In this virtual program, Susan Schulten, Colorado State Historian for 2025-26, explores the complex forces that shaped the American West in the 1800s. The prospect of westward expansion fostered both unity and division in nineteenth-century America. From the war against Mexico to the Dred Scott decision of 1857, the drive to acquire new territory deepened sectional divisions, ruptured the political landscape, and ultimately exploded in Civil War. Schulten will show that this disunion—alongside mineral rushes and shifting conceptions of the land itself—made the organization of new territories possible, most dramatically in Colorado.
Susan Schulten is Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Denver, where she has taught since 1996. She also currently serves as the State Historian of Colorado. She is the author of several books that use old maps to tell new stories about American history, including A History of America in 100 Maps (2018), Mapping the Nation: history and cartography in nineteenth-century America (2012), and The Geographical Imagination in America, 1880-1950. Her most recent books are Emma Willard: Maps of History (2022), and a two-volume history of America written with Elliott Gorn, Constructing the American Past (2025). She was the Mellon Distinguished Scholar in Residence at AAS in 2024-25 and was elected to AAS membership in October 2018.