For many, imagining the U.S. environment of the 1800s evokes pristine wild spaces or pastoral scenes of small-farm agriculture. This Romantic vision of the natural world is central to the environmental imagination of transcendental writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. But the natural world of nineteenth-century America was predicated as often on the land dispossessions of western expansion, the labor of enslaved people, the urban spaces of industrialization, and other more complex relationships between the human and nonhuman worlds. In this class, we'll look at figurations of race and nature in nineteenth-century U.S. literature and culture, when non-white Americans were often presumed to be 'closer' to nature even as they were often excluded from budding discourses of environmental ethics, wilderness adventuring, and the conservation movement. When is an alignment with the natural world a positive ideal and when does it provide a rationalization for forms of exploitation? How is the idea of the 'natural' used to construct race, including whiteness, blackness, and other racial categories? How have racialized notions of empire and the frontier impacted the way contemporary U.S. culture views nature? Authors may include Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, Chestnutt, Dickinson, Melville, Poe, Stowe, Muir.