Weeks 1–3
Define the West before narrating it
Begin with Indigenous political geography, competing empires, borderlands, and the local problem of the Platte Purchase.
Northwest Missouri State University · Fall 2026
The American West:
Power, Place, and Memory
A problem-centered course from Indigenous worlds and competing empires to corporate power, environmental change, sovereignty, and public memory.
- Course
- 33-582
- Meetings
- Tuesdays & Thursdays
- First class
- August 25
- Instructor
- Rob Voss
The course’s organizing question
How was the American West made—and who has had the power to define, inhabit, govern, remember, and remake it?
How the semester moves
Fifteen weeks in four interpretive movements
Chronology remains visible, but recurring questions about power, evidence, place, and memory give the semester its structure.
Weeks 4–7
Trace conquest through sovereignty and movement
Follow treaties, removal, war, slavery, migration, and continental state-building without treating power as settled.
Weeks 8–11
Interrogate the institutions of the modern West
Examine corporate power, railroads, reservations, schooling, racial regimes, conservation, reclamation, and extraction.
Weeks 12–15
Connect crisis, development, sovereignty, and memory
Carry western history through the twentieth century and end by asking who has the power to remember and remake the region.
Start here
Week 1 establishes the course’s evidence norms.
Students draw a diagnostic boundary map, compare competing frameworks, and begin the Decision Record that follows major work through the semester.
Open Week 1 →First major deadline
Borderlands, Louisiana, and the Platte Purchase
Mapping studio draft; major submission follows Friday, September 18.
See requirements and grace periods →Course materials
A required text woven through every teaching week
The American West: A New Interpretive History supplies shared chronology without adding a separate graded component; Canvas, the syllabus, and the planning workbook use the same weekly chapter map.
Open faculty resources →