Student Learning Outcomes

• Students will be able to explain and evaluate the story of America's westward advance as part of the wider story of the development of the American nation and its democracy.
• Students will analyze how different historians have assessed the history of the American West and its influence upon the development of the American nation and democracy.
• Using both primary and secondary sources, students will be able to determine and critically analyze competing perspectives on the history, culture, and society of the American West.
• Students will recognize and articulate in writing the diversity of human cultural expression, such as religion, ethnicity, language, sex, orientation, and gender, by comparing different historical perspectives in the history of American western expansion. [PLO 1,5]