HIST 3800: Environmental History of the United States

You will need to develop a topic that meets the following requirements:

• Is relevant to the environmental history of the United States
• Supports analysis and argument, meaning that it is open to interpretation and is something reasonable people may disagree on
• Is narrow enough to allow original thought, and can be answered in 12 weeks

There are three suggested approaches to finding a topic for your assignment.

• Use the tools of environmental history to gain fresh insight into a U.S. history topic you are already familiar with. Try viewing the event, theme, or era through one of these lenses:
  • Necessary resources (coal, wood, steel, iron) and/or their extraction
  • Impact on habitats of animals and plants
  • Impact on indigenous peoples
• Start with a non-human actor and develop a topic from there. Once you select something, do some basic historical research to narrow the topic to a research question you can answer in a semester. Examples of non-human actors include:
  • Organisms like animals or plants
  • Consumer products
  • Chemicals
• Start with a physical location you know and consider its history. Think about the main aspects of the location's history: what larger, global issues are involved? Some examples of this include:
  • Strawberry Reservoir and its history as part of the Ute Reservation, its role in providing power and water to Utah County and Salt Lake City, and its relationship to the Colorado River. Universal issues could be the building of dams for hydroelectric power or water rights in the American West.
  • University Avenue in Orem and its automobile traffic and parking lots. How did this street and city go from pedestrian friendly to automobile-dependent? Universal issues include changes in transportation or urban planning.

Read through the information at this link for help with creating a topic and beginning research:  https://www.williamcronon.net/researching/questions.htm

Below is a list of potential topics to help you get started. Background research can help you select keywords and find interesting subtopics to explore! Try Googling topics about which you're interested, reading a few recent news articles, and/or digging into Wikipedia. 

Potential Topics

• "public lands"
• Endangered Species Act of 1973
• water OR drought
• pollution
• legislation OR policy OR laws
• "Navajo Nation"
• "environmental racism"
• mining
• "national parks"
• Downwinder
• "fish and wildlife"
• "Indigenous Peoples"
• technology OR "electronic waste" OR e-waste
• Yellowstone
• fire OR "forest fire"
• farmers OR agriculture 
• "wild horses"
• colonialism
• "Transcontinental Railroad"

Boolean operators are words or symbols that tell library databases how to search. With Google, you can throw search terms at the search box and trust that Google's search rules and algorithms will take care of things. Library databases need you to type in the search rules along with the topics and subjects you're searching for.

AND

This command tells the database to search for two or more words in article titles, topics, and abstracts.

• "Bayonet Constitution" AND Hawaii
• "Bayonet Constitution" AND Hawaii AND agriculture 

OR

This tool tells the database to find at least one of two or three words. This tool is the best way to search for synonyms without having to try an entire series of searches:

• "national park" AND ("conservation" OR "preservation")
• "mountain west" AND ("water" OR "drought")

"Quotation Marks"

Quotation marks are used to tell databases to search for words in a certain order. This is especially useful for finding titles or specific topics that can't be boiled down to a specific word:

• ("Native American" OR indigenous)  AND ("tribe" OR "nation")
• ("Native American" OR indigenous)  AND ("tribe" OR "nation") AND Utah

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