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The origins of the American Cordillera – the mountain ranges forming the backbone of North America, Central America, and South America – remain contentious. It is one of the few global orogens in which there was an active margin whose formation mechanisms remain unresolved. This seminar class will begin by reading seminal papers on the application of “new global tectonics” to the Cordillera shortly following the plate tectonic revolution in the late 1960s. Progressing forward in time, the class will continue to read and discuss papers that develop the classic, broadly accepted model that western North America was gradually assembled from the late Paleozoic into the Miocene through east-dipping subduction. The class will then turn to a drastically different model that was first published in a divisive paper in 2009 that turned the classic tectonic interpretation of the Cordillera on its head by proposing that much of western North America was a separate ribbon continent. The final part of the course will focus on papers published during the last 10 years that try to reconcile differences between the two models. Throughout the course, we will evaluate the range of observations and datasets – both geological and geophysical – that are used to support aspects of the two competing models.