Title: Week 8 Overview and Inquiry
Course: The American West: Power, Place, and Memory > Section: Week 8 · October 12–16, 2026: Railroads, Corporate Empire, and Dispossession

WEEK 8 · INQUIRY MODULE

Week 8: Railroads, Corporate Empire, and Dispossession

What did railroads connect, and what relations of land, labor, and violence did they conceal?

Dates: October 12–16, 2026

Focus

- Railroad finance and federal land policy
- Chinese, Indigenous, Black, Mexican, and white labor
- Buffalo destruction, military logistics, and market integration

Before class

1. Read: American Yawp, chapter 16 selected sections.
2. Open and inspect the linked primary-source collection(s). Record one source, one context question, and one limitation.
3. Scholarship lens: Manu Karuka, Empire’s Tracks (2019), selected excerpt.

Primary-source portals

- Library of Congress: The American West, 1865–1900
- Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project

Tuesday/Thursday meeting plan

Date | Status | Plan
Tuesday, October 13 | Class | Railroad promotion, federal subsidy, land policy, corporate sovereignty, and labor.
Thursday, October 15 | Class | Railroads, military logistics, dispossession, and the in-class historiographical synthesis.

Campus full-term classes meet normally; the October 12–16 online break does not apply. Historiographical Portfolio due Friday, October 16.

After class

Deliverable: Historiographical Judgment Portfolio and Reading & Reasoning Check 6.

- I can answer the weekly inquiry with a contestable claim.
- I can name at least two pieces of evidence and explain their limits.
- I can identify an interpretation that my evidence supports, complicates, or challenges.