[Save] Seminar 10-10-2003

[Margo Collett]

Modern Times, Rural Places:
Seminar Series at MIT

Conevery Bolton Valencius
Assistant Professor, Department of History, Program in American Culture 
Studies,
and Program in Environmental Studies, Washington University
"Country" Matters:  Understanding the Early-Nineteenth-Century American 
Environment

Friday, October 10th, 2003
2:30 to 4:30 pm
MIT, Building E51 Room 095

In the early United States, people who left their home regions wrote and 
spoke of the "country" they encountered elsewhere.  This notion of 
"country" had little to do with national boundaries:  people could travel 
from a "new country" to their own, all the while remaining formally within 
American territory.
What does the frequent reference to new and different "country" tell us 
about environments of the early nineteenth century?
To early Americans, environments were localized, they were differentiated, 
they were sometimes overlapping, and they were vitally important for human 
health and well-being.  Reports of the earthquakes of 1811-12, however, 
challenged some of this sense of "country":  earthquakes were not 
discretely localized, and they connected vast regions, rather than 
differentiating them.  Looking at various descriptions of the "face of the 
country," at rest and in turmoil, thus gives some sense of the change in 
regional perception over the early nineteenth century.

Sponsored by MIT's History Faculty and the Program in Science, Technology, 
and Society

For more information or to be put on the mailing list, please contact Margo 
Collett at mcollett at mit.edu or log onto our websites
  at http://web.mit.edu/history/www/index.html and http://web.mit.edu/sts/
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