CONTENT: This course traces the incorporation and development of western North American by three nations during the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  The course focuses on material, political, and cultural events in the areas of northern Mexico and western Canada and the United States since 1800.  The primary aim of this course is to bolster students’ understanding of the dynamic forces shaping regional development at a transnational level.  The course will develop a historical and spatial analysis of regional development, and it will examine the interplay between historical events and popular cultural representations of those events.  Students will engage lectures, secondary readings, and primary texts to understand the history of the North American West as one region, three nations, and many places.  The course stresses understanding the historical processes of regional development in a comparative context.  As an upper-division geography course focusing on process and place, HIST 376 contributes to student comprehension of the social, cultural, and environmental issues underlying regional development across a broad reach of North America.

GRADING:

Midterm             25%

Papers                30%

Final        25%

Tutorial              20% 

TEXTS:

Andrew Graybill, Policing the Great Plains: Rangers, Mountains, and the North American Frontier, 1875-1910 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007)

Quintard Taylor, The Forging of a Black Community: Seattle's Central District from 1870 through the Civil Rights Era (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994)

ARTICLES AND ESSAYS WILL BE AVAILABLE THROUGH THE W.A.C. BENNETT LIBRARY