This course is an exercise and experiment in place-oriented history of science. For most historians, including historians of science, the very notion of place-oriented history of science is a contradiction in terms save for the time-honored category of nation-state as place. Thus, a historian might consider a history of French scientific institutions or Chinese science to be a meaningful category, but a history of science of the Paris Basin or of Mongolia seems to be a category mistake.

This is because historians of science still take for granted the Mertonian norm of universality. French, Italian, and German natural philosophers may all have interpretted the Copernican system in ways that were culturally specific; but underlying those interpretations was (and is) a universe whose order was (and is) literally universal.

The Grand Canyon is a good choice of place with which to mark out new territory, to begin to establish a new category of historical inquiry. As Stephen Pyne writes,

Since the mid-nineteenth century, the Canyon has been explored and appreciated, and for the better part of a century it has been a central emblem, a profound truth, for many major American intellectuals and, through them, for American culture at large. In the end, the Grand Canyon cut a swath through the landscape of American history no less unique and grandiloquent than that which the Colorado River had excavated out of the Colorado Plateau. Indeed, the dramatic abruptness of the Canyon's brink matches the suddenness of that historic moment in which a Colorado [River] canyon and American civilization met. How rim and river intersected remains a geologic mystery; how the place and its poets came together endures as something of an intellectual miracle.

The purpose of this course is to define, admire, and critique that miracle -- historically, and all within eleven weeks.

Requirements for the course:

Reading and discussion. I ask that you do all required reading, and that you make contributions to the discussion. Unlike a lecture course, where the lecturer has sole responsibility for the quality and conduct of the course, a seminar is the joint responsibility of professor and students in the seminar. The more you prepare for each week's discussion, the better the course will be.

Reports. You are asked to prepare a report for one week's reading. Your report can be as short as two pages of double-spaced type; please do not write more than four pages. You should summarize the week's reading in a paragraph or two, then use the rest of the report to provoke discussion. Please make sufficient copies of your report and place it in the envelope on the door to my office (H&SS 5071) as early on Monday morning as possible.

Paper. You are required to write a paper, 12-15 pages in length, exploring in detail some aspect of the course. Begin thinking about your topic and sources the first week of term; make use of Earle Spamer's bibliography as a resource. Your paper is due early finals week.

Field trip. As advertised, we will take an unofficial field trip to the Grand Canyon during the tenth week of the quarter. The field trip is unofficial in the following sense: you are not technically required to attend; you will have to provide your own transportation and arrange your own lodging; you can stay in the canyon for as long or as little as you care to do; you will not be insured by the university in case of loss of life or limb. While there, we will take the fullest advantage of the resources of the National Park Service, as well as of the Northern Arizona Museum in Flagstaff. If you plan to participate, please begin making arrangements as soon as possible.

Seminar schedule:

January 4 Introduction to Course

Go over course requirements; discuss Colin Fletcher.

Colin Fletcher emigrated to the United States in the late 1950s. A paragraph biography appears toward the end of the book. Before undertaking his two-month trek through the Grand Canyon, Fletcher backpacked across California from the Mexican border to Oregon. His account of that trip was published as The Thousand-Mile Summer. Shortly after Fletcher published The Man Who Walked Through Time he wrote and published a guide for backpackers. The first edition of The Complete Walker established Fletcher as the guru of backpackers (although there was something of a backlash against Fletcherism in the 1980s).

The Man Who Walked Through Time serves as our introduction to the common understanding of the canyon and its meaning. This occurs in just two pages: the section entitled ÒThe Place,Ó on pages 3-4. It would be well, for the purpose of the course, to commit the sense of these two pages to memory.

Beyond that, the book is a finely crafted narrative of a journey on foot from one end of the canyon to the other. It has the narrative structure of a journey into hell, and a return, but in this case hell is paradise -- a place in which the narrator is the only human being present. Consnnant with the narrative structure, Fletcher sheds his ÔnaturalÕ subject-object relationship with the environment and adopts an I/Thou relationship when he Òmoves insideÓ the life in the canyon. In the return from paradise, Fletcher regains the subject-object.

You may also find it useful to pay attention to the terminology of the canyon: the landforms, placenames, and wildlife. For a contemporary pictorial overview, see Time and the River Flowing, which was published by the Sierra Club in conjuction with their political action to ÒsaveÓ the canyon (we will discuss that later in the term).

Required reading: Colin Fletcher. 1968. The Man Who Walked Through Time. New York: Alfred A Knopf.

Optional:

Francois Leydet. 1964. Time and the River Flowing: Grand Canyon. Ed. David Brower. San Francisco: Sierra Club.

January 11 Canyon Prehistory; Euro-American exploration to 1869

Discuss Pyne.

Stephen Pyne is a cultural historian at Arizona State University. His dissertation and first book was a biography of the nineteenth-century American geologist G. K Gilbert. But Pyne is better known for his semi-popular and sometimes semi-autobiographical works on the history of fire. (Pyne worked for several seasons as a fire lookout at the Grand Canyon.)

In How the Canyon Became Grand, Pyne revised and lengthened his earlier work on the canyonÕs human history, Dutton's Point: An Intellectual History of the Grand Canyon. The essence of the argument, summarized above in the introduction to this syllabus, is that the physical space we know as the Grand Canyon is an intellectual achievement; we can therefore understand the way we perceive and conceptualize the Grand Canyon through intellectual history.

While PyneÕs argument to this effect is interesting and convincing, you will want to scrutinize it (and the evidence for it) quite closely, both in preparation for this weekÕs discussion and again during our field trip.

In addition to this primary theme, we will also wish to think about and discuss the history of use and disuse of the canyon prior to the great Euro-American confrontation that occurs at the close of the 1860s. The human ÒpreÓ-history of the canyon dates back at least 4000 years; at the end of the first millenium A.D., the canyon was home to perhaps several thousand Anasazi. For many, including John Wesley Powell, an understanding and appreciation of the canyon landscape is enriched by the attempt to conceptualize it as living space.

Before setting Pyne aside, be sure to have a look at the charts and graphs with which he closes his book.

Required reading: Stephen Pyne. 1998. How the Canyon Became Grand: A Short History. New York: Viking Press, pp. 1-55.

Optional:

William Goetzmann. 1959. Army Exploration in the American West, 1803-1863. New Haven: Yale University Press.

-----. 1966. Exploration and Empire. New York: Knopf.

Stephen J. Pyne. 1982. Dutton's Point: An Intellectual History of the Grand Canyon. Grand Canyon, Ariz.: Grand Canyon Natural History Association.

January 18 John Wesley Powell

Required reading: Wallace Stegner. 1954. Beyond the Hundredth Meridian. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. [Penguin edition]

January 25 Dutton and Davis

Required reading: Pyne, pp. 68-101

February 1 The ecology of the canyon

Required reading:

February 8 The contested geographies of the canyon

Required reading: Barbara J. Morehouse. 1996. A Place Called the Grand Canyon: Contested Geographies. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, pp. 1-48.

February 15 Grand Canyon National Park

Required reading: Morehouse, pp. 49-120.

February 22 In the context of the Colorado Plateau, part one</p>

Required reading: Donald L. Baars. 1972. The Colorado Plateau: A Geologic History. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, pp. 1-156.

Optional:

March 1 In the context of the Colorado Plateau, part two

Required reading: Barrs, pp. 157-248

Optional:

March 8 Recent environmental issues

Required reading: Morehouse, pp. 121-164

Optional:

March 15 Meet at the canyon