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Subject: History (HIST)
CRN: 42635
Lecture
St Paul: John Roach Center 481
Requirements Met:
Sustainability (SUST)
Writing in the Discipline
Natural Disasters like storms, floods, earthquakes, and volcanoes are dramatic events. Often spectacular, terrifying, and deadly, they raise urgent questions for those who survive them and seek to respond. Why did this happen? Is it a divine judgement, the normal course of nature, or some failure of human foresight and planning? And what should be done in response: rescue, rebuilding, moral and religious reformation, or abandonment? Studying such events in the past allows historians unique windows into the societies and cultures faced by these emergencies, but it also raises basic conceptual problems. Just what separates "natural" from social or political disasters? Should plagues, famines, fires - even war - be included in this category? And what, as historians, can we know and should we say about these events? In this course students explore these questions, first through common readings that offer some possible answers and then by putting these insights into practice by conducting an in-depth research project.
4 Credits