Thomas Moran, Green River, Wyoming 1881

HIST 374W/376: North American West

Spring 2015: This course traces the incorporation and development of western North American by three nations during the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  If focuses on material, political, and cultural events in the areas of northern Mexico and western Canada and United States since 1800.  The primary aim is to bolster understandings of the dynamic forces that shaped regional development at a transnational level.  Lectures and readings develop historical and spatial analyses of regional events, while films bare the interplay of history and popular culture in regional and national mythology.  Students will engage 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:
Andrew Graybill, Policing the Great Plains: Rangers, Mountains, and the North American Frontier, 1875-1910 (Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2007)
Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (Oxford Univ. Press, 1999)
Andrea Geiger, Subverting Exclusion: Transpacific Encounters with Race, Caste, and Borders (Yale Univ. Press, 2011)
Robert Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton Univ. Press, 2003)
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%