History 900 Workshop: Environmental History of New York City Professor Andrew Needham KJCC 711, Office Hours T, W 5-6 [email protected], 8-8629 New York City appears the antithesis of nature. The concrete canyons of lower Broadway and Midtown, the mechanistic grids ordering the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn, the reclaimed wetlands of JFK and Laguardia Airports, the industrial wastes of the aging manufacturing corridors of Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, and the massive (if closed) landfills on Fresh Kills, Staten Island, seem monuments to the human domination of the natural world. Look closer, however, and nature remains at the heart of the city’s existence. From the city’s origins as a harbor city at the intersection of the Hudson River and the Atlantic, to the Manhattan bedrock that anchor modern skyscrapers, natural geography has determined urban possibility. Infrastructure that has become “second nature” brings water and electricity to the city and carries its waste to distant landfills. The park lands that dot the city have become both playgrounds where New Yorkers seek green space and battlefields where they fight over the proper ways to enjoy those spaces.

This course investigates topics in the environmental history of New York City from the 1600s to the present. Environmental history is a relatively new field of history that attempts to take nature and natural forces seriously as key components of historical change. Through readings, site visits, and writing assignments, The course introduces students to the field of environmental history and investigates the history of our immediate environment. As a history department workshop, the course also introduces students to the key elements of the discipline of history: finding and reading articles, conducting research, and evaluating primary and secondary sources.

Assigned Books (Available at the NYU Bookstore or online. Books are also on reserve in Bobst): Ballon, Hilary and Kenneth Jackson, eds. Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York. New York, W.W. Norton, 2007 (optional). Gandy, Matthew. Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2003. Goodman, James. Blackout. New York: North Point Press, 2005. Page, Max. The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900-1940. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Rosenberg, Charles. The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849 and 1866. 2nd Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962, 1987. Sanderson, Eric. Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City. New York: Abrams, 2009.

Research Resources: At times, I will ask you to consult these resources in advance of our in-class discussions. They will also be useful in your three essays. Ascher, Kate. The Works: Anatomy of a City. New York: Penguin Press, 2005. (available in the Bobst Reference Room) Day, Leslie. Field Guide to the Natural World of New York City. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. (Reserve) Jackson, Kenneth. Ed. The Encyclopedia of New York City. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. (Available in the Bobst Reference Room. Prof. Needham also has a copy you may consult). Homberger, Eric. The Historical Atlas of New York City: A Visual Celebration of Nearly 400 Years of New York City’s History. New York: Henry Holt, 1994. (Reserve). Attendance and Participation Students are expected to come to class having read and thought about that week’s material. Students are expected to participate in classroom discussions and to be attentive to the comments of others. I realize that some students are more comfortable speaking extemporaneously than others. To account for this phenomenon, I frequently ask students to write in their notebooks on particular questions. If you know you have difficulty speaking in class, please use these opportunities to share your thoughts. To enable good discussion, I ask that you turn off your cell phones and avoid using laptops or phones in class. My experience leads me to believe that laptops are used far more often to surf the web than to take notes. Such actions distract both you and your fellow students and are inappropriate in a small, discussion-based class. Attendance at every class is required. Students receive one unexcused absence; every additional absence will result in the reduction of the participation grade by one full grade. More than three unexcused absences will result in a maximum participation grade of F. Discussion Questions: On weeks without written assignments, you will post two discussion questions by Tuesday at 5 PM on Blackboard. These will be graded on a scale of check, check +, check –. These questions are a fundamental element of the course. The success of course discussions will largely rest on the quality of student questions. Tips for writing good discussion questions: Think about the key elements of the assigned work for that week. What kind of sources does the author use, and how does he or she use them? What are the works’ major historical claims and why are they important? What are the works’ main ideas and concepts? How might they be used beyond the book? What is significant or unique about the author’s story? Any of these can form the starting point for good discussion questions. While not required, free writing about what you find intriguing or troubling about the reading may help you formulate questions. Types of questions to avoid: purely factual questions, questions that require research beyond that week’s book (unless you are willing to do that research), yes or no questions. Evaluation of a good question: whether you know the answer and whether it engages the reading for that week.

Essay #1 Posing Historical Questions (3 pages) Environmental history is fundamentally concerned with stories of relationships between humans and the natural world. Many of the most influential environmental histories have examined the historical development of relationships that continue to shape the daily lives of contemporary Americans: agricultural commodity markets, water and power systems, ideas of wilderness and civilization. How would you write an environmental history relevant to the lives of contemporary New Yorkers? How would you confine the scope of your research? Which historical actors would serve as your focus and why? How would you include “nature” or “environment” as an historical agent? What kind of historical documents would you hope to find, and why? What questions would frame your research? This essay asks not that you write such a history, but that you create a brief research plan in order hypothetically to write such a history. You may define “nature” or “environment” in any way you wish, but you must make that clear to the reader. Due 10/7. Students should come to class prepared to present their essay to the class, along with its underpinning assumptions. Essay #2 Walking Tour (5 pages) Write a five page environmental history walking tour, based upon newspaper and secondary source, of a particular space in New York City. This space can be a park, a neighborhood, a section of river, canal, harbor, or wetlands, an industrial district, etc. It is up to you to delineate the bounds of your tour. Assume that persons taking the walking tour will have only your paper, and not you, as a guide. Be as visually descriptive as possible while including historical and ecological details. Due 11/ 11. Students should come to class prepared to present the major details of their walking tour. Essay #3 Document Analysis (8-10 pages) For this essay, you will choose a primary source relevant to the class from a nearby archive or rare book collection primary source relevant to the course. This essay requires you to pose perceptive questions, engage intensively with the text and conduct secondary-source research in order to offer illuminating answers that formulate an argument. Note: Since this assignment requires archival research, you should begin identifying a source and reading it in the archive no later than week 10. There will be 2 preliminary steps to this assignment. In week 11, you will submit a preliminary prospectus of one page that includes your selected document and the tentative question or questions you will pose. Two weeks later, on 12/2, you will submit a final prospectus of three pages that include a description and citation of your selected document, the question or questions you are posing, a tentative statement of your argument, and a bibliography of secondary sources. Essays should be double-spaced, with one-inch margins, and in a twelve-point Times font. Please avoid tricks to inflate the length of papers (shrinking margins, increasing spacing between letters, words, and lines, increasing font size, etc.) these tend to be painfully obvious and lead the professor to conclude that the author is up to something.

All essays will receive two grades. The first reflects form and usage. The second reflects the ideas contained within the essay. For information on form and usage, please see the course writing guide. Grades will be determined according to the following percentages: Class participation (including discussion questions): 40% Essay #1: 15% Essay #2: 15% Essay #3: 30% Plagiarism and other violations of the University’s published policies are serious offenses and will be punished severely. Plagiarism includes presenting or paraphrasing a phrase, sentence, or passage of a published work (including material from the WorldWide Web) in a paper without attribution of the source, submitting your own original work in more than one class without the prior permission of the instructors, submitting a paper written by someone else, submitting as your own work any portion of a paper or research that you purchased from another person or commercial firm, and presenting in any other way the work, ideas, data, or words of someone else without attribution. These are punishable offenses whether intended or unintended (e.g., occurs through poor citations or confusion about how to reference properly). Anyone caught plagiarizing will fail the course. Academic dishonesty also encompasses situations of deliberate fabrication, such as claiming that “you must have lost the paper I turned in” or the "computer crashed and I lost my only copy" when such stories are not true. Violations of academic integrity, including plagiarism, will result in disciplinary action by the University. 9/9 Week 1 Introduction 9/16 Week 2 Methods of Urban Environmental History Donald Worster, “Doing Environmental History,” in The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives in Modern Environmental History, Donald Worster, ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. [BB] William Cronon, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative,” Journal of American History 78:4 (March, 1992) [BB] Jenny Price, “13 Ways of Looking at Nature in L.A.” The Believer (April 2006). Christine Rosen and Joel Tarr, eds., “The Importance of an Urban Perspective in Environmental History,” Journal of Urban History, 20:3 (1994): 299-310. [BB] Gandy, Concrete and Clay, Introduction. 9/23 Week 3 The Natural History of Early New York Eric Sanderson, Mannahatta Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace, “First Impressions,” in Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 2-13. [BB]

9/30 Week 4 Making Landscapes “Useful” Andrew Hurley, “Creating Ecological Wastelands: Oil Pollution in New York City, 1870-1900,” Journal of Urban History 20 (1994), [BB] David Scobey, “The Rule of Real Estate,” in Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004). [BB] Max Page, The Creative Destruction of Manhattan 10/7 Week 5 1st paper due Come to class prepared to present (in 5 minutes) the major arguments and analyses contained in your paper. Week 6 10/14 Disease, Public Health and Bodies in the City Charles Rosenberg, The Cholera Years. Howard Markel, “The Rabbi with Trachoma: The View from Ellis Island,” in When Germs Travel (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004). [BB] Ellen Stroud, “Dead Bodies in Harlem: Environmental History and the Geography of Death,” in Andrew Isenberg, ed., The Nature of Cities: Culture, Landscape and Urban Space (Rochester, New York: University of Rochester Press: 2006). [BB] Green-wood Cemetery Tour 10/21 Week 7 Nature, Infrastructure, and Disaster Goodman, Blackout David Grann, “City of Water,” New Yorker (Sept. 1, 2003). [BB] Concrete and Clay, Chapter 1 Come to class prepared to discuss the details of one of the following infrastructures by consulting Ascher, Works: New York’s drinking water, waste water, electricity, recycling, garbage, or food supply infrastructures. 10/28 Week 8 Green Spaces David Schuyler, The New Urban Landscape. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986, Chapters 4-7. [BB] Roiy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, “The Past Fifty Years,”in The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (New York: Henry Holt, 1994). [BB] Concrete and Clay, Chapter 2. Central Park Tour

11/4 Week 9 Jane Jacobs, Robert Moses, and Modern New York Gandy, Concrete and Clay, Chapter 3 Ballon and Jackson, Robert Moses and the Modern City, selections. Robert Caro, “Introduction,” in The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Knopf, 1974). [BB] Edward Glaeser, “What a City Needs,” The New Republic (Sept. 4, 2009). [BB] Robert Moses, Working for the People (New York: Harper, 1956), excerpt. [BB] Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961, 2002), excerpt. [BB] 11/11 Week 10 No class Walking tour due 11/18 Week 11 Environmental Inequalities Gandy, Concrete and Clay, Chapters 4 and 5. Julie Sze, “Childhood Asthma in New York City” and “The Racial Geography of New York City Garbage” in Noxious New York (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007). [BB] **Initial prospectus due** 11/25 Week 12 No Class, Thanksgiving 12/2 Week 12 No reading – second prospectus due. Come to class prepared to discuss. 12/9 Week 13 Is Contemporary New York Green? David Owen, “Green Manhattan: Everywhere Should Be More Like New York,” New Yorker (October 18, 2004), 111-123. [BB] Michael Crowley, “Honk, Honk, Aaah,” New York (May 17, 2009). [BB] Nicolai Ouroussoff, “Architecture Review: On High, A Fresh Outlook,” New York Times (June 9, 2009). [BB] High Line Tour 12/16 Final papers due in Prof. Needham’s mailbox by 2 PM.