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David Patrick McKenzie

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Category: Hist 616 – American West

Posts for my History 616 – American West class, fall 2014.

Hist 616 - American West

AmWest Final Post: The New Orleans Association’s Claims against Mexico

In my midterm primary sources blog post, examining U.S. citizens who filed claims against Mexico for unpaid debts related to their support of Mexico’s War of Independence, I laid out grand ambitions for the technology I would use in my final paper.
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December 8, 2014David McKenzieLeave a comment
Hist 616 - American West

AmWest Post #12: “You ain’t from around here, are you?”

http://youtu.be/cYfjq3ZYZbA This clip from the film Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure demonstrates a phenomenon the late Hal Rothman, in his fascinating work Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century West, argues was associated with tourism: The need to perform a certain image of a place. When
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November 30, 2014November 30, 2014David McKenzie2 Comments
Hist 616 - American West

AmWest Post #11: San Antonio as Western City

Throughout our Western history class, I’ve been pondering the question of Texas as a Western versus Southern state. Overall I agree with the assessment of historian Randolph Campbell that the state is more Southern because the bulk of the population lives in
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November 23, 2014David McKenzieLeave a comment
Hist 616 - American West

AmWest Post #10: Comanche… World-System, Federation, Empire?

From the title of this week’s book, we can tell that Pekka Hämäläinen isn’t messing around. He intentionally provokes by calling his book the Comanche Empire. The book argues that the Comanches gained so much power in the 18th- and early 19th-century Southwest that they
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November 12, 2014November 18, 2014David McKenzie3 Comments
Hist 616 - American West

AmWest Post #9: Railroads and the West’s Transformation

This week’s reading was Richard White‘s influential Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America, which focuses on the development of transcontinental rail lines from nothing at the dawn of the Civil War to multiple lines by the end of the 19th
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November 9, 2014November 9, 2014David McKenzieLeave a comment
Hist 616 - American West

AmWest Post #8: Statewide Online Archives

For this week, our assignment is to look at Montana Memory and similar statewide online archival portals from Western states. Montana Memory is a joint project of the Montana Historical Society and the Montana State Library, but, like many such portals, it
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November 1, 2014David McKenzie1 Comment
Hist 616 - American West

AmWest Post #7: West as Exception, Norm, Precedent…?

This week’s main reading, An Aristocracy of Color by D. Michael Bottoms, formerly of our own George Mason University History Department, focuses on the application of Reconstruction laws and post-Civil War constitutional amendments–based on the specific circumstances of the South but national in
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October 26, 2014October 26, 2014David McKenzie3 Comments
Hist 616 - American West

AmWest Primary Sources: U.S. Aid to Mexican Rebels

For this blog post and for my paper assignment in the American West class, I’m using selections of claims by U.S. citizens against Mexico. These selections document involvement by U.S. citizens in Mexico’s War of Independence, specifically merchants who sold arms, munitions,
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October 20, 2014October 20, 2014David McKenzie2 Comments
Hist 616 - American West

AmWest Post #6: The West as (Latin) America

In his first chapter of Colony and Empire, William Robbins references the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s controversial West as America exhibition from 1991. As I read the book, however, I couldn’t help but to think that he was arguing for the U.S. West
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October 11, 2014October 20, 2014David McKenzie2 Comments
Hist 616 - American West

AmWest Post #5: Migrations + Environmental Change = Way of the West?

This week’s reading, University of Arkansas historian Elliott West’s excellent The Way to the West: Essays on the Central Plains, focuses on two major migrations into the Central Plains during the mid-19th century: the better-known westward movement of U.S.-Americans and the lesser-known
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October 5, 2014David McKenzie1 Comment

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