Notes From John Jamison on Past Work in 9th Grade History and Future Work:

What I Used to Do.

I used to teach Ancient & Medieval History for ninth graders. In the course of doing that I arrived at an understanding, mainly under the influence of Debby Nicely, of the importance of geography in the study of history. Studying that led me to see the wider implications: that peoples' interactions with the environment worked in two ways. For example, you can trace the movement of civilizations upstream in Mesopotamia during the fourth, third and second millennia b.c., from Sumer right down at the Gulf, up to Akkad in 2300, to Babylon in 1800, ending with Assyria, up near Turkey, in about 1200. Why drift upstream? Because the land was exhausted, salinated through excessive irrigation and poor drainage. What was once the Fertile Crescent is now a desert, due to the wonders of hydrologic engineering.

This is not the only story, just the first one.

What I Hope to Do.

I no longer teach ancient history. The course I now teach with Tom, called "Time and Space," is about the twentieth century. As the course has evolved over the past three autumns, my insight into its content has deepened, and I have come to realize that here, too, the subject must embrace environmental and geographic content as well as the historical, cultural and intellectual themes I had in mind at the beginning. Specifically, we need to look at issues of third world development and population control if we are to emerge from the twentieth century with a useful and meaningful world picture. I will probably focus on a few areas only, such as irrigation engineering in Bali (thanks to a book belonging to Bob Mazelow) or the questions surrounding desertification in Africa.

These are just the latest stories.

John Jamison

November 6, 1996