This first time around teaching the survey I have, simply, been starved for evaluations. Do I lecture too much? Do I lecture too little? Are the readings interesting? Are they too long? Am I covering the right stuff? What should I be talking about? Am I asking the right questions? Really, I want to know,…

This summer when my department asked if I would, for the first time, teach the first half of the US history survey I knew I wanted to assign William Cronon’s nearly-deified Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England for two primary reasons. First, because it is a wonderful example of…