"The history of the West until recently 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. Inherited wet-land habits have given us a damaged domain. The exacerbated personal freedom of the frontier has left us with myths, a folklore, a set of beliefs and assumptions, that are often comically at odds with the facts of life. . . . Angry as one may be at what heedless men have done and still do to a noble habitat, one cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery."
--Wallace Stegner, The Sound of Mountain Water
History 162: Lecture Outlines
Lecture 1: Possibilities Lost: The Significance of the Frontier and West in American History
Lecture 2: The "Columbian Exchange" and North American Colonialism
Lectures 3 and 4: Colonial Frontiers
Lectures 5 and 6: National Expansion and Indian Nationalism in the Early Republic
Lecture 7 and 8: The Federal Government and The Making of The American West
Lectures 9 and 10: The Workaday West and the Wild West
Lectures 11 and 12: Family Life in the Nineteenth-Century West
Lectures 13 and 14: Custom's Last Stand?: Vanquished But Unvanished Indians
Lectures 15 and 16: The Great American Mirage or How the West Was Watered
Lecture 17:
Gunbelt and Sunbelt:
The West and Washington in the Twentieth Century
Lecture 18: Californication
Lecture 19: There's No Place Like Nome
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