Required Reading On The History Of The U.S. West

A colleague from the USIH weblog, David Sehat, alerted me to this New York Times piece. Written by Katherine Roberts and titled “A Western State of Mind,” this should be required reading for survey level courses on U.S. history that cover the nineteenth-century western territories.

In fact, Roberts’s article is almost a perfect example of how I want my students to write reader response papers. I ask that those papers have a thesis, discuss a historical topic from class, and then connect the topic to the present (either personally or generally). – TL