AMERSTD C112
The American Landscape: Place, Power and Culture
What is America as a landscape and a place, and how do we know it when we see it? This course seeks to address such questions, to introduce ways of seeing and interpreting American histories and cultures, as revealed in everyday built surroundings—homes, highways, farms, factories, stores, recreation areas, small towns, city districts, and regions. It does so through the lens of cultural geography, an interdisciplinary practice that developed, in part, here at Berkeley. Our goal in this course is thus twofold: First, to develop literacy in the role of space and place in American culture, and second to develop a working knowledge of cultural geography as a practice.
Topics
- . To introduce students to the central themes and practices of cultural geography; To explore the interaction of landscape (space, place, and the built environment) with American economics, politics, and culture; To teach students how to “read” landscapes as records of past and present social relations, and to form their own speculations from evidence about the cultural meanings of those landscapes; To reinforce and further develop advanced skills in seeing, thinking, researching, and writing. Upon completion of this course, it is hoped that students will appreciate the way that the American landscape both shapes and is given shape by economics, politics and culture. In studying practices of cultural geography, as well as undertaking their own experiments through course assignments, students will emerge with a better grasp of how to examine landscapes in an intellectually rigorous manner, and how to use the landscape as evidence for scholarship.
Official catalogue course objectives and student learning outcomes
Sources
- Course catalogue ↗2026-2027