Thomas Moran, Green River, Wyoming 1881

HIST 374W/376: North American West

Spring 2022: This course traces the incorporation and development of western North America into three nations during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The course focuses on material, political, and cultural events in northern Mexico, western Canada, and western United States. The aim is to bolster understandings of the transnational forces that shaped regional development. Lectures and readings will present historical and spatial analyses of regional events, while the (sometimes assigned) films reveal the interplay of the past and popular culture in regional and national mythology. Students will study the lectures, secondary readings, and primary texts to understand the North American West as simultaneously one region, three nations, and many places. HIST 376 contributes to student comprehension of the social, cultural, and environmental issues underlying regional development across a broad reach of North America.

Topics: Colonialism, Core-Periphery Relationships, Environmental Contingencies, Local and Regional Culture, Nationalism, Mythology and History

Texts:
Christopher Herbert, Gold Rush Manliness: Race and Gender on the Pacific Slope (Univ. of Washington Press, 2018)
Lissa Wadewitz, The Nature of Borders: Salmon, Boundaries, and Bandits in the Salish Sea (Univ. of Washington Press, 2012)
Andrea Geiger, Subverting Exclusion: Transpacific Encounters with Race, Caste, and Borders (Yale Univ. Press, 2011)
Joshua Reid, The Sea Is My Country: The Maritime World of the Makahs, an Indigenous Borderlands People (Yale Univ. Press, 2015)
Primary documents available on Canvas website; articles and essays available on library electronic journals site

Course Evaluation:
Midterm               30%
Papers                 30%
Final                    30%
Participation         10%