A Nation Moving West

Facets of the pioneer experience on the changing American frontier from the Revolution to 1900.

Facets of the pioneer experience on the changing American frontier from the Revolution to 1900.

"Drawing on the journals and correspondence of pioneers, Horsman examines more than a hundred years of history, recording components of the diets of various groups, including travelers, settlers, fur traders, soldiers, and miners. He discusses food-preparation techniques, including the development of canning, and foods common in different regions"--Provided by publisher.

The United States’ boundaries have expanded over the centuries—and at the same time, Americans’ ideas about their country have grown as well. The nation the world knows today was shaped by centuries of thinkers and events. In the 1830s, over fifty years after the United States had won its independence from Britain, Americans were still delighted with their young country. That sense of hope and freedom are still a part of the United States today. As you learn about the settlers who rode the Oregon Trail to new land in the West, you will gain a better understanding of how America became America

Split Screen Nation traces an oppositional dynamic between the screen West and the screen South that was unstable and dramatically shifting in the decades after WWII, and has marked popular ways of imagining the U.S. ever since. If this dynamic became vivid in Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained (2012), itself arguably a belated response to Easy Rider (1969), this book helps us understand those films, and much more, through an eclectic history of U.S. screen media from the postwar era. It deftly analyzes not only Hollywood films and television, but also educational and corporate films, amateur films (aka "home movies"), and military and civil defense films featuring "tests" of the atomic bomb in the desert. Attentive to sometimes profoundly different contexts of production and consumption shaping its varied examples, Split Screen Nation argues that in the face of the Cold War and the civil rights struggle an implicit, sometimes explicit, opposition between the screen West and the screen South nonetheless mediated the nation's most paradoxical narratives--namely, "land of the free"/land of slavery, conquest, and segregation. Whereas confronting such contradictions head-on could capsize cohesive conceptions of the U.S., by now familiar screen forms of the West and the South split them apart to offer convenient, discrete, and consequential imaginary places upon which to collectively project avowed aspirations and dump troubling forms of national waste. Pinpointing some of the most severe yet understudied postwar trends fueling this dynamic--including non-theatrical film road trips, feature films adapted from Tennessee Williams, and atomic test films--and mining their potential for more complex ways of thinking and feeling the nation, Split Screen Nation considers how the vernacular screen forms at issue have helped shape how we imagine not only America's past, but also the limits and possibilities of its present and future.

An introduction to westward expansion in the United States in graphic form.

A Nation on the Move: Westward Expansion, 1800-1860 U.S. History After 1800, the United States militantly expanded westward across North America, confident of its right and duty to gain control of the continent and spread the benefits of its "superior" culture. In John Gast's American Progress, the white, blonde figure of Columbia--a historical personification of the United States--strides triumphantly westward with the Star of Empire on her head. She brings education, symbolized by the schoolbook, and modern technology, represented by the telegraph wire. White settlers follow her lead, driving the helpless natives away and bringing successive waves of technological progress in their wake. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the quest for control of the West led to the Louisiana Purchase, the annexation of Texas, and the Mexican-American War. Efforts to seize western territories from native peoples and expand the republic by warring with Mexico succeeded beyond expectations. Few nations ever expanded so quickly. Yet, this expansion led to debates about the fate of slavery in the West, creating tensions between North and South that ultimately led to the collapse of American democracy and a brutal civil war. Chapter Outline: Introduction Lewis and Clark The Missouri Crisis Independence for Texas The Mexican-American War, 1846-1848 Free Soil or Slave? The Dilemma of the West The Open Courses Library introduces you to the best Open Source Courses.