AmWest Post #5: Migrations + Environmental Change = Way of the West?
This week’s reading, University of Arkansas historian Elliott West’s excellent The Way to the West: Essays on the Central Plains, focuses on two major migrations into the Central Plains during the...
View ArticleAmWest Post #6: The West as (Latin) America
In his first chapter of Colony and Empire, William Robbins references the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s controversial West as America exhibition from 1991. As I read the book, however, I couldn’t...
View ArticleAmWest Primary Sources: U.S. Aid to Mexican Rebels
For this blog post and for my paper assignment in the American West class, I’m using selections of claims by U.S. citizens against Mexico. These selections document involvement by U.S. citizens in...
View ArticleAmWest Post #7: West as Exception, Norm, Precedent…?
This week’s main reading, An Aristocracy of Color by D. Michael Bottoms, formerly of our own George Mason University History Department, focuses on the application of Reconstruction laws and post-Civil...
View ArticleAmWest Post #8: Statewide Online Archives
For this week, our assignment is to look at Montana Memory and similar statewide online archival portals from Western states. Montana Memory is a joint project of the Montana Historical Society and the...
View ArticleAmWest Post #9: Railroads and the West’s Transformation
This week’s reading was Richard White‘s influential Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America, which focuses on the development of transcontinental rail lines from nothing at...
View ArticleAmWest Post #10: Comanche… World-System, Federation, Empire?
From the title of this week’s book, we can tell that Pekka Hämäläinen isn’t messing around. He intentionally provokes by calling his book the Comanche Empire. The book argues that the Comanches gained...
View ArticleAmWest Post #11: San Antonio as Western City
Throughout our Western history class, I’ve been pondering the question of Texas as a Western versus Southern state. Overall I agree with the assessment of historian Randolph Campbell that the state is...
View ArticleAmWest Post #12: “You ain’t from around here, are you?”
This clip from the film Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure demonstrates a phenomenon the late Hal Rothman, in his fascinating work Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century West, argues was associated...
View ArticleAmWest Final Post: The New Orleans Association’s Claims against Mexico
In my midterm primary sources blog post, examining U.S. citizens who filed claims against Mexico for unpaid debts related to their support of Mexico’s War of Independence, I laid out grand ambitions...
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