- The history of American westward expansion through the first half of the nineteenth century can be summarized as "the middle ground that was not found." Explain and evaluate.
- According to John Mack Faragher, "pioneering was a paramilitary occupation." Discuss in relation to Spanish, French, British, and American colonialism.
- When Karl Marx suggested that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce, he was not thinking about the Ohio Valley. But the history of the "western country" in the second half of the eighteenth century provides striking evidence of Marx's dictum. Explain by comparing and contrasting British colonial policy in the 1760s with Federalist policy in the 1790s.
- It has been said that the Spanish came to the Americas for "gold, god, and glory," the French for "fish, fur, and the faith," and the English for "land, land, and land." Do you agree? How might you amend any or all of the above trilogies?
- In his book, The Roots of Dependency, Richard White argues that the military superiority of Europeans fails to account for their ability to conquer indigenous peoples and colonize new territories. "Military force," writes White, "was rarely employed for its own sake; it served other interests. The threat of force merely expedited the working of more elementary factors--political, economic, and cultural. Force often explains how change took place; it does not explain why it took place." Do you agree with this assessment? What factors other than military force explain why Europeans were able to assert their dominance? How did these factors both inhibit and encourage the dependency of North American Indians?
- "The history of the West," according to Wallace Stegner, "has been a history of the importation of humid-land habits (and carelessness) into a dry land that will not tolerate them; and of the indulgence of an unprecedented personal liberty, an atomic individualism, in a country that experience says can only be successfully tamed and lived in by a high degree of cooperation." Discuss.
- In his article on the contemporary American frontier, Frank Popper summarizes the dominant themes in the history of the Great West as a "tradition of geographic mobility and [a] myth of social mobility." Likewise, Patricia Limerick writes that "to many Americans, the West promised so much that the promise was almost sure to be broken. . . . The West was the national region most associated with optimism and opportunity. The Western gap between expectation and results was thus a version of the national gap." Write an essay that examines the relationship between Popper's "tradition" and "myth," between Limerick's "expectation" and "results." Your essay should distinguish between racial and ethnic groups and between men and women. Above all, it should address the question apparently left unasked by Popper and Limerick: if such a gap between myth and reality, between expectation and results, existed and exists, why have millions of people continued to migrate to the American West as the promised land of hope and opportunity?
- In The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West, Patricia Limerick insists that the closing of the frontier in 1890 constitutes an artificial divide, and that the history of the West is largely one of continuity. Considering three of the following topics, examine the ways in which the history of the nineteenth and twentieth-century West converge and diverge: Indians; race and ethnicity; gender; economic development; environmental relations; federal policies.
- In the past, the history of the American West has typically been written as a triumphalist narrative emphasizing the heroic accomplishments of white male pioneers. Does the inclusion of white women and non-white men and women serve primarily to satisfy multicultural sensibilities of late twentieth-century Americans, or do these efforts at inclusion significantly restructure the overall framework of Western American history? Discuss.
- Consider the following proposition: "In contrast to Frederick Jackson Turner's emphasis on the frontier as the crucible of innovation, independence, and individualism, imitation of eastern models and dependence on the federal government characterized the history of the American West through the nineteenth century. During the twentieth century, dependence on the federal government expanded, but the West has become more innovative than imitative." Do you agree entirely, partially, or not at all with this revisionist thesis? Explain.
- In his essay, "Colonial America without the Indians," James Axtell registers the indispensability of the Indians for understanding America's past by imagining how Early American history would have looked had the "New World" truly been a "virgin land." Drawing on Axtell's framework, extend the counterfactual speculation to the present by examining "Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century American Wests without the Indians."
- In his book, Dust Bowl, Donald Worster argues that the erosion and desolation of the southern plains was one of the great ecological disasters of human history. Perhaps the most contentious feature of Worster's account concerns his assessment of the causes of this catastrophe. Worster insists that the dust bowl was made in the U.S.A., not in heaven or hell. In Worster's view, the tragedy was no "accident" of nature, but the consequence of specific American assumptions, decisions, and practices regarding the land. According to Worster, the dust bowl happened because "the system" worked, not because it failed, malfunctioned, or was ignored.
In what ways would you revise the mythology of the West to make room for Worster's findings? In light of his book, can we still see small farmers as "heroic pioneers" scratching out the "American Dream"? Do Worster's conclusions mean we have to rewrite the history of the West to emphasize greed, ignorance, and short-sightedness? Are there no heroes, only losers, in the dust bowl saga?
- According to one pioneer woman in Arizona (c. 1890), "our hearts' desire [was] a real home on the desert." What defined a "real home" for the people(s) of the Great West? How did different peoples' understanding of what constituted a "real home" clash? How did these definitions change from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries?
- Given Hollywood's penchant for remakes and sequels, it seems only a matter of time before "Shane" attracts some filmmaker's attention. Your assignment is to provide a summary of a new script for "Shane: The Remake" or "Shane II." The synopsis, including an outline of the plot and a sketch of the principal characters, should emphasize the ways in which the new script updates and expands the original movie to better reflect recent scholarship on the conquest, colonization, and consolidation of the American West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. How would Jane Tompkins review your movie?