Westward Expansion
A Milestone Documents E-text
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Abstract

What do you imagine when you think of the American West? Do cattle herds tended by bowlegged young men roam through grassy mountain meadows? Or perhaps horse-borne Comanche warriors thunder across the Plains? Maybe a dispute over a gold mine ends in a gunfight. You probably do not picture African American munitions workers, the railroad tracks that connected western resources to eastern markets, or air-conditioning. The first set of images is mainly from the nineteenth century. The process of western expansion, however, continued well into the twentieth century. While popular notions about the American West endure, the people and places of the West are more complex than cowboys, Indians, and violence. The meanings of the West changed continually as America grew.

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