We continued our review of central concepts from the first semester. We revisited briefly the Puritan focus on God and eternity, the post-Revolutionary celebration of American Progress (via the famous Gast painting of that name), and finally the Romantic reaction to that religion of progress and the elevation of a faith in Nature.
Students then took detailed notes on the first fifteen minutes of the PBS documentary on America's National Parks ("The Scripture of Nature" and "Eden"), after which they worked in small groups to write brief statements of what they took to be the central themes of what they had watched.
