The North American West to 1850

What you’ll be able to do

• Identify the various peoples who occupied the North American West before the 16th century, how they lived in their respective environments and vis-à-vis one another, and how scholars and Native communities themselves have made sense of that occupation

• Identify and analyze the relationships among the political, social, cultural, economic, and environmental factors that brought Europeans and enslaved Africans to places that came to be called the West from the 16th through the 18th centuries

• Identify and analyze the political, social, cultural, economic, and environmental factors that gave rise to two new occupying nations in places that came to be called the West in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, as well as increasingly powerful Indigenous peoples

• Identify and analyze the political, social, cultural, economic, and environmental factors that paved the way for U.S. conquest of various parts of the North American West by the middle of the 19th century

• Identify and analyze the political, social, cultural, economic, and environmental factors that brought increasing numbers of Americans, Europeans, and Asians to the West by the middle of the 19th century

• Explain the how the history of places that came to be called the West demonstrates the workings of imperialism and colonialism

• Identify and analyze the ways in which westerners of various genders navigated their lives; the forces that created hierarchies among and within human communities; and the means by which various westerners either maintained or challenged those hierarchies

• Explain the significance of the West for the development of the U.S. nation-state and for the fate of those who lived in the West before the U.S. claimed it

• Explain how and why the West began to gain such a hold on popular imagination in the 19th century, through such media as fiction, art, music, drama, and film

• Differentiate between primary and secondary sources

• Pose a historical question

• Make a historical argument

• Demonstrate knowledge of the concept of historiography in both of its meanings: as the study of the study of history, and as the literature of history

• Analyze primary sources by placing them in their historical contexts

• Evaluate historical arguments posed in secondary sources

• Demonstrate knowledge of the conventions of historical writing, from writing about the past in the past tense to citing sources used in making historical arguments

Source: UW Guide 1· UW Guide 2