Lectures curated around Ken Burns: The West, which examines the West as a boundless landscape where myth, vision, and dream shape historical reality.

Kiowa poet N. Scott Momaday remarked that the American West "is a place that has to be seen to be believed, and it may have to be believed in order to be seen." America without the West is unthinkable now. Yet there was nothing inevitable about our taking it. Others had prior claim to its vastness, after all, and we could quite easily have remained forever huddled east of the Mississippi. In resolving to move west and become a continental nation we would exact a fearful price from those already living on the land. But we also became a different people, and it is no accident that that turbulent history, and the myths that have grown up around it, have made the West the most potent symbol of the nation as a whole, overseas as well as in our own hearts.