Blood & Thunder: The Idealized American West and Its Place Today: Excluded Histories of the West

This text explores the full history of immigration issues in America, from those early immigrants making their way through Ellis Island, to immigration issues in modern society. With in-depth analysis of a broad range of documents, researchers come away with fresh understanding and insight to study this hot button topic. Immigration & Immigrant Communities provides detailed, thought-provoking analysis of: The Chinese Exclusion Act Executive Order 9066: Japanese Internment Cesar Chavez: Commonwealth Address Pope Francis' Speech to U.S. Congress on Immigrants and Refugees And much more! . Each in-depth chapter guides readers with historical insight and comprehension. Written by historians and teachers, several elements explain the document's historical impact and provide thoughtful critical analysis, including a Summary Overview, Defining Moment, Author Biography, Document Analysis, and Essential Themes. Plus, an historical timeline and bibliography of important supplemental readings will support readers in understanding the broader historical events covered. The documents discussed in this volume paint a portrait of the issues and challenges face by immigrants on American soil. This volume will be a useful addition to high school and undergraduate libraries, plus history collections of all sizes.

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

For decades, the story of the American West has been told as a glorious tale of conquest and rugged individualism--the triumph of progress. But recently, a new school of historians has challenged this view, creating what is known as the "new western history," an approach that gives a central role to the environment, native peoples, and the concentration of power in the hands of a few. Foremost among these historians is Donald Worster. In Worster's writings, the western past emerges not as a march of Manifest Destiny but rather as an unfolding relationship between humankind and nature. In Under Western Skies, Worster provides an eloquent introduction to the changing traditions of western historical writing and then demonstrates his own approach through fascinating case studies. For example, he takes a hard look at the struggle by the Lakota to regain ownership of the Black Hills, examining not only the legal history of treaties and court cases but also the importance of the Black Hills in Indian religion and the way they have been mismanaged by the U.S. government. He discusses the cowboy in terms of the new ecology that arose from livestock ranching--the endless miles of fences, the changes in the environment wrought by extensive grazing, certain species of animals almost wiped out because they were considered a danger to sheep and cattle. But Worster's view of nature is not as simple or as, linear as for instance, Bill McKibben's stark picture in The End of Nature, a picture Worster argues against. From the mining ghost towns of the Rockies to the uprooted farm families of the Dust Bowl, nature sometimes wins the struggle. Even the Hoover Dam, he reminds us, may one day be overcome by the patient Colorado River. Under Western Skies both offers intriguing insights into important aspects of our history and instills a new appreciation for the place of nature, native peoples, and the struggles over money and power in the western past.