The changes of natural environment along with China's historical period

Instructions

This is intended to give you an opportunity actually to do environmental history yourself as a way of synthesizing what you have learned from the entire course. In it, you are to choose some place in the world and write a 3FULL page essay discussing your interpretation of some aspects of its environmental history, using materials we have studied in the class. Because this is a brief paper, you will need to think carefully about what parts of your chosen place you wish to explore in your essay: it is far better to discuss a few aspects well than many aspects superficially. Write a description or tell a story that will explain to the reader how this place came to have the shape and qualities it has today. You should think of this paper as an exercise in historical, geographical, and environmental interpretation, asking you to read a small patch of landscape as a historical document of past environmental change.Since I would like you to be thinking about this paper from the very start of the semester, here are some suggestions for the how best to approach it. Remember that the most important aspect of this assignment is for you to have an experience trying to read an actual landscape. I fully understand that you do not know enough environmental history to construct a complete or fully accurate narrative of environmental changes that have shaped your chosen place. What I am looking for instead is that you take a long, careful look at a place and try to see it with unfamiliar eyes, taking nothing for granted but looking at everything you see there as if you had never seen it before. Then ask how the things you see might have come to be there.Use materials from the readings and from the lectures to help you think about the kinds of questions you want to ask, and do the best job you can answering these questions using the evidence you can find on the ground. You do not need to worry too much about identifying individual species of plants and animals, though you should at least look closely at these just to see what you can figure out about the way they are arranged on the land; more importantly, though, look at the broader patterns of boundaries, buildings, street patterns, fence lines, utility services, etc., instead.Although this is not primarily a paper based on written documents, I expect you to track down at least FOUR sources that will help you understand the changing landscape of your chosen place. You need to have at least two primary sources.  For instance, look at old photographs, maps, land surveys, surveyor notes, and census records.  Tertiary sources (i.e. encyclopedic sources) should not be included in these four sources.

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