Brings American history home to students in the West. Fifteen chapters in each volume explore issues and events of national import -- such as colonization and revolution -- from a unique regional perspective. The West in the History of the Nation expands coverage of the West beyond the classic topics of westward expansion and the Gold Rush to explore such issues as frontier rebellion, colonial economics, frontier slavery, Progressive era politics, New Deal projects, and atomic age in the Cold War West. The organization of the topics parallels that of core texts, and a period designation for each chapter identifies where it falls in the survey, making it easy to incorporate the frontier and the West into the American history course.
More than 130 primary-source documents and images in both volumes. Chapter topics and documents balance political and social focuses, emphasizing that the two are intertwined. Images, government documents, contemporary accounts, editorials, newspaper articles, letters, speeches, and diary entries -- many of them never before published in a college reader -- expose students to all kinds of people from the West and the frontier, black and white, native and immigrant, male and female, powerful and powerless.
A unique offering of visual documents. Unlike most readers designed for the U.S. history survey course, The West in the History of the Nation gives special emphasis to visuals by offering numerous drawings, paintings, maps, handbills, advertisements, and photographs to encourage students' critical thinking. Not only are visual documents used as selections in each volume, but each chapter opens with an image that can be used to stimulate class discussion.
Extensive editorial apparatus highlights the connection between western and national histories, teaches students to think critically about what they read, and is flexible enough for beginning as well as more advanced students. Included are brief chapter introductions that identify and clarify the relationship between western documents and national history; prereading questions that highlight important issues; headnotes that provide background information on authors and documents; editorial glosses that explain terms and information unfamiliar to students; and suggestions for further reading that list 6–8 secondary sources on every topic.