US History Studies, Since Reconstruction
Rosen
Unit One, Westward Expansion
Notes, I Questions
 What were some of the lasting results of the Louis and Clark expedition?
 What factors and developments in the late 18th and early 19th centuries facilitated
westward movement?
 Why do you think easterners would have wanted to travel west, despite the hazards and
difficulties of leaving home?
Notes, II Questions
 What purposes to the various trails and serve in the process of westward expansion?
 In what ways did westward expansion depend on the technologies of the time?
 Why was the support of politician such as Henry Clay so important to westward
expansion?
Notes, III Questions
 What relationship existed between attitudes towards Native Americans and the concept
of Manifest Destiny?
 What sorts of things might settlers have done to alter the landscape to their desired
specifications and to confirm to the spirit of Manifest Destiny?
 What were some of the ways in which the US government try to assimilate Native
Americans into "mainstream" American culture? Why do you think the government
saw this as important?
Notes, IV Questions
 What were some of the biggest difficulties of frontier life? Why do you think so many
people "stuck it out" rather than return east?
 Why do you think that territories and states such as Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado were
the first to grant women the right to vote?
Notes, V Questions
 How did Spain’s method for settling present-day California differ from the way in
which the US eventually did?
 Why did mining camps during the California Gold Rush have a “Wild West”
atmosphere?
 In what ways do you think the Mexican-American War affected patterns of western
settlement?
US History Studies, Since Reconstruction
Rosen
Unit One, Westward Expansion
Notes, VI Questions
 What might have been the pros and cons facing an African-American family who
considered migrating from the South into Kansas after the Civil War?
 Why do you think competition was so fierce for land upon the passage of the Homestead
Act?
 In what ways to the transcontinental railroad help the nation achieve its perceived
"Manifest Destiny"?
Notes, VII Questions
 What did 19th-century federal legislation and military activity feel about the
government attitude towards westward expansion and Native Americans?
 Why do you think Easterners and foreigners held romanticize notions of the American
West?
 Why do you think landscape paintings of the West proved so influential in its settlement
and preservation?
Unit One Comprehensive Questions
 Why did Americans of European descent feel so compelled to expand the country
westward?
 What my 19th-century Native Americans have said about Manifest Destiny? Why
would they have taken this perspective?
 How might the country have developed differently if no gold or other precious materials
have been discovered in the west?
 What would've been like to walk in the shoes of the 19th century is settler in the West?
 What did 19th-century federal legislation and military activity reveal about the
government’s attitude towards westward expansion?
 In what ways did westward expansion rely on immigration?