HST 231 - The American West

Course unit(s): 1
Meets GAR (students beginning prior to Fall 2024): Meets general academic requirement HU.
This course explores the history of the American West, focusing on the period since 1850. We start in an era of consolidation and incorporation, when the U.S. surveyed a West that had only recently become American in name, and worked to make it a West that was American in fact. This process had political, economic, military, social, and cultural dimensions, and it was one that westerners resisted as often as they welcomed it. By the end of the nineteenth century, the West had emerged as an identifiable region of the U.S., with regional economic features, unique ties to the federal government, distinctive patterns of race relations, and a unique place in U.S. cultural memory. Throughout, we will attend to the aspirations of a variety of western peoples: people of all genders; workers and captains of industry; sexual majorities and sexual minorities; people of North American, Latin American, European, African, and Asian origin or descent. We look at how the varied aspirations of such peoples both clashed and coalesced, sometimes producing dissension and violence, and other times producing new social movements. Using films, monographs, memoirs, letters, academic articles and literary fiction, we will explore the struggle for land, resources, identity, and power, all of which have characterized “The West” and its role in the history of the United States.