Calvin College Courses
The Mellema Program has sponsored a variety of courses taught regularly. Three of these courses were taught in the 2008-2009 academic year. In the Fall 2008, William Katerberg taught History 358, an advanced course that focuses on the history of violence and power in the American West. In the Spring 2009, Katerberg taught History 257, a survey of the American West.
In the May Interim of 2009, Gerald Van Kooten and Ralph Stearley taught “Big Sky Geology: Montana Field Experience,” an off-campus version of Geology 151, “Introduction to Geology.” In addition, Jamie Skillen taught environmental studies courses that included significant coverage of the American West.
Library Collection
Calvin College’s library now holds one the largest collections of Western American studies material in Michigan. In addition to recent scholarship on the American West, the library includes a significant amount of work on the Canadian West and North. It also includes runs of major journals that focus on the West, notably the Western History Quarterly, Pacific Historical Review, Journal of the West, and Montana: Magazine of Western History.
The library is also rich in primary sources from the nineteenth century, notably significant portions of material from microfilm collections such as Western Americana, History of the Pacific Northwest, The Plains and Rockies, Travels in the West and Southwest, and History of the Canadian Northwest. Descriptions of this material on microfilm can be found at the library website.
Publications
The Mellema Program director’s study of science fiction novels and films set in the American West was published in October 2008 with the 
University Press of Kansas under the title Future West: Utopia and Apocalypse in Frontier Science Fiction. The book debuted at the Western History Association and American Studies Association conferences in the Fall of 2008.
The history textbook that the director is co-writing with Carol Higham of Davidson College in North Carolina, Conquests & 
Consequences: The American West from Frontier to Region, in August 2009 by Harlan Davidson Press in Illinois. It will debut at the Fall 2009 meetings of the Western Historical Association.
