex as historians deepen their understanding of the vast role of "anthropogenic change" (also known as "history") in reconfiguring the places and processes thought of as "natural." Much of the seminar explores the transformation of attitudes, from the assessment of North American landscapes and resources by early settlers to the recognition of the changing "baseline" of global warming, along with a reconsideration—and revision—of the usual polarity-pitting utilitarian approaches in opposition to preservationist approaches to the management of nature. With guest speakers drawn from the University of Colorado's widely respected environmental studies program, the roles of naturalists and scientists in shaping American thinking about nature will receive particular attention, as will changes in the production and consumption of energy, a fundamental matter in environmental history. The concluding field trip to Rocky Mountain National Park gives the themes of the lectures and discussions a down-to-earth grounding in a visit to one of the most popular units in the nation's public lands, while close attention to John McPhee's Encounters with the Archdruid provides a framework for drawing lessons from the past to enhance the quality of contemporary environmental decision-making.

Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) is the great American novel about race, perhaps even the great American novel. It considers and affirms the principle—that "mysterious binding force"—that holds the U.S. together as a people and that is tied to its own history. In doing so it raises all the important political questions about equality, freedom, rights and justice; the legacy of slavery and white supremacy; our "human and absurd diversity." The novel's deliberate attempt, in Ellison's words, "to return to the mood of personal moral responsibility for democracy" makes perfectly clear the connection between literature and politics. The seminar will also consider a few of Ellison's essays bearing directly on Invisible Man.

From 1919 to 1929, Langston Hughes noted, "Harlem was in vogue." Black painters and sculptors joined writers and musicians in an artistic outpouring that established Harlem as the international capital of African American culture. Participants will study the evolution of the Harlem Renaissance through the music of Duke Ellington and Ethel Waters, the art of painter Archibald Motley and sculptor Augusta Savage, and the literary works of Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer, among others.

Viewed as everything from an extension of frontier ideology to the expression of counter culture, the road narrative genre has been an enduring and popular American cultural form. Whether mainstream or marginal, road narratives feature a protagonist (or pair) who embraces the geographical freedom represented by the automobile in order to attain a range of other mobilities—from the psychological and sexual to the social and economic. In this seminar, participants will examine this genre in relation to an American ideology of both spatial and social mobility. Beginning with the first transcontinental road novel, published in 1912, participants will look at a range of texts that feature protagonists whose identities vary in relation to class, gender, and race in order to understand how road narratives illuminate an issue of mobility central to their larger historical and cultural moments. To enhance our discussion of the primary sources, participants will view a selection of maps, advertisements, and photographs from the Newberry collections related to road travel.