Doing Local Environment History

Assistant professor of history Michael Smith was troubled by the feedback he received from the students in his History of American Environmental Thought course. They told him that the material in the course was interesting but somewhat remote from their lives. In response, he developed a component for the course that connected the students more deeply to both the material and the Ithaca community. During the 2005–6 academic year, students in the course worked with the History Center in Tompkins County on a series of local environmental history case studies, ranging from the 1903 typhoid epidemic in Ithaca to an environmental history of mills along Fall Creek. By working with primary sources relating to local environmental history housed in a local cultural institution, the students almost without exception developed a stronger connection to the Ithaca community. As one student wrote in his final essay, “Doing a local environmental history project will not teach you the meaning of life, but it will give meaning to a particular place—enough for one semester.”