Please help me! I'm a fourth year science student taking an environmental history class. I have to come up with my own topic, and write a paper based on some or all of our readings this term. (I've read diligently and taken notes, attended seminars, 4h a week.) I have no idea how to come up with a topic. Our main theme is "Eating Nature," which is supposed to be about food, but we can use other themes from the class: landscapes, consumption, knowing, identity, transnational.
Readings were about some environmental things I would have expected mass/fast food production, California's agricultural history, national parks, Atlantic cod, but really stuff was focused on the environment's effect on people, not really science and people's effect on the environment. I don't find people interesting as a topic, but I already had to write about them twice for this class.
I don't know how to come up with a proper topic, despite having googled for tips on history essays. I'm not asking for a topic per se, but just how to come up with one. I came up with a couple, but they seem lousy, obvious, pointless. My best idea was "unidirectional" and he said I should also consider the effect of the environment on the people. :(
We're supposed to "take the material where we want to take it, work the material thoroughly, define a theme and work it deliberately in a sophisticated fashion - probably multiple themes." His examples were Food and spatial relationships or food and identity.
Human identities are not interesting to me in the least! I do not care about gender, identity, nationalism. I care about landscapes, fish populations, rivers, and so on. We only read ONE scientific paper, and it's not about food. I hate most of the things we read.
edited: paragraph breaks.
edited2: bolding and list of all readings in order. ** means interesting and about food, * just interesting.
Cronon, William. “Kennecott Journey: The Paths Out of Town.” in Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Past. Eds., Cronon, William, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin. New York. W. W. Norton, 1992: 28-51.
White, Richard. “‘Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?: Work and Nature.” in Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature. Ed. Cronon, William. New York. W. W. Norton, 1995: 171-85.
Chester, Robert N., Nicolaas Mink, Jane Dusselier, Nancy Shoemaker. “Having Our Cake and Eating It Too: Food’s Place in Environmental History, A Forum.” Environmental History 14 (April 2009): 309-44.
*Carlton, William R. “New England Masts and the King’s Navy.” New England Quarterly 12 (March 1939): 4-18.
*Shaw, Karena. “The Global/Local Politics of the Great Bear Rainforest.” Environmental Politics 13 (March 2004): 373-92.
**Tyrrell, Ian. “Peripheral Visions: Californian-Australian Environmental Contacts, c.1850s-1910.” Journal of World History 8 (Fall 1997): 275-302.
Wolmer, William. “Transboundary Conservation: The Politics of Ecological Integrity in the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park.” Journal of Southern African Studies 29 (March 2003): 261-78.
**Kurlansky, Mark. Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World. London. Jonathon Cape, 1998.
Mintz, Sidney. “Time, Sugar, & Sweetness.” Marxist Perspectives 2 (Winter 1979-1980): 56-73.
Sackman, Douglas C. “Putting Gender on the Table: Food and the Family Life of Nature.” in Seeing Nature Through Gender. Ed. Scharff, Virginia J. Lawrence. University Press of Kansas, 2003: 169-93.
Parenteau, William. “‘Care, Control and Supervision’: Native People in the Canadian Atlantic Salmon Fishery, 1867-1900.” Canadian Historical Review 79 (March 1998): 1-35.
Stroud, Ellen Francis. “Troubled Waters in Ecotopia: Environmental Racism in Portland, Oregon.” Radical History Review 74 (Spring 1999): 65-95.
Raviv, Yael. “Falafel: A National Icon.” Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture. 3 (Summer 2003): 20-25.
Lacombe, Michael A. Political Gastronomy: Food and Authority in the English Atlantic World. Philadelphia. University of Penssylvania Press, 2012.
*Nash, Linda. Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge. Berkeley. University of California Press, 2006.
Klingle, Matthew. “Spaces of Consumption in Environmental History.” History & Theory 42 (December 2003): 94-110.
*Binnema, Theodore and Melanie Niemi. “‘Let the Line Be Drawn Now’: Wilderness, Conservation, and the Exclusion of Aboriginal People from Banff National Park in Canada.” Environmental History 11 (October 2006): 724-51.
McCarthy, James. “Rural Geography: Alternative Rural Economies—The Search for Alterity in Forests, Fisheries, Food, and Fair Trade.” Progress in Human Geography 30 (December 2006):803-11.
Rollins, William. “Reflections on a Spare Tire: SUVs and the Postmodern Environmental Consciousness.” Environmental History 11 (October 2006): 684-723.
**Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. New York. Harper, 2002.
*Ellis, Bonnie K., et al. “Long-Term Trophic Cascade in a Large Lake Ecosystem.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108 (18 January 2011): 1070-75.
not read yet:
Carney, Judith. “Landscapes of Technology Transfer: Rice Cultivation and African Continuities,” Technology and Culture 37 (January 1996): 5-35.
Flores, Dan. “Bison Ecology and Bison Diplomacy: The Southern Plains from 1825 to 1850.” Journal of American History 78 (September 1991): 465-85.
Raup, Hugh Miller. “The View from John Sanderson’s Farm: A Perspective for the Use of the Land.” Journal of Forest History 10 (April 1966): 2-11.
Donahue, Brian. “Another Look at John Sanderson’s Farm: A Perspective on New England
Guthman, Julie. Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California. Berkeley. University of California Press, 2004.
*We also saw some great films that are not about food - "Winged Migration," "Blue Vinyl," and "Manufactured Landscapes." There are a few other film pieces such as one about Columbia River salmon people, and one about panamerican migratory bird conservation, which has a food aspect relating to duck hunting.
I have virtually no knowledge about your class, so my post probably won't help you find a specific topic. But as an undergraduate, I always thought finding a topic was the hardest part of writing! So don't feel discouraged! It can be a real challenge, especially when the topics are broad and open-ended!
I found that there are two keys to writing a good history paper. The first is that you MUST make an argument (You have to provide an interpretation of the past/theme). And the second is that you MUST synthesize as many sources together as you can to support that argument (Professors do not want you to just summarize sources). So when I would go to write a paper, I would try to pick the topic based on how effectively I could accomplish these goals.
Maybe start by identifying several broad topics that you're curious about. Just something you're interested in delving a little bit deeper with. From here, maybe ask yourself:
Maybe one of these questions might give you the spark you need. The important part isn't the topic so much as is your argument/interpretation and your support of that argument. Good luck!
Take something you like
fish populations
Take a people group that interacts with said interest. Obviously whales are mammals, but marine life.
What is their history and tradition? What government organisations and legislations have affected them? How have the national parks and reservations historically been divided? How has the allowance for hunting had a positive or negative effect on the population of the tribe and the whale population?
landscapes, consumption, knowing, identity, transnational
National parks and reservations, how meat is divided and traditionally consumed, how have they retained cultural identity but also assimilated, seeing as they are closely related to other tribes in Canada, how do they nationally identify and what have the historical boundaries been?
So yes, it is about food and culture, but you also can include the "historical" scientific data of marine life, preservation status, migration patterns etc.
And all of this just a few hours from Simon Fraser and Vancouver.
Obviously you do not have to do this topic, but hopefully you saw the method. I knew very little about the Makah people before writing this, but I asked myself some questions about what your interest were and what in your area could provide an interdisciplinary overlap between your interest in science and your historical assignment. I thought native peoples, whaling, and then did some brief searching and narrowed things down.
So again, what is something that interest you? What time period are you looking to work in? A time period could be anything from the "Roman Republic" to London on Christmas day in 1975. What people were involved? Who and what were affected by these events? What can a description of these specifics of time and figures do to further help to bring understanding to your initial subject of interest? Always ask a question that you would want to know the answer to and go from there
I hate most of the things we read.
university life is a privilege, don't forget that.
all the best on your essay.
That is such an awesome reading list. Who's teaching this course?