This teaching unit is designed to supplement your students' study of the second phase of westward expansion. Westward Expansion: 1842-1912 includes a booklet containing a teachers guide, a set of reproductions of original documents, and a CD-ROM containing exercise worksheets and digital images of original documents. Each of 15 exercises includes reproductions of documents from the National Archives and suggests classroom activities based on these documents. The documents include official correspondence, petitions, photographs, broadsides, newspapers, maps, and invention patents. Students practice the historian's skills as they complete exercises using these documents to gather information, identify points of view, evaluate evidence, form hypotheses, and draw conclusions. The documents in this unit show a side of western history not commonly portrayed, namely that of the very significant commitment of the federal government to westward expansion at every stage of settlement. They also highlight the pluralistic character of life in the American West and the cost to those who were displaced as the United States pursued its Manifest Destiny. Because settlement of the western frontier has been romanticized by literature, film, and television, extra time is devoted in this unit to helping students separate the mythology of the West from its history. Other units comprising the Teaching With Documentsseries are: The Constitution: Evolution of a Government The Bill of Rights: Evolution of Personal Liberties The United States Expands West: 1785-1842 The Civil War: Soldiers and Civilians The Progressive Years: 1898-1917 World War I: The Home Front The 1920's The Great Depression and The New Deal World War II: The Home Front The United States At War: 1944 The Truman Years: 1945-1953 Peace and Prosperity: 1953-1961