Institute Readings

Participants will read excerpted chapters from the following books and articles in preparation for the institute. All readings will be made available electronically through the institute website. The program will also include primary source materials, including texts, objects, images, and landscapes. These readings are currently tentative and will be finalized prior to the institute.

Week 1 Readings

Buchanan, Thomas C. “Levees of Hope: African American Steamboat Workers, Cities, and Slave Escapes on the Antebellum Mississippi.” Journal of Urban History 30, no. 3 (2004).

Brady, Lisa. War upon the Land: Military Strategy and the Transformation of Southern Landscapes during the American Civil War. University of Georgia Press, 2012.

Harkin, Michael E. and David Rich Lewis, eds. Native Americans and the Environment: Perspectives on the Ecological Indian. University of Nebraska Press, 2007.

Jacoby, Karl. Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation. University of California Press, 2014.

Powell, Miles. Vanishing America: Species Extinction, Racial Peril, and the Origins of Conservation. Harvard University Press, 2016.

Reid, Joshua L. The Sea Is My Country: The Maritime World of the Makahs. Yale University Press, 2015.

Rothman, Adam. Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South. Harvard University Press, 2007.

Spence, Mark David. Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks. Oxford University Press, 2000.

Whyte, Kyle Powys. “On the Role of Traditional Ecological Knowledge as a Collaborative Concept: A Philosophical Study,” Ecological Processes 2, no. 7 (2013).

Week 2 Readings

Closmann, Charles E., ed. War and the Environment: Military Destruction in the Modern Age. Texas A&M University Press, 2009.

Estes, Nick. Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. Verso Books, 2019.

Gilio-Whitaker, Dina. As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock. Beacon Press, 2019.

Gleason, Diane Mildred. Dardanelle and the Bottoms: Environment, Agriculture, and the Economy in an Arkansas River Community, 1819–1970. University of Arkansas Press, 2017.

Halvorson, Charles. Valuing Clean Air: The EPA and the Economics of Environmental Protection. Oxford University Press, 2021.

Mizelle Jr., Richard. “Black Levee Camp Workers, the NAACP, and the Mississippi Flood Control Project, 1927–1933.” Journal of African American History 98, no 4 (2013).

Nelson, Melissa K. and Dan Shilling, eds. Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Learning from Indigenous Practices for Environmental Sustainability. Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Sabin, Paul. Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism. W. W. Norton, 2021.