Go West, Young Man . . .
My approach to genealogy has always been to focus on “projects” – carve-outs from my larger genealogy research to focus on a specific question, lineage, or time period. A few years ago, I began to work on a project I called Over the Hill, focused on the generation of my ancestors who moved from the colonies on the east coast to the interior states during the 60 years after the American Revolution – generally, my 3rd great-grandparents’ generation. As I began to try to make sense of where and why these people moved, I realized that I had to understand the locations they came from.
I soon recognized that I couldn’t understand their movement until I understood both their origins and their destinations; that realization gave me the idea of writing about 52 locations that were significant in my family history. I wrote that book, which I called 52 Locations in 52 Weeks, during the 20220-2021 pandemic shutdown period.
As I was working on this project, I also began to recognize how important “the West” was – and still is – to American History. That was the genesis of an Osher class that I called “Go West, Young Man . . . Westward Expansion in American History and Mythology.”
The class turned out to be great fun, both to prepare and to present. I was able to bring in information about why people moved west, how they moved west, and what their journeys were like. I was able to talk about how “the west” formed and transformed American culture. I was able to talk about the art and music of the west, and, in the last class, the movie and TV westerns.
I introduced the mythology of “the west” early in the first class. These two paintings capture this mythology.
If you’re already familiar with these paintings, you know why I selected them. If you don’t know them, take some time to google them. They are very interesting and they tell us a lot about what “the west” meant to 10th-century America.
Day 1: Westward Expansion: The Big Picture (top-down, political history)
During this class, I talked a lot about government action to expand to the west. At first the action was taken by the British, as they established colonies on the east coast and then moved toward the mountains. After the American Revolution, the United States looked like this map, as the states claimed land and settled their conflicting claims to form the new nation.
Additional political decisions led to enormous expansion in the decades after the revolution, as this map shows.
By 1850, this is what the United States looked like.
During this class, I also talked about treaties, land claims, relations with other nations (Britain, France, Spain, and then Mexico, and economic development issues that shaped these new lands.
Day 2: Westward Expansion: A granular look (bottom-up, social history)
During the second session, we drilled down and examined the combination of circumstances that led people to move west – to take advantage of (and sometimes create) the opportunities that the west provided them.
My point for this day was that it was all well and good for the government to sign treaties and claim land – but if Americans didn’t go west to settle these lands and make them profitable, the government enterprise would have failed. The west was settled through the millions of individual decisions to develop and then travel on the trails, roads, and rivers that led to the west. Old transportation technologies were adapted – and some new ones were invented – to make it easier for people to move west.
One of the things I realized while I was preparing to teach this course is that migration occurs in waves – which makes sense – and that successive waves of migrants have different goals. This slide summarizes these goals.
And it’s also important to understand this recurring pattern.
I used many (many many) more maps in this presentation. But you get the idea.
Day 3: Westward Expansion: The West in Popular Culture
It’s hard to over-emphasize the importance of “the west” in our popular culture. The image of the rugged individualist, the self-sufficient cowboy, the rancher braving the wilderness – these make up the fabric of America’s image of itself.
In this session, we took a wild ride through the literary, artistic, musical, and cinematic (both movies and television) images of the west. For the last 20 minutes or so of the class, we did a “sing-along” of the music we all remembered from the 1950s. If you’d like to sing along, click here to open my Spotify playlist (this is a public playlist, but you have to have at least a free Spotify account to listen).
This was a fun class to put together and a fun class to teach. I plan to teach it again in an upcoming semester.