Hi, I'm Shannon, the podcast producer here at C-SPAN, and we're back in summer school this week with a discussion on the American West.

On this episode of the Lectures in History podcast, Texas Women's University History Professor, Cessley Zander,

discusses the federal government's efforts to explore and control the American West from the early 1800s through the Civil War.

Today we're on to Army Explorers in the sort of interior west.

So as I told you all last time, we've been proceeding pretty chronologically up to this point.

This lecture is going to kind of spin us out onto a thematic topic.

So we're going to start right around Thomas Jefferson, who we left off talking about on Monday.

But we're going to jump all the way through forward to the U.S.-Mexico War and the Civil War.

And so a lot of the topics we're talking about today, they're also going to come up in our future lectures.

So just know that if you feel slightly unmoored when it comes to what time we're in, I'm

going to do my best to signpost, but just flag me down if you're like, we've suddenly jumped 20 years.

That's going to happen today because it's a more of the thematic topic.

But what I really want us to get out of this is a deeper insight

into this question we've been talking about throughout the class, which is once you have

an empire, how do you exert control over it? And how is the new U.S. federal government, which

we started to talk about on Monday, going to control the interior

west, which is going to be its kind of biggest problem. So we'll start here with Adam Smith,

pretty famous, famous dude, economist, right? Around 1776, just as the Americans are starting

to draft that Declaration of Independence that's going to set them to war with great Britain.

He writes this about the United States from shopkeepers, tradesmen and attorneys.

They are becoming statesmen and legislatures and are employed in contriving a new form of government for an extensive empire,

which they flatter themselves will become

...