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  • Using the Environmental History of the Commonwealth to Enhance Pennsylvania and U.S. History Courses
  • Charles Hardy III (bio)

Why teach Pennsylvania environmental history? How can teachers use it to improve students’ understanding of the history of the state, the region, and the nation? I have found through my teaching at West Chester University that environmental history grounds American history in the physical realities upon which human history unfolds: the natural resource bases, both renewable and nonrenewable, that all societies use to construct their economies, cultures, and political systems.1 Recognizing this grounding, students can better understand the complex world in which they live, and thus better respond to the challenges they will face as citizens and consumers.

Nature’s Gifts

When I teach the history of Pennsylvania, I start with its physical structures—its geology, climate, and hydrology—then move to its flora and fauna.2 These are the same elements that fascinated [End Page 473] early European explorers and colonists. Indeed, in 1683 William Penn began his letter to the Free Society of Traders by describing his colony’s “soil, air, water, seasons, and produce, both natural and artificial.” In his 1685 letter on the “Good Order Established in Pennsylvania and New Jersey,” Thomas Budd wrote about the plants and livestock—both native and European—that grew well in Pennsylvania, and the natural markets for its abundance of “flour, bisket, and pork” in the Caribbean. Noting how if “we sprinkle but a little English hay seed on the land without plowing, and then feed sheep on it, in a little time it will increase that it will cover the land with English grass, like unto our pastures in England,” Budd also provides a wonderful window into the history of the Columbian Exchange. So, too, does America’s first great botanist and plant exporter, John Bartram, who in the 1700s sent more American species to Old World gardeners than any other person.3

Blessed with a temperate climate and rich soils, the colony of Pennsylvania grew rich on its farms. Students can engage in historical detective work by analyzing images of the Pennsylvania colonial coat of arms (which replaced helmet, shield, and dragon with plow, sheaf, and ship), the colonial grain mills that still dot the Commonwealth’s landscape, its rich farmsteads, and the iconic Pennsylvania bank barn to understand what made Pennsylvania the breadbasket and meat provisioner of North America.


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Figure 1.

Pennsylvania Coat of Arms. After declaring independence the state of Pennsylvania placed a plow and a merchant ship on paper money (1777) and then in its coat of arms (1778) to symbolize the two principal sources of the Commonwealth’s wealth: agriculture and commerce.

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Figure 2.

Edward Hicks, “An Indian summer view of the Farm and Stock OF JAMES C CORNELL of Northampton Bucks county Pennsylvania,” 1846. In this painting, Hicks beautifully captured the richness of Pennsylvania’s farm economy in the early 1800s. Behind the prize-winning livestock—their place in the foreground indicating their importance—one can see the large stone farmhouse, massive barn, full corncribs, and an orchard and wood lots in the background. (Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.)


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Figure 3.

Farmer and wife in front of their barn, somewhere in Pennsylvania, circa 1890. The Commonwealth’s most distinctive architectural form, the Pennsylvania barn served many functions. Large barns, like the one pictured here, speak to the great productivity of farms across the state. (Courtesy of The Library Company of Philadelphia.)

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Paintings, photographs, and other visual sources also enable students to learn about how Americans viewed and made sense of the natural world. Nowhere, for example, is the Quaker philosophy of the peaceful coexistence of man and nature more eloquently expressed than in the celebrated but poorly understood “Peaceable Kingdom” paintings of Edward Hicks. Teachers who might be familiar with the landscape painters of the Hudson River School (see Stephen Cutcliffe’s essay in this issue) can also explore Americans’ changing attitudes toward the natural world by investigating Pennsylvania landscape painters from the Susquehanna River...

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