Course offerings

HIST 2369: Race, the nation, and american outdoor recreation (Fall 2025, Cornell)

This class will explore how access to the outdoors has been impacted by social inequalities related to race, class, and gender throughout U.S. history. The idea of “the outdoors” and its synonyms (whether “wilderness” or “nature”) has sustained lasting cultural resonance in the United States. Since the nineteenth century’s development of American Romanticism, “nature”—or the idea of a landscape not manipulated by humans—has become a powerful cultural symbol and one of the nation’s most cherished attributes. However, this course will examine how this strong reverence for natural places in the United States has been overlaid by racist ideologies.

Photo credit: Rodrigo Abd, AP Source: National Council on Public History

HIST 4243: public history in place: Interpreting the environment (Spring 2026, Cornell)

This class moves beyond the traditional disciplinary confines of academic history to examine museums, archival collections, parks, monuments, podcasts, op-eds, maps, and more as sites of historical inquiry, memory, and knowledge production. We will think critically about what it means to craft place-based and environmental history narratives for a “public” audience. Throughout the semester, we will also consider the following questions: Who counts as a historian? To whom are historians responsible when they conduct archival research and craft narratives? What makes history in/accessible? Who are the actors in environmental history (humans, or also non-human animals and plants)? This course will also reconsider what it means to write place-based histories by incorporating site visits (including a park, an archive, and a museum) into our coursework.