History 460 Final Exam questions n
answers graded A+
John Muir - correct answer ✔✔Born in Scotland 1838, migration to Wisco at 11. Family started
a farm. Tensions between him and his Calvinist father (only text worth reading was the bible).
Mechanically gifted (Clock). Factory accident caused him to lose his eye and he vowed not to
work in industry. Walked all over US. Saw Yosemite during this. Struggled to save Hetch-Hetchy
valley. The project sought to put a dam there to supply water for drinking and firefighting to SF,
and was approved in 1913. Muir died a year later. Sierra club formation. Conservationist,
urbanization is death of the sublime landscapes. Sublime as a beautiful landscape.
Rodrick Nash - correct answer ✔✔Wilderness and the American Mind
David Stradling - correct answer ✔✔Conservation in the Progressive Era: Classic Text
Gifford Pinchot - correct answer ✔✔Publicist, exaggerated his own role in shaping the
conservation movement during the progressive era. Born in a wealthy family in Connecticut in
1865. His father suggested to think about a career in forestry. Got a BA at Yale and managed and
estate. In 1898, he was appointed chief of the USDA forestry division. In 1900, he convinced his
father to found the Yale Forestry School. He then persuaded Teddy Roosevelt to transfer the
federal forest reserves from the Interior to USDA, creating the new US Forest Service with
Pinchot as the first Chief Forester. His friendship with Teddy was the key to his success. From
1901-10, acreage rose from 51 to 175 Million. The night of the midnight forest came the night
before Teddy lost his power. Pinchot's book, The fight for Conservation, is an important piece
which identifies philosophical reasons for conservation. That being, an extension of Jeremy
Bentham's doctrine to declare that the goal of conservation was to serve "the greatest good of
the greatest number for the longest time". Nature exists for purely human use. Conservation is
a question of defending the national good.
Gifford Pinchot saw women as key to the conservation movement's success, given their role as
educators of the next generation. Chapter 9, entitled "The Children," argued that "...almost
,without exception it is the mother who plants patriotism in the mind of the child. It is her duty.
The growth of patriotism is first of all in the hands of the women of any nation. In the last
analysis it is the mothers of a nation who direct that nation's destiny.... The great fundamental
problem which confronts us all now is this: Shall we continue, as a Nation, to exist in well-being?
That is the conservation problem."
George Perkins Marsh - correct answer ✔✔Man and Nature (1864), pivotal novel in shaping
environmental politics. Core argument: after reading about ancient civilizations, he concluded
that deforestation caused by humans had environmental consequences: erosion, watershed
deterioration, decline of agricultural lands. This is what caused their collapse. This was used to
support the preservation of Adirondack Park to preserve water for rivers, cities and the Erie
Canal. This also stemmed from a convergence of the romantic sublime with hunting and
utilitarianism.
Carl Schurz and Bernard Fernow - correct answer ✔✔Secretary of the interior (1877-81),
Forestry Bureau Chief (1886-98). Forestry traditions from Europe that US conservationists
borrowed heavily.
What was the central commitment of progressive conservation as described by Gifford Pinchot?
- correct answer ✔✔1. Efficient use of natural resources.
2. ending waste
3. technical rule by scientific experts
4. suspicions of corruptions that seemed to attend democratic process
5. intense nationalism.
6. Enthusiasm for a strong centralized government.
William Ellsworth Smythe - correct answer ✔✔The Conquest of Arid America (1900), supported
irrigation. Through this, places like Salt Lake City was transformed into a garden.
Francis G Newland - correct answer ✔✔Reclamation Act of 1902, lead to federal financial
support for irrigation for homestead farms.
,Dr. Jacob Bigelow - correct answer ✔✔1831, organized Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. It was intended as a rural retreat in city where one could go to contemplate
human mortality amid the beauties of nature. Mount Auburn was also the nation's first
arboretum, and became a model that would henceforth influence romantic cemeteries,
arboretums, and parks across the country.
Andrew Jackson Downing - correct answer ✔✔1815-1852, became one of the nation's most
influential "landscape gardeners" (the older term for "landscape architect"), publishing the first
major overview of this subject in 1841 as Theory & Practice of Landscape Architecture, 1841. In
it, he borrowed from J. C. Loudon's ideas of landscape gardening in England: constructing
landscapes that expressed ideas of the "picturesque" and the "beautiful" on the gardened
landscapes of rural estates and retreats.
Downing's books offered recipes for achieving the qualities of picturesque and the beautiful
that theorists like Kant, Burke, and Gilpin had written about in the second half of the eighteenth
century:
• Picturesque: wild, dark, coniferous, masculine, Gothic
• Beautiful: pastoral, light, deciduous, feminine, Greco-Roman classical
Downing died young in a steamboat accident on the Hudson at the age of 36 in 1852. It was
thus another man, much longer lived, who would go on to become the nation's greatest
landscape architect over the course of the nineteenth century: Frederick Law Olmsted
Frederick Law Olmsted - correct answer ✔✔best known for the commission that made him
famous (along with the architect Calvert Vaux): Central Park in New York City in 1857. Before
then, he had dropped out of Yale College, tried to become a gentleman farmer, traveled in
England, toured the American South and wrote books on the evils of slavery. With Central Park,
he began the career as a landscape architect that would define the rest of his life, bringing the
rural picturesque into the heart of the city, its curvilinear organic patterns standing in
counterpoint to the grid of city streets, with Mount Auburn Cemetery & Downing's work serving
as models.
, Olmsted's essay on "Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns" remains a classic. Olmsted
would design parks and park systems all around the country, including a redesign of the park
looking out on Niagara Falls and the system of roads on the floor of Yosemite Valley. But his
work also led him to ponder the design of an ideal suburb, one of which was Riverside, Illinois in
1869, with its curving streets, middle-class houses on large lots, gardens tended by well-to-do
women or the gardeners they employed. The male commute between suburban home and
urban workplace meant that the suburb would be shaped by (middle-class) feminine notions of
beauty and well nurtured childhood.
Mabel Osgood Wright - correct answer ✔✔a founder of the Connecticut Audubon Society and
editor of the Audubon magazine Bird-Lore, was also the anonymous author Garden of a
Commuter's Wife (1901), which does a good job of articulating these gendered ideals of
domesticated suburban landscapes. In Wright, we see the convergence of romantic ideas with
bird-watching, conservation, gardening, childcare, suburban domesticity
Anna Botsford Comstock - correct answer ✔✔highly influential approach still retained this
search for values, but with a much greater commitment to bringing rigorous scientific
investigation into the classroom. Botsford was born 1854; 1874 enrolled at Cornell; met
entomologist husband J. H. Comstock as a student and became scientific illustrator for him;
1895 became involved in nature study, joined Cornell faculty, and became a leading figure of the
movement for next three decades: Handbook of Nature Study first published 1911, remains in
print as a classic. Nature study can be seen as another domesticated strand of the romantic
sublime: secularization of (Protestant) religious values, nature as an ideal context for educating
children to cultural values about the human place in nature and society.
Ernest Thompson Seton - correct answer ✔✔Born 1860 in England, Seton moved to Canada at
the age 6. He began work as an artist/illustrator, doing animal illustrations for scientific
publications by mid-1880s. He worked as a wolf hunter in New Mexico in 1893, and began
writing illustrated stories to help readers identify with the animals he cared about. One of his
earliest and most popular short stories was called "Lobo, the King of Currumpaw," 1894, which
appeared in his book Wild Animals I Have Known, published in 1896. He favored stories of noble
wolves and other animals struggling against great odds, often dying tragically but heroically. In
1902, Seton created the Woodcraft Indians, teaching rural and suburban children outdoor
"Indian" skills. It went on to serve as a model for Lord Robert Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts in
answers graded A+
John Muir - correct answer ✔✔Born in Scotland 1838, migration to Wisco at 11. Family started
a farm. Tensions between him and his Calvinist father (only text worth reading was the bible).
Mechanically gifted (Clock). Factory accident caused him to lose his eye and he vowed not to
work in industry. Walked all over US. Saw Yosemite during this. Struggled to save Hetch-Hetchy
valley. The project sought to put a dam there to supply water for drinking and firefighting to SF,
and was approved in 1913. Muir died a year later. Sierra club formation. Conservationist,
urbanization is death of the sublime landscapes. Sublime as a beautiful landscape.
Rodrick Nash - correct answer ✔✔Wilderness and the American Mind
David Stradling - correct answer ✔✔Conservation in the Progressive Era: Classic Text
Gifford Pinchot - correct answer ✔✔Publicist, exaggerated his own role in shaping the
conservation movement during the progressive era. Born in a wealthy family in Connecticut in
1865. His father suggested to think about a career in forestry. Got a BA at Yale and managed and
estate. In 1898, he was appointed chief of the USDA forestry division. In 1900, he convinced his
father to found the Yale Forestry School. He then persuaded Teddy Roosevelt to transfer the
federal forest reserves from the Interior to USDA, creating the new US Forest Service with
Pinchot as the first Chief Forester. His friendship with Teddy was the key to his success. From
1901-10, acreage rose from 51 to 175 Million. The night of the midnight forest came the night
before Teddy lost his power. Pinchot's book, The fight for Conservation, is an important piece
which identifies philosophical reasons for conservation. That being, an extension of Jeremy
Bentham's doctrine to declare that the goal of conservation was to serve "the greatest good of
the greatest number for the longest time". Nature exists for purely human use. Conservation is
a question of defending the national good.
Gifford Pinchot saw women as key to the conservation movement's success, given their role as
educators of the next generation. Chapter 9, entitled "The Children," argued that "...almost
,without exception it is the mother who plants patriotism in the mind of the child. It is her duty.
The growth of patriotism is first of all in the hands of the women of any nation. In the last
analysis it is the mothers of a nation who direct that nation's destiny.... The great fundamental
problem which confronts us all now is this: Shall we continue, as a Nation, to exist in well-being?
That is the conservation problem."
George Perkins Marsh - correct answer ✔✔Man and Nature (1864), pivotal novel in shaping
environmental politics. Core argument: after reading about ancient civilizations, he concluded
that deforestation caused by humans had environmental consequences: erosion, watershed
deterioration, decline of agricultural lands. This is what caused their collapse. This was used to
support the preservation of Adirondack Park to preserve water for rivers, cities and the Erie
Canal. This also stemmed from a convergence of the romantic sublime with hunting and
utilitarianism.
Carl Schurz and Bernard Fernow - correct answer ✔✔Secretary of the interior (1877-81),
Forestry Bureau Chief (1886-98). Forestry traditions from Europe that US conservationists
borrowed heavily.
What was the central commitment of progressive conservation as described by Gifford Pinchot?
- correct answer ✔✔1. Efficient use of natural resources.
2. ending waste
3. technical rule by scientific experts
4. suspicions of corruptions that seemed to attend democratic process
5. intense nationalism.
6. Enthusiasm for a strong centralized government.
William Ellsworth Smythe - correct answer ✔✔The Conquest of Arid America (1900), supported
irrigation. Through this, places like Salt Lake City was transformed into a garden.
Francis G Newland - correct answer ✔✔Reclamation Act of 1902, lead to federal financial
support for irrigation for homestead farms.
,Dr. Jacob Bigelow - correct answer ✔✔1831, organized Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. It was intended as a rural retreat in city where one could go to contemplate
human mortality amid the beauties of nature. Mount Auburn was also the nation's first
arboretum, and became a model that would henceforth influence romantic cemeteries,
arboretums, and parks across the country.
Andrew Jackson Downing - correct answer ✔✔1815-1852, became one of the nation's most
influential "landscape gardeners" (the older term for "landscape architect"), publishing the first
major overview of this subject in 1841 as Theory & Practice of Landscape Architecture, 1841. In
it, he borrowed from J. C. Loudon's ideas of landscape gardening in England: constructing
landscapes that expressed ideas of the "picturesque" and the "beautiful" on the gardened
landscapes of rural estates and retreats.
Downing's books offered recipes for achieving the qualities of picturesque and the beautiful
that theorists like Kant, Burke, and Gilpin had written about in the second half of the eighteenth
century:
• Picturesque: wild, dark, coniferous, masculine, Gothic
• Beautiful: pastoral, light, deciduous, feminine, Greco-Roman classical
Downing died young in a steamboat accident on the Hudson at the age of 36 in 1852. It was
thus another man, much longer lived, who would go on to become the nation's greatest
landscape architect over the course of the nineteenth century: Frederick Law Olmsted
Frederick Law Olmsted - correct answer ✔✔best known for the commission that made him
famous (along with the architect Calvert Vaux): Central Park in New York City in 1857. Before
then, he had dropped out of Yale College, tried to become a gentleman farmer, traveled in
England, toured the American South and wrote books on the evils of slavery. With Central Park,
he began the career as a landscape architect that would define the rest of his life, bringing the
rural picturesque into the heart of the city, its curvilinear organic patterns standing in
counterpoint to the grid of city streets, with Mount Auburn Cemetery & Downing's work serving
as models.
, Olmsted's essay on "Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns" remains a classic. Olmsted
would design parks and park systems all around the country, including a redesign of the park
looking out on Niagara Falls and the system of roads on the floor of Yosemite Valley. But his
work also led him to ponder the design of an ideal suburb, one of which was Riverside, Illinois in
1869, with its curving streets, middle-class houses on large lots, gardens tended by well-to-do
women or the gardeners they employed. The male commute between suburban home and
urban workplace meant that the suburb would be shaped by (middle-class) feminine notions of
beauty and well nurtured childhood.
Mabel Osgood Wright - correct answer ✔✔a founder of the Connecticut Audubon Society and
editor of the Audubon magazine Bird-Lore, was also the anonymous author Garden of a
Commuter's Wife (1901), which does a good job of articulating these gendered ideals of
domesticated suburban landscapes. In Wright, we see the convergence of romantic ideas with
bird-watching, conservation, gardening, childcare, suburban domesticity
Anna Botsford Comstock - correct answer ✔✔highly influential approach still retained this
search for values, but with a much greater commitment to bringing rigorous scientific
investigation into the classroom. Botsford was born 1854; 1874 enrolled at Cornell; met
entomologist husband J. H. Comstock as a student and became scientific illustrator for him;
1895 became involved in nature study, joined Cornell faculty, and became a leading figure of the
movement for next three decades: Handbook of Nature Study first published 1911, remains in
print as a classic. Nature study can be seen as another domesticated strand of the romantic
sublime: secularization of (Protestant) religious values, nature as an ideal context for educating
children to cultural values about the human place in nature and society.
Ernest Thompson Seton - correct answer ✔✔Born 1860 in England, Seton moved to Canada at
the age 6. He began work as an artist/illustrator, doing animal illustrations for scientific
publications by mid-1880s. He worked as a wolf hunter in New Mexico in 1893, and began
writing illustrated stories to help readers identify with the animals he cared about. One of his
earliest and most popular short stories was called "Lobo, the King of Currumpaw," 1894, which
appeared in his book Wild Animals I Have Known, published in 1896. He favored stories of noble
wolves and other animals struggling against great odds, often dying tragically but heroically. In
1902, Seton created the Woodcraft Indians, teaching rural and suburban children outdoor
"Indian" skills. It went on to serve as a model for Lord Robert Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts in
