Publisher's Synopsis
This teaching unit is designed to supplement your students' study of the first phase of westward expansion.
The United States Expands West: 1785-1842 includes a booklet containing a teachers guide plus, a set of reproductions of original documents, and a CD-ROM containing exercise worksheets and digital images of original documents. Each of ten exercises includes reproductions of documents from the National Archives and suggests classroom activities based on these documents. The documents include official correspondence, petitions, artwork, broadsides, newspapers, maps, and court decisions. Students practice the historian's skills as they complete exercises, using these documents to gather information, identify points of view, evaluate evidence, form hypotheses, and draw conclusions.
The documents in this unit show a side of western history not commonly portrayed, that of the very significant commitment of the federal government to westward expansion at every phase of settlement. They also highlight the international character of life in the American West and the tenuity of the nation's supposed Manifest Destiny. Because settlement of the western lands is so colored by myth, extra time is devoted in this unit to developing skills to separate the mythology of the west from its history.
Other units comprising the Teaching With Documents series are:
The Constitution: Evolution of a Government
The Bill of Rights: Evolution of Personal Liberties
Westward Expansion: 1842-1912
The Civil War: Soldiers and Civilians
The Progressive Years: 1898-1917
World War I: The Home Front
The 1920's
The Great Depression and The New Deal
World War II: The Home Front
The United States At War: 1944
The Truman Years: 1945-1953
Peace and Prosperity: 1953-1961
