Ancient Climate Changes

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

In the fifteenth century, a sizable portion of humanity broke with the past and stitched together a new world. Societies across the globe encountered one another for the first time, developed novel intellectual and economic systems, and organized politically as they never had before. Their explorers, artists, scientists, merchants, and rulers set in motion a great expansion and intensification of humanity’s presence on Earth, in ways we are still struggling to manage today. This course will take you through these global developments. It will do so by introducing you to environmental history: the study of humanity’s past interactions with the nonhuman world. You will discover how European imperialism conscripted plans and animals; how climatic cooling triggered a seventeenth-century world crisis; and how globalization transformed humanity’s footprint on planet Earth. In the process, you will learn how to read and learn across disciplines, in ways that will deepen your understanding of our present and future.