On May 22, 1843, the inaugural wagon train of the Great Emigration departed from Independence, Missouri, bound for the Pacific coast. A group of 1,000 settlers (along with 1,000 head of cattle) began a five-month journey across the Western half of the continent, arriving in Oregon in late October. This first large wagon train cemented the concept of the Oregon Trail, both as a route for settlers and a new facet of the emerging (White) American Dream, one that inevitably included colonialism, violence, and destruction for the indigenous peoples already living on the Plains and westward.

The Throwback Thursdays talk for the week of May 20-26th features Evelyn Nakano Glenn discussing "Settler Colonial Legacies: U.S. Racial Formation, American Exceptionalism and White Nationalist Xenophobia," (originally presented September 28, 2017) which examines how American national identity, racial stratification, and central concepts such as sovereignty, citizenship, property, and freedom developed in the context of territorial expansion, encounters with indigenous others, reliance on chattel slavery, and mass immigration.