ASH 3002y Reading Assignment
April 12, 1999

The Old Southwest and Beyond the Missouri

Here's a preliminary reading assignment for April 12.   Please browse in the additional reading below; some of the web resources are very rich.

If you have ideas or suggestions between now and then, please post them to the course bulletin board.

Required Reading:

• Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land:  The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950, 1978), chapters 11-15, pp. 123-173 (Barnard reserves).
• Annette Kolodny, The Land Before Her:  Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860 (Chapel Hill and London:  U of North Carolina P, 1984), pp. 4-13.
• The Gold Rush at PBS Online 
• The Emigrants' Guide to California and Oregon
• Walt Whitman, "Facing West from California's Shores," The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 5th edition, vol. 1, p. 2153.

Additional reading:

• WestWeb:  Including a bibliography of sources on the West, "Making It Their Own:  Women in the West,"  "The Golden Mountain:   Asian-Americans in the West," "Tierra Nuestra:   Chicanos in the West," and "Many Bloodied Plains:   Western Military History"
• The Modesto Bee's Yosemite:   A History, Prologue and Chapters 1-2.
• "California as I Saw It": First-Person Narratives of California's Early Years, 1849-1900
• Pioneering the Upper Midwest: Books from Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, ca. 1820-1910
• Sources for the Study of the Southwest
• PBS New Perspectives on the West
  

As you examine these sites, think about them critically.  Having put a project together, what would you do differently if you were presenting these sites?  How useful is each site?  How reliable does the information presented seem?  Why?