1. Contact Information

Dr. Michael Witgen
Office: 2642 Haven Hall
Office Hours: Thursday 12:30-2:00 pm
Email: mwitgen@umich.edu

2. Class Meetings

Tuesday and Thursday 10:00-11:30 am

Room: G 390 Dennison

Campus Map

3. Course Description

This course examines both the “place” and the “process” of the history of the U.S. West, a shifting region of Native North America that was the object first of Spanish, French, English, and then American expansionism, and finally as a distinct region with a unique relationship to the U.S. federal government, distinctive patterns of race relations, and a unique place in American cultural memory.  While this course is a general survey of the west as a region, we will examine the west as both a place and as an idea in American culture and in the popular imagination.  Accordingly, we will spend some time in the east exploring the backcountry frontier during the first years of the republic when the west meant the Ohio Valley and Kentucky, as well focusing on the historical development of the trans-Mississippi west stretching from the Great Plains to the Pacific Ocean.  Using films, monographs, memoirs, letters, and academic articles and literary fiction we will explore the struggle for land, resources, identity, and power, which have characterized the west and its role in the history of the American nation-state.

4. Textbooks

Ned Blackhawk, Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West
Zane Grey, Riders of the Purple Sage
John Steinbeck, Harvest Gypsies: On the Road to the Grapes of Wrath
Monica Itoi Stone, Nisei Daughter
Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River

Films: Historians do not have a monopoly on making sense of the past.  Novelists, songwriters, filmmakers, politicians, and regular people tell stories about the past in order to entertain, understand where they came from, and support political an philosophical arguments.  As historians it is important that we not only try to learn what “really happened,” but to understand how different people have interpreted events differently and used the past to tell stories about the present.  Arrangements for screenings will be made outside of class.  You will be asked to watch five films and at least one television episode, additional film and TV clips may be shown during class.

Deadwood (David Milch, HBO)
The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)
Shane (George Stevens, 1953)
The Virginian (Victor Fleming, 1929)
Grapes of Wrath (John Ford, 1940)
Lone Star (John Sayles, 1996)