Scribner Seminar Program
Course Description
An Unsettled Place: 400 Years of Remaking the Hudson River Landscape
Instructor(s): Rik Scarce, Sociology
How does an ecological locale—a “landscape”—become geographically, socially, and temporally
special? How does a people manage to keep it that way or change it? Many regions in
the United States supply answers to these questions of space, time and place, but
one of the oldest and most complex sets of responses emerges from the landscape that
is home to Skidmore College. In 2009 the Hudson River will have existed for 400 years
in the Euro-American consciousness, which makes this a unique moment to explore the
region’s landscape as a history of place-making. In this seminar, we will examine
how and why both the conceptual understandings and the physical realities of the Hudson
Region have changed the way the have over the past four centuries. The landscape’s
ecology is its lifeblood, and we will continually return to it. Yet human societies
and their ecologies co- evolve, so we must look elsewhere to tell a complete ecological
story. As such, we will explore the Hudson landscape as it has evolved through art,
literature, warfare, technology, and shifts in culture and laws. (Includes three required
Saturday field trips.)
Course Offered