From chapter three of the Steinberg textbook, Reflections from a Woodlot, explain some of the main environmental factors that impeded or facilitated resettlement.

Unit Two

Assignment 2

Assignment Instructions

This assignment is worth 12% of your final grade. There are two parts: short and long answer questions related to your course readings.

Short Answer Questions

In four or five sentences, briefly answer five of the following questions. Ten marks each.

1. From chapter three of the Steinberg textbook, Reflections from a Woodlot, explain some of the main environmental factors that impeded or facilitated resettlement.
2. After reading Samuel de Champlain’s Voyages, how do you think his target audience shaped his writing?
3. Based on Cook’s argument, how important were ecological factors to survival in the New France colony? How do Virginia DeJohn Anderson’s findings compare to Ramsay Cook’s?
4. What is Carl Martin’s main argument regarding the impact of Europeans on the culture of the northeastern Algonquian?
5. In what ways does Charles Bishop refute or contradict Carl Martin’s thesis? How does Carl Martin respond to his critics? Do you think his ecological interpretation is sound?
6. From Steinberg’s chapter five, King Climate in Dixie, and Joyce Chaplin’s article, explain how access to water shaped power relations in the U.S. South. What impact did water and agriculture have on the enslavement of African peoples in this part of North America?
7. Based upon Donald Worster’s essay “Hydraulic Society in California” and the primary sources “An Advocate Encounters the Irrigators, 1887” and “A Writer Describes Irrigation Districts, 1897”, explain how irrigation was organized in California in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century? Were there alternatives to the model chosen?

Long Answer Questions

Answer two of the following questions. 250-350 words per question. Twenty-five marks each.

1. Considering the environmental challenges of resettlement, how might an environmental history approach change the way historians think about the colonization of North America by European peoples?
2. How did the encounter with capitalism through the fur trade alter the Aboriginal relationship with fur-bearing animals?
3. How did the control over water through the use of different irrigation technologies alter social power relations in the U.S. South and West?
4. The following criteria will be used to evaluate your answers.

The following criteria will be used to evaluate your answers.