The American West33-582 · Fall 2026

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, structured discussion, source labs, and capstone workshops.

  1. 01

    Meeting frame

    Name the day’s historical problem and weekly inquiry.

  2. 02

    Opening problem

    Commit to an initial interpretation.

  3. 03

    Coordinates

    Establish terms, actors, place, and chronology.

  4. 04

    Working claim

    Test a consequential historical interpretation.

  5. 05

    Evidence

    Study facts, patterns, and tensions that complicate it.

  6. 06

    Source reading

    Practice sourcing, context, purpose, and corroboration.

  7. 07

    Interpretation

    Use evidence through a structured activity.

  8. 08

    Exit revision

    Return to the opening and record what changed.

Weekly deck sequence

Fourteen decks cover all twenty-eight class meetings.

Week 14 is Thanksgiving Break. Week 15 resumes with a capstone artifact workshop and the final map-and-memory synthesis.

Week 1

Where—and When—Is the West?

  • Tue August 25Course launch; diagnostic boundary map; establish evidence, discussion, and Decision Record norms.
  • Thu August 27Compare frontier, borderlands, regional, environmental, and Indigenous-centered frameworks; source clinic.
Week 2

Indigenous Worlds and Competing Empires, 1700s

  • Tue September 1Indigenous polities, mobility, kinship, and competing imperial claims in the eighteenth century.
  • Thu September 3Horses, trade, diplomacy, captive exchange, and a scale-of-power evidence lab.
Week 3

Borderlands, Louisiana, and the Platte Purchase

  • Tue September 8Louisiana Purchase claims, diplomacy, intelligence, and contested sovereignty.
  • Thu September 10Platte Purchase document chain, Northwest archive orientation, and Mapping the West studio.
Week 4

Removal, Sovereignty, and the Mexican North

  • Tue September 15Removal, treaty vocabulary, parties, translation, coercion, and sovereignty.
  • Thu September 17Mexican North, jurisdiction, Indigenous diplomacy, and Source Reasoning Lab 1 annotation.
Week 5

Manifest Destiny, War, Slavery, and Gold

  • Tue September 22Manifest Destiny, Texas, the U.S.–Mexico War, and conquest.
  • Thu September 24Slavery’s western reach, gold, property, and a corroboration controversy.
Week 6

Overland Migration, Death, and Environment

  • Tue September 29Route and risk mapping from trail diaries, material traces, and quantitative evidence.
  • Thu October 1Family labor, gender, Indigenous homelands, disease, mortality, and Source Lab 2 transfer.
Week 7

Civil War and Continental State-Building

  • Tue October 6Civil War in Missouri, Indian Territory, New Mexico, and the Pacific.
  • Thu October 8Dakota War, the Long Walk, emancipation, Greater Reconstruction, and capstone scope workshop.
Week 8

Railroads, Corporate Empire, and Dispossession

  • Tue October 13Railroad promotion, federal subsidy, land policy, corporate sovereignty, and labor.
  • Thu October 15Railroads, military logistics, dispossession, and the in-class historiographical synthesis.
Week 9

Reservations, Allotment, Education, and Indigenous Persistence

  • Tue October 20Reservation policy, allotment, kinship, and settler governance.
  • Thu October 22Boarding-school records, child removal, archival harm, Indigenous persistence, and data sovereignty.
Week 10

Racial Regimes, Labor, and Border Violence, 1880–1920

  • Tue October 27Racial formation through law, labor, migration, and border violence.
  • Thu October 29Newspaper comparison, corroboration, ethical quotation, and Source Lab 3 transfer.
Week 11

Conservation, Reclamation, Extraction, and Tourism

  • Tue November 3National parks, tourism, and Indigenous dispossession.
  • Thu November 5Reclamation, water, extraction, conservation, administrative power, and capstone dossier workshop.
Week 12

Crisis and Mobilization in the West, 1920s–1945

  • Tue November 10Oil, Dust Bowl ecology, migration, photography, and causal explanation.
  • Thu November 12New Deal development, wartime mobilization, incarceration, Bracero labor, and oral-history ethics.
Week 13

The Postwar West: Suburbs, Water, Nuclear Landscapes, and Red Power

  • Tue November 17Suburbanization, Sunbelt growth, federal investment, and unequal benefits.
  • Thu November 19Dams, water, nuclear landscapes, termination, Red Power, and capstone consultation.
Week 15

The Contemporary West and the Politics of Memory

  • Tue December 1Contemporary sovereignty, migration, water, climate, extraction, and capstone artifact workshop.
  • Thu December 3Politics of memory; redraw the Week 1 map and synthesize the course.
Download all lecture decks