Race Gender in American Wes

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

This is a research seminar with two central goals. The first is to examine the meanings and significance of race and gender in the history of the American West. The second is to develop your research, writing, and analytical abilities through the study of primary and secondary historical sources. The first task asks you to think about the history of the American West through the prisms of race and gender. The American West was and is a place of stunning racial diversity. Given the broad reach of the course, we will have to be selective in our topics; this course should in no way be considered a comprehensive, or survey, history of the American West. Hundreds of distinct ethnic and cultural groups have called this place home. In addition to examining a sampling of diverse peoples in the American West, we will also consider the meanings of race and gender carefully. What does race mean? What is gender? Are they “real”? Why and when are some groups and not others called “races,” and why do these categories change over time? What does gender have to do with these processes? How do thinking about race and its history, and gender and its malleability, shape how we think about the American West? The second task of the course, which will include developing and completing independent research, will allow you to put into action the ideas generated by our investigations. The course will include discussions of historical research methods and analyzing primary and secondary sources, advice on how to search for and narrow down a topic, and lessons on how to organize and write a paper based on primary sources.