HIST 3413A: The U.S. & Its Borderlands

HIST 3413A: The U.S. & Its Borderlands
Winter 2026

Description: In the past ten years, American political life has been consumed by conversations about border enforcement. The heated discussions about banning migrants, building walls, and accelerating deportations—though remarkable for their scope, scale, and intensity—are not entirely unprecedented. Questions about who should be allowed to move across national boundaries—to travel, trade, raid, marry, work, or settle—have long provoked fierce debate. Indeed, the process of constructing and enforcing borders in North America has typically prompted searching questions about belonging. Along the territorial edges of nation-states, such questions about belonging resonate in profound ways.

This course focuses on the historical experiences of frontiers and border-making in the U.S. in an effort to place current conversations about border enforcement in a broader historical context. It will examine the efforts to construct and enforce the country’s boundaries with Mexico and Canada, and along the Pacific Rim, in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the ways that Indigenous peoples, settlers, and migrants both shaped and were shaped by those efforts. In so doing, we will seek to explore both the policies designed to establish and consolidate the territorial boundaries of the U.S. and to regulate the movement of people across those borders. It will also compare and contrast those policies with the actual practices that emerged on the ground. In the process, we will see how these historical struggles over national borders can shed new light on modern debates.

Format: This course will be offered live and in-person. Our investigations over the course of the semester will be organized around the weekly readings. Our time in class will be divided between lectures and discussions that will help to contextualize those readings, as well as various applied activities that will give you the opportunity to develop vital research and writing skills.

Evaluation: I have not yet settled on the course assignments, though the course will include weekly quizzes and in-class writing assignments based on the assigned readings.

Questions? Please contact me at michel.hogue@carleton.ca