This week we’re talking about maps and the Mexican-American War (for which maps were actually pretty important!).

Monday

• Check in on Blackboard.
• Listen to our podcast for today and check the transcript.

• Here’s the West Wing clip you need!

• Discuss the cartogram GIF in the transcript in your group channel.
• Draw a map of your surroundings. If you feel ambitious, you could look at some of these maps that use different ways of thinking about space, and try your hand at one of those. Post your map in your group’s Slack channel and, if you want, in #week11.

Small Project #6

• Make a StoryMap that shows the movements of one person who participated in your war. You need to know 5-20 places the person went and why.

(This screencast is extremely low resolution for some reason; I’m trying to figure out why and then I’ll fix it. But for now this will do.)

• Make sure you cite your sources in your blog post!

Wednesday

• Listen to today’s podcast or read the transcript.

• In your Slack group, discuss the primary source I’ve linked to. Where does it fit in the story of the war? You may need to do a tiny bit of research to figure it out. What perspective is it taking on the war? (Ultra super bonus morale points if you sing it!)
• In your Slack group, write a few sentences about how you responded to the podcast. For example, how does this war connect to today? What things were surprising or confusing?

Further reading

• Doyle, Robert C. “Manifest Destiny versus Nativism: Mexico, 1846–1848.”In The Enemy in Our Hands, 69–88. University Press of Kentucky, 2010. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt2jcngh.10.
• Dull, Jonathan R. “Trade Protection and War with Mexico, 1815–1861.” In American Naval History, 1607-1865: Overcoming the Colonial Legacy, 65–82. University of Nebraska Press, 2012. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1d9nqgf.8.
• Greenberg, Amy S. A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico. Knopf, 2012.
• Ruiz, Octavio Madigan, Amy Sanders, and Meredith Sommers. “Mexico’s Loss of Land: Perspectives from Mexico and the United States.” OAH Magazine of History 10, no. 2 (1996): 24–35.
• Silverstone, Scott A. “The Mexican War and Territorial Expansion.” In Divided Union, 157–201. The Politics of War in the Early American Republic. Cornell University Press, 2004. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctv2n7gkh.8.