In this new course, students will connect the long-term environmental consequences of slavery to present fights for racial and environmental justice, seeing them as part of the same struggle. The course will explore how the exploitation of both people and land were linked to the rise of capitalism, and will engage historical and material ecologies in a dialectic with the everyday experiences of enslaved people. Key ideas like “property”, "nature”, "wilderness," "frontier," and "progress" will be deliberated towards a theorization of the relationship between racial and environmental justice. Readings will examine the ecological diversity of the South, including how environmental devastation drove slavery’s expansion; how people negotiated their relationship with the land during enslavement; and how enslaved labor was used to extract value from a variety of different environments, for e.g., agriculture, mining, and lumbering. Finally, our course will explore how enslaved people used their environment as sites of resistance, including the use of swamps, forests, and rivers to evade slave patrols and build fugitive communities. Course materials will include traditional scholarship, primary source interviews, and multimedia.