So far in this class, we have considered four broad eras in the history of California and the West: the precolonial era, the Spanish era, the (brief) Mexican era, and the American era. There are problems, of course, with dividing up history based on which colonial power is on top at a given time, but each of these eras did inaugurate significant changes to the relationships between people and the natural world.
We can date the American era to the United States’ conquest of California and much of the current-day Southwest in the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848, though of course people from the United States had been present and active in California and the West long before the war. One of the distinctive features of the American era (in which we are still living) has been the rapid and dramatic transformations of many of the West’s landscapes, including activities like building massive cities and creating extensive agricultural land.
It’s this process of transformation I would like you to explore in this paper. Specifically, please address this question: How did transformations of landscapes in California and the West in the late nineteenth century affect the region’s people? There are many ways you might approach this question. You might identify “winners” and “losers” in this process, you might explore changing relationships between westerners and their environment, you might assess whether these transformations made western societies and economies more or less stable, and so on.
Address this question in a paper of 4-5 double-spaced pages (approximately 1200-1500 words) that draws specific, cited evidence from at least three different chapters, articles, or primary sources assigned in this course. If you use Dant’s book, you must also use at least one other source (in other words, you may not base your paper only on three chapters from Dant; you need another source as well). You may use simple parenthetical citations at the end of the relevant sentence, such as (Dant 34) or (Booker 80).
To make this fairly short paper effective, you will need to narrow the topic – do not try to catalog all the transformations people made to landscapes in this era, or all of the effects of those transformations. Instead, find an angle on the question that you can explore deeply in the space of a brief paper.
Please use the following sources to draw specific , cited evidence :
Dant, Sara. (2016). Losing Eden: An Environmental History of the American West. John Wiley & Sons.
Elkind, S. S. (2014). Matthew Morse Booker. Down by the Bay: San Francisco’s History between the Tides.
