Blood & Thunder: The Idealized American West and Its Place Today: Selected Resources: History of the American West

A new study of those excluded from the national narrative of the West. Dan Moos challenges both traditional and revisionist perspectives in his exploration of the role of the mythology of the American West in the creation of a national identity. While Moos concurs with contemporary scholars who note that the myths of the American West depended in part upon the exclusion of certain groups - African Americans, Native Americans, and Mormons - he notes that many scholars, in their eagerness to identify and validate such excluded positions, have given short shrift to the cultural power of the myths they seek to debunk. That cultural power was such, Moos notes, that these disenfranchised groups themselves sought to harness it to their own ends through the active appropriation of the terms of those myths in advocating for their own inclusion in the national narrative. that, because the construction of American culture was never designed to accommodate these outsiders, their writings display a division between their imagined place in the narrative of the nation and their effacement within the real West marked by intolerance and inequality.

To many Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the West was simultaneously the greatest symbol of American opportunity, the greatest story of its history, and the imagined blank slate on which the country's future would be written. From the Spanish-American War in 1898 to the Great Depression's end, from the Mississippi to the Pacific, policymakers at various levels and large-scale corporate investors, along with those living in the West and its borderlands, struggled over who would define modernity, who would participate in the modern American West, and who would be excluded. In Making a Modern U.S. West Sarah Deutsch surveys the history of the U.S. West from 1898 to 1940. Centering what is often relegated to the margins in histories of the region--the flows of people, capital, and ideas across borders--Deutsch attends to the region's role in constructing U.S. racial formations and argues that the West as a region was as important as the South in constructing the United States as a "white man's country." While this racial formation was linked to claims of modernity and progress by powerful players, Deutsch shows that visions of what constituted modernity were deeply contested by others. This expansive volume presents the most thorough examination to date of the American West from the late 1890s to the eve of World War II.  

Established barely a decade ago, the New Western History has retold the story of the American West from the point of view of the oppressed, colonized, and conquered. Scholars led by William Cronon, Patricia Nelson Limerick, Richard White, and Donald Worster have challenged the Turnerian myth of the frontier and have forced scholars to reexamine their understanding of the region. Now seven scholars in American Studies, English, women's studies, philosophy, and environmental studies take a closer look at the work of the New Western Historians. While recognizing that these revisionists have broken important new ground, they observe that many of their claims to uniqueness may be overstated and identify areas of investigation that may have been overlooked. These articles discuss the need to expand the horizons of the New Western History to include fiction, women's literature, racial categories, and works of writers such as Wallace Stegner who presaged the movement. They also argue for more serious consideration of popular culture as represented in western fiction and films and include an analysis of the New Western History's treatment of nature by two natural resource managers. The New Western History was first published as a special issue of the Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory and is now being made available to a wider audience for the first time. It was named Best Special Issue in the 1997 Council of Editors of Learned Journals International Awards Competition and was cited for its interest to general readers. This collection of essays clearly shows that the response to the New Western History is both vigorous and mixed. It advances the lively and important discussion that the New Western Historians have set in motion and makes that debate accessible to anyone with an interest in the history of the West. CONTENTS Introduction / Jerome Frisk and Forrest G. Robinson The Theoretical (Re)Positions of the New Western History / Jerome Frisk Clio Bereft of Calliope: Literature and the New Western History / Forrest G. Robinson Literature, Gender Studies, and the New Western History / Krista Comer Haunting Presences and the New Western History: Reading Repetition, Negotiating Trauma / Carl Gutiérrez Jones The Problem of the "Popular" in the New Western History / Stephen Tatum The New Western History: An Essay from the Woods (and Rangelands) / Sally K. Fairfax and Lynn Huntsinger

The West, especially the Intermountain states, ranks among the whitest places in America, but this fact obscures the more complicated history of racial diversity in the region. In Making the White Man's West, author Jason E. Pierce argues that since the time of the Louisiana Purchase, the American West has been a racially contested space. Using a nuanced theory of historical "whiteness," he examines why and how Anglo-Americans dominated the region for a 120-year period. In the early nineteenth century, critics like Zebulon Pike and Washington Irving viewed the West as a "dumping ground" for free blacks and Native Americans, a place where they could be segregated from the white communities east of the Mississippi River. But as immigrant populations and industrialization took hold in the East, white Americans began to view the West as a "refuge for real whites." The West had the most diverse population in the nation with substantial numbers of American Indians, Hispanics, and Asians, but Anglo-Americans could control these mostly disenfranchised peoples and enjoy the privileges of power while celebrating their presence as providing a unique regional character. From this came the belief in a White Man's West, a place ideally suited for "real" Americans in the face of changing world. The first comprehensive study to examine the construction of white racial identity in the West, Making the White Man's West shows how these two visions of the West--as a racially diverse holding cell and a white refuge--shaped the history of the region and influenced a variety of contemporary social issues in the West today.

From the author of The Origins of the Korean War, this book "faces West" to focus on the importance of the Pacific Coast in a boldly original reinterpretation of the American ascendency. America is the first world power to inhabit an immense land mass open at both ends to the world's two largest oceans--the Atlantic and the Pacific. This gives America a great competitive advantage often overlooked by Atlanticists, whose focus remains overwhelmingly fixed on America's relationship with Europe. Bruce Cumings challenges the Atlanticist perspective in this innovative new history, arguing that relations with Asia influenced our history greatly. Cumings chronicles how the movement westward, from the Middle West to the Pacific, has shaped America's industrial, technological, military, and global rise to power. He unites domestic and international history, international relations, and political economy to demonstrate how technological change and sharp economic growth have created a truly bicoastal national economy that has led the world for more than a century. Cumings emphasizes the importance of American encounters with Mexico, the Philippines, and the nations of East Asia. The result is a wonderfully integrative history that advances a strong argument for a dual approach to American history incorporating both Atlanticist and Pacificist perspectives.

A 2021 Notable Social Studies Trade Book from the Children's Book Council and National Council for the Social Studies "Especially and unreservedly recommended for family, elementary school, middle school, and community library American History collections for young readers."--Midwest Book Review "A strong addition to social studies and literacy curricula."--Amina Chaudhri, Booklist "Full of awesome pictures and rich with historic info every kid (and their parents) should learn."--Red Tricycle, Best New Books of 2020, According to Our Kids Did you know that the Lone Ranger was likely inspired by a black cowboy? Or that some of the most famous sharpshooters in the West were women? Or how a Native American rodeo star could ride even a buffalo? These are no tall tales! In fact, historians estimate that 1 in 4 cowboys were actually black, latino, or Native American-or even women! So saddle up for a tour of the Wild West with some of history's most unsung heroes and discover how the great Western story is really everyone's story.

A fully revised and updated new edition of the classic history of western America  "A classic for the twenty-first century, The American West stands as the best one volume treatment of the American West in a generation--a masterful overview, replete with triumph and tragedy, pain and possibility."--Karl Jacoby, Columbia University  "This new edition of The American West is, quite simply, stunning. Incorporating cutting-edge scholarship without losing the vision and clarity of the original, it weaves a cast of protagonists around a clear and gripping narrative. Comprehensive, bold, punchy, this is a textbook that reads like a novel."--Pekka Hämäläinen, Oxford University  The newly revised second edition of this concise, engaging, and unorthodox history of America's West has been updated to incorporate new research, including recent scholarship on Native American lives and cultures. An ideal text for course work, it presents the West as both frontier and region, examining the clashing of different cultures and ethnic groups that occurred in the western territories from the first Columbian contacts between Native Americans and Europeans up to the end of the twentieth century.

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History A dramatic, riveting, and "fresh look at a region typically obscured in accounts of the Civil War. American history buffs will relish this entertaining and eye-opening portrait" (Publishers Weekly). Megan Kate Nelson "expands our understanding of how the Civil War affected Indigenous peoples and helped to shape the nation" (Library Journal, starred review), reframing the era as one of national conflict--involving not just the North and South, but also the West. Against the backdrop of this larger series of battles, Nelson introduces nine individuals: John R. Baylor, a Texas legislator who established the Confederate Territory of Arizona; Louisa Hawkins Canby, a Union Army wife who nursed Confederate soldiers back to health in Santa Fe; James Carleton, a professional soldier who engineered campaigns against Navajos and Apaches; Kit Carson, a famous frontiersman who led a regiment of volunteers against the Texans, Navajos, Kiowas, and Comanches; Juanita, a Navajo weaver who resisted Union campaigns against her people; Bill Davidson, a soldier who fought in all of the Confederacy's major battles in New Mexico; Alonzo Ickis, an Iowa-born gold miner who fought on the side of the Union; John Clark, a friend of Abraham Lincoln's who embraced the Republican vision for the West as New Mexico's surveyor-general; and Mangas Coloradas, a revered Chiricahua Apache chief who worked to expand Apache territory in Arizona. As we learn how these nine charismatic individuals fought for self-determination and control of the region, we also see the importance of individual actions in the midst of a larger military conflict. Based on letters and diaries, military records and oral histories, and photographs and maps from the time, "this history of invasions, battles, and forced migration shapes the United States to this day--and has never been told so well" (Pulitzer Prize-winning author T.J. Stiles).

The "settling" of the American West has been perceived throughout the world as a series of quaint, violent, and romantic adventures. But in fact, Patricia Nelson Limerick argues, the West has a history grounded primarily in economic reality; in hardheaded questions of profit, loss, competition, and consolidation. Here she interprets the stories and the characters in a new way: the trappers, traders, Indians, farmers, oilmen, cowboys, and sheriffs of the Old West "meant business" in more ways than one, and their descendents mean business today.

ECPA Top Shelf Book Cover Award American Society of Missiology Book Award ★ Publishers Weekly starred review You cannot discover lands already inhabited. Injustice has plagued American society for centuries. And we cannot move toward being a more just nation without understanding the root causes that have shaped our culture and institutions. In this prophetic blend of history, theology, and cultural commentary, Mark Charles and Soong-Chan Rah reveal the far-reaching, damaging effects of the "Doctrine of Discovery." In the fifteenth century, official church edicts gave Christian explorers the right to claim territories they "discovered." This was institutionalized as an implicit national framework that justifies American triumphalism, white supremacy, and ongoing injustices. The result is that the dominant culture idealizes a history of discovery, opportunity, expansion, and equality, while minority communities have been traumatized by colonization, slavery, segregation, and dehumanization. Healing begins when deeply entrenched beliefs are unsettled. Charles and Rah aim to recover a common memory and shared understanding of where we have been and where we are going. As other nations have instituted truth and reconciliation commissions, so do the authors call our nation and churches to a truth-telling that will expose past injustices and open the door to conciliation and true community.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History For many years, a single volume covering the "History of the West" did not exist. Paxson''s masterwork rectifies this problem - offering an essential, sweeping account of the American West and westward expansion from 1763-1893. The American pioneer is followed to every frontier for nearly 150 years across fifty-nine chapters. Full of world-class insight, Paxson masterfully paints a picture of how the land mass of the United States was settled - starting with English settlers in New England to the wayward expansion across the continent and ending with the sunny shores of California. Paxson''s literary genius does not shine in quotations from secondary and source material; he has made his material a part of himself. Indeed, rather than conforming to a social history, Paxson takes a historical, geographic, and pragmatic view of Westward expansion. He masterfully covers American history from the War for Independence to the Louisiana Purchase, conflicts with Native Americans and Civil War, Presidential edicts from Washington to Roosevelt, and even offers keen insight into the little-studied intricacies of frontier finance and the inside workings of canal and railroad corporations. "Future historians will gratefully remember Mr. Paxson for essaying a task which others had either shirked or felt themselves incompetent to perform." This is a must-read for any student of American history. About the Author: Frederic Logan Paxson was an American historian, President of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association, and possessed undergraduate and PhD degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, as well as a master''s from Harvard University. As a historian, he was an authority on the American frontier and won the 1925 Pulitzer Prize for this work. Chapters of this work Include: The American Frontier of 1763 The Forks of the Ohio The Shenandoah Country and the Tennessee The Rear of the Revolution The Land Problem Creation of the Public Domain The National Land System The Old Northwest The Western Boundaries The First New States Political Theories of the Frontier Jeffersonian Democracy The Frontier of 1800 Ohio: The Clash of Principles The Purchase of Louisiana Problems of the Southwest Border The Bonds of Unity The Wabash Frontier: Tecumseh, 1811 The Western War of 1812 Stabilizing the Frontier The Great Migration Statehood on the Ohio: Indiana and Illinois The Cotton Kingdom: Mississippi and Alabama Missouri: The New Sectionalism Public Land Reform Frontier Finance The American System Jacksonian Democracy The East, and the Western Markets The Western Internal Improvements The Permanent Indian Frontier, 1825-1841 The Mississippi Valley Boom The Border States: Michigan and Arkansas The Independent State of Texas 1837: The Prostrate West The Trail to Santa Fe The Settlement of Oregon The "State" of Deseret * The War with Mexico The Conquest of California Far West and Politics Preemption The Frontier of the Forties The Railroad Age Land Grants and the Western Roads Kansas-Nebraska and the Indian Country "Pike''s Peak or Bust!" The Frontier of the Mineral Empire The Overland Route The Public Lands: Wide Open The Plains in the Civil War The Union Pacific Railroad The Disruption of the Tribes The Panic of 1873 Frontier Panaceas The Cow Country The Closed Frontier The Admission of the "Omnibus" States The Disappearance of the Frontier