Winning and Losing the West

Learning Objectives

1. Explain the importance of homesteading and railroads in Western history. Describe the importance of cattle drives and barbed wire to the development of agriculture and ranching.
2. Compare the experiences of racial and ethnic minorities in the North and West to the challenges faced by African Americans in the South. How were the strategies used by each of these groups related? Why did whites in these regions discriminate against ethnic and racial minorities while remaining critical of white Southerners for limiting the freedoms of former slaves?
3. Identify the various strategies used by suffragists during the 1870s and 1880s. Analyze the arguments and strategies of leading women’s rights advocates. Analyze the reasons that some women sought to work within nineteenth-century notions about gender while others were more radical and sought to overturn these notions.