As a field of scholarship, environmental history focuses on the reciprocal interactions between human societies and the natural world over time, the changing ways in which those interactions have been mediated by cultural and political forms, and the emergence of “the environment” as an object of knowledge and concern. Following this thread, we will locate historical antecedents and cultural values in racial and environmental rhetoric, exploring how constructions of race and ethnicity and ideas about the natural world have shaped each other; how access to, and experiences of, landscapes and natural resources have differed along racial lines; and how mainstream conservation and environmental movements have discriminated against non-white Americans. We are particularly interested in asking who has historically had the power to name, claim, and manage resources? Students will build ethical critical reading and discussion skills towards linking the ways colonization, empire, the transatlantic slave trade, and coercive labor practices define how we understand, experience, and learn about the environment.