ARTH 201
American Landscape History Fall 2009
Division I Writing Skills
Cross-listed ENVI 201
This is not the current course catalog

A survey course stressing the visual attributes and historical geography of regional, vernacular (that is, ordinary or pervasive) American settings, with the goal of discerning a national style of spatial or landscape organization. Among the human-altered environments to be studied, from an evolutionary or diachronic perspective, are: forestlands, rangelands, croplands, outdoor recreational sites, mines and quarries; power and utilities; small towns, mill towns, central business districts, and suburbs; housing, industry, commerce, and institutional uses such as the American college campus; water, road, and rail corridors as examples of circulation nets. Given the course’s breadth of topics and, by contrast, other courses (see ArtH 311 and 318 during this academic year) concentrating on specific land uses, a major objective in this survey will lie in discerning generic stylistic continuities and discontinuities, or changes, which the landscape activities or sites express. One outdoor, afternoon meeting each week provides discussion opportunities in situ, and enables class members to obtain a deeper or first-hand familiarity with a rural-urban gradient of representative land uses and occupants of the Hoosic-Hudson watershed and Taconic upland region surrounding Williamstown, as well as practicums in interviewing and field study methodologies.