This graduate reading seminar will explore the ways that historians and other scholars have
studied America's built environment to understand the nation. It will emphasize the variety
of methodologies used to explore the American landscape: urban history, architectural history,
environmental history, cultural geography, and historic preservation prominent among them.
Books will cover topics ranging from the colonial period to the late twentieth century.
Each student will also visit one museum or historic site, chosen to fit her interests and schedule.
Paul A. Shackel, ed. Myth, Memory, and the Making of the American Landscape. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001. ISBN: 0813021049.
Richard Lyman Bushman. The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities. 1992. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 1993. ISBN 0679744142.
Lisa C. Tolbert, Constructing Townscapes: Space and Society in Antebellum Tennessee . Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999. ISBN: 0807847682.
William Cronon. Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. 1991. Reprint, New York: W. W. Norton, 1992. ISBN: 0393308731.
Alan Trachtenberg. Reading American Photographs: Images As History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans. 1989. Reprint, Hill & Wang, ISBN 0374522499.
Reading American Photographs: Images As History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans. New York, N.Y.: Hill and Wang.
Richard V. Francaviglia. Hard Places: Reading the Landscape of America's Historic Mining Districts. 1991. Reprint, University of Iowa Press, 1997. ISBN: 0877456097.
John R. Stilgoe. Metropolitan Corridor: Railroads and the American Scene. 1983. Reprint, New Haven: Yale, 1985. ISBN: 0300034814.
Katherine Solomonson. The Chicago Tribune Tower Competition: Skyscraper Design and Cultural Change in the 1920s. 2001. Reprint, University of Chicago Press, 2003. ISBN: 0226768007.
Alison Isenberg. Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It . 2004. Reprint, University of Chicago Press, 2005. ISBN: 0226385086.
Gail Radford. Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. ISBN: 0226702235.
Adam Rome. The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. ISBN: 0521804906.
Max Page and Randall Mason, eds. Giving Preservation a History: Histories of Historic Preservation in the United States. New York: Routledge, 2004. ISBN: 0415934435.
History Seminar: Zachery Schrag