Title: Week 12 Overview and Inquiry
Course: The American West: Power, Place, and Memory > Section: Week 12 · November 9–13, 2026: Crisis and Mobilization in the West, 1920s–1945

WEEK 12 · INQUIRY MODULE

Week 12: Crisis and Mobilization in the West, 1920s–1945

How did environmental crisis, federal development, and wartime mobilization redistribute opportunity, coercion, and vulnerability in the West?

Dates: November 9–13, 2026

Focus

- Oil, boomtowns, Dust Bowl ecology, and migration
- New Deal infrastructure, labor, and federal power
- Japanese American incarceration, defense industry, Bracero labor, and Native military service

Before class

1. Read: American Yawp, chapters 22–24 selected sections.
2. Open and inspect the linked primary-source collection(s). Record one source, one context question, and one limitation.
3. Scholarship lens: Sarah Deutsch, Making a Modern U.S. West (2022), selected excerpt; pair with a Densho or Bracero oral history.

Primary-source portals

- Library of Congress: Dust Bowl Migration
- Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information photographs
- Densho Digital Repository
- Densho teaching resources
- Bracero History Archive

Tuesday/Thursday meeting plan

Date | Status | Plan
Tuesday, November 10 | Class | Oil, Dust Bowl ecology, migration, photography, and causal explanation.
Thursday, November 12 | Class | New Deal development, wartime mobilization, incarceration, Bracero labor, and oral-history ethics.

Source Reasoning Lab 4 due Friday, November 13.

After class

Deliverable: Source Reasoning Lab 4 and Reading & Reasoning Check 10.

- 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.