HIST 74: The American West, 1800 to the Present
Roger Lotchin
History 74 is a survey and interpretation of the American West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, emphasizing the special role of the West in the evolution of American history and the development of contemporary American society. It concentrates upon the trans-Mississippi West (beyond the 95th parallel), sometimes called the Great West and focuses on the theme of renewal. Americans and before them Europeans have regarded America as the place where people could start history over again without the restraints of civilization to bind their actions. Each frontier was regarded as the land of American dreams. In the "American West," we will try to see how well the dreamers succeeded in the unique geographic and temporal context mentioned above. Yet even though this was the last in a series of "Wests," it was the most unique. Although renewal is the overall theme of the course, it will also feature considerable concentration on the related themes of the physical environment, cultures, and western exceptionalism. Within the overall themes of renewal, the physical environment, cultures, and western exceptionalism, the course will cover the topics common to most Western history courses. These will include exploration and discovery; the mountain men and fur trade; war and the development of the West; westward expansion; the cattlemen's frontier; the farmers' frontier; the urban frontier; the women's frontier; Mormonism; lawlessness, gunfighters and collective violence; images of the West; the American Indians; overland trails and the process of migration; gold and other mining rushes; western economic life; conservation and the environment; the West as a force in the development of the modern American state; western geography; technology and the transformation of western geography; labor, radicalism, the western city; and railroads. Although the course will dwell heavily on major themes or forces of history, it will also include much on the heroic character of the western cast of characters: Meriwether Lewis, Sitting Bull, John Charles and Jessie Benton Fremont, Billy the Kid, Crazy Horse, Wild Bill Hickock, Amy Loucks, the Big Four of railroads and the Comstock Lode, Brigham Young, mountain men Jed Smith and John Colter, Luther Burbank, Red Cloud, George and Libbie Custer, John Muir, John Wesley Powell, William Mulholland, and the Emperor Norton, the First, of San Francisco.