[Sci-tech-public] MIT Seminar on Environmental and Agricultural History, February 24, 2012

[Margo Collett]

MIT Seminar on Environmental and Agricultural History


"A Landscape Architect in the Twin Cities:  Western Settlement, Indian Mounds, and America's Most Radical Park System"


Aaron Sachs
Department of History, Cornell University


Western settlement after the Civil War might call to mind new, sprawling cities, dominated by the Railroad and laid out by speculators on rigid grids, no matter what the topography; or rugged dry-land farming; or long cattle drives; or the Indian Wars on the plains.  Environmental historians might immediately think of Yosemite and Yellowstone and the rise of the wilderness mythos.  But something strange was happening in Minneapolis and St Paul, whose civil leaders had hired the landscape architect H.W.S. Cleveland to shape their rapidly expanding cities according to an old-fashioned aesthetic -- one that challenged mainstream notions of Progress through a direct engagement with history and with the cycles and limits of nature.

February 24, 2012
2-30 - 4 PM
Building E51-095
Corner of Wadsworth and Amherst Streets
Cambridge

Sponsored by the MIT History Faculty and the Program in Science, Technology, and Society.  For more information or to be put on the mailing list contact mcollett at mit.edu.
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