American West Faculty Course Lab

A faculty-facing course design case study

A full American West course, built for faculty to inspect, adapt, and debate.

The American West: Power, Place, and Memory is a complete upper-division course for a fifteen-week, in-person semester. It begins with Indigenous worlds in the eighteenth century and carries the story through sovereignty, migration, corporate power, environment, and public memory.

Explore the courseRead the AI position
  • 28class meetings
  • 14lecture decks
  • 238lecture slides
  • Faculty remains the final decision-maker.

The design proposition

Treat the course as an argument, not a coverage list.

The organizing question is: How was the American West made—and who has had the power to define, inhabit, govern, remember, and remake it?

That question keeps chronology visible while asking students to track power across maps, treaties, railroads, schools, labor markets, water projects, archives, and monuments.

01

Begin before U.S. arrival

Indigenous nations and competing empires establish the first political geography.

02

Revisit sovereignty

Treaties, removal, allotment, Red Power, and contemporary conflicts form a continuous thread.

03

Make evidence visible

Every meeting asks students to source, contextualize, corroborate, or revise a claim.

04

Use a local lens

The Platte Purchase and Northwest Missouri connect continental processes to place.

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Fall 2026 delivery

In person, Tuesday/Thursday, 75 minutes; first meeting August 25 and last regular meeting December 3.

Attendance

Approved absences protected

Up to three counted absences carry no automatic reduction; each additional counted absence lowers the final grade by one-third letter.

Deadlines

Friday plus grace

Major work is generally due Friday at 11:59 p.m.; automatic no-penalty grace runs through Sunday. Later work needs preapproval or extenuating circumstances.

Course architecture

Fifteen weeks in four interpretive movements

Each movement has a guiding problem. Open one to inspect its weekly sequence; Week 14 preserves Thanksgiving Break without adding hidden work.

IWeeks 1–3Define the West before narrating it

What changes when the West is treated as a relationship and process rather than a fixed region?

  1. 01Where—and When—Is the West?
  2. 02Indigenous Worlds and Competing Empires, 1700s
  3. 03Borderlands, Louisiana, and the Platte Purchase
IIWeeks 4–7Trace conquest through sovereignty, labor, and movement

How did treaties, war, migration, and state-building remake western space without making power uncontested?

  1. 04Removal, Sovereignty, and the Mexican North
  2. 05Manifest Destiny, War, Slavery, and Gold
  3. 06Overland Migration, Death, and Environment
  4. 07Civil War and Continental State-Building
IIIWeeks 8–11Interrogate institutions that made the modern West

How did corporations, federal policy, racial regimes, and environmental management reorganize land and belonging?

  1. 08Railroads, Corporate Empire, and Dispossession
  2. 09Reservations, Allotment, Education, and Indigenous Persistence
  3. 10Racial Regimes, Labor, and Border Violence, 1880–1920
  4. 11Conservation, Reclamation, Extraction, and Tourism
IVWeeks 12–15Connect crisis, growth, sovereignty, and memory

Who benefited from western development, who bore its costs, and who has the power to interpret that history now?

  1. 12Crisis and Mobilization in the West, 1920s–1945
  2. 13The Postwar West: Suburbs, Water, Nuclear Landscapes, and Red Power
  3. 14Thanksgiving Break — no new work
  4. 15The Contemporary West and the Politics of Memory

Lecture system

Every seventy-five-minute meeting follows an evidence arc.

The sequence is consistent enough to orient students and flexible enough for documents, maps, images, simulations, and workshops.

  1. 01

    Meeting frame

    Name the day’s historical problem and weekly inquiry.

  2. 02

    Opening problem

    Ask students to commit to an initial interpretation.

  3. 03

    Coordinates

    Establish terms, actors, place, and chronology.

  4. 04

    Working claim

    Offer an interpretation students are expected to test.

  5. 05

    Evidence

    Present the facts, patterns, and tensions that complicate it.

  6. 06

    Source reading

    Slow down for sourcing, context, purpose, and corroboration.

  7. 07

    Interpretation

    Make students use evidence through a structured activity.

  8. 08

    Exit revision

    Return to the opening and record what changed.

Evidence of learning

Assessment moves from reading evidence to making public history.

Repeated historical practice matters, while the culminating public-history interpretation receives the largest share.

Public History Capstone30%
Historiographical Judgment Portfolio20%
Source Reasoning Labs20%
Mapping the West10%
Reading & Reasoning Checks10%
Seminar Practice & Reflection10%

Assignment ladder

  1. MapDefine and defend a West.
  2. SourceTest claims through treaties, diaries, newspapers, and oral histories.
  3. SynthesizePlace recent scholarship into a historical argument.
  4. PublishCreate and defend an ethical public-history capstone.

A position for faculty practice

AI can expand faculty capacity. It cannot assume faculty authority.

AI can be extraordinarily valuable for faculty course design—accelerating research synthesis, generating alternatives, prototyping materials, and exposing alignment gaps.

Faculty remain the instructor and final decision-maker: they verify sources, choose content and pedagogy, set policy, evaluate evidence, grade student work, protect students, and own every published decision.

AI can help faculty

  • Scope and sequence a large body of material
  • Draft multiple approaches for expert review
  • Convert content into slides, notes, tables, and LMS structures
  • Check consistency, accessibility, and missing components
  • Handle repetitive production and quality-control work

Faculty must decide

  • What students should learn and why it matters
  • Which scholarship, evidence, and interpretations are trustworthy
  • How local context, student needs, and institutional policy apply
  • Where bias, error, privacy, copyright, or accessibility require intervention
  • What is finally assigned, assessed, published, and taught
AI supports authorship when it strengthens faculty judgment—not when it conceals or replaces it. The instructor remains responsible, accountable, and in command.

Adopt thoughtfully

Use the package as a design case, not a turnkey command.

The materials are editable by design. Their value lies in making choices visible enough for another instructor to accept, revise, or reject.

  1. 1

    Inspect alignment

    Compare its question, outcomes, readings, and assessments with your program and students.

  2. 2

    Replace the local lens

    Add the archives, nations, environments, and communities nearest your campus.

  3. 3

    Re-verify the details

    Check calendars, editions, reserve access, image rights, policies, and factual claims.

  4. 4

    Test before publishing

    Use a Canvas sandbox, Student View, link checks, and accessibility review.

Educator resources

Download the course or inspect one layer at a time.

These are faculty working materials. Review and revise them before using them with students or importing them into a live LMS course.

Complete package

Faculty course core package

Canvas cartridge, student syllabus, instructor guide, sequence workbook, reserve request, bibliography, and validation reports.

DownloadZIP ↓

LMS import

Canvas course cartridge

Sixteen modules, assignment shells, quizzes, and course structure prepared for a Canvas sandbox import.

DownloadIMSCC ↓

Teaching guide

Instructor implementation guide

Course logic, facilitation guidance, assessment structure, accessibility notes, and pre-publication checks.

DownloadDOCX ↓

Lecture package

Editable lecture decks

Fourteen PowerPoint decks containing 238 slides and complete presenter notes for the 28 T/Th meetings.

DownloadZIP ↓

Editable planning

Lecture sequence workbook

Twenty-eight dated T/Th meetings with deck ranges, activities, assessments, AI boundaries, and exceptions.

DownloadXLSX ↓

Library workflow

Reserve request list

Ten syllabus-scoped titles with ISBNs, excerpt purposes, publisher records, and a processing checklist.

DownloadDOCX ↓

Student-facing copy

Complete student syllabus

Contact information, policies, grade architecture, readings, assignment AI boundaries, and the complete Fall 2026 calendar.

DownloadDOCX ↓

Before live use: verify library page spans and rights, adapt institutional policy language, and complete a local Canvas sandbox, Student View, link, and accessibility review.