Sophomore American Frontiers: Badlands and Borderlands in U.S. History, 1776-1898

3 units

This course will examine the northern, southern, and above all western regions that comprised the borders and borderlands of the United States from the American Revolution through the late nineteenth century. Exploring local cultures and politics in depth, American Frontiers will address not only the mechanisms by which the United States wrested control of the continental interior, but the immediate and longer-term social consequences of this process for the peoples living within its diffuse regions. In addition to reading scholarly literature, students will work with primary sources such as travel narratives, maps, newspapers, photographs and paintings. Further, there will be frequent explorations into recent fiction and film, encouraging students to question and critique the very imagery that Americans use to construct their visions of the frontier. Through interwoven lectures and in-class discussion, students will be exposed to Indian, Mexican, Canadian, and American voices, black and white, female and male, that will lend original perspectives to the questions of governance, labor, warfare, law, immigration, freedom, and family that consumed border residents straddling multiple worlds.