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A Companion to the American West is a rigorous, illuminating introduction to the history of the American West. Twenty-five essays by expert scholars synthesize the best and most provocative work in the field. Each essay covers a subtopic of western American history, its major concerns, and its major works to provide a comprehensive overview of themes and historiography. The essays not only come from the perspective of the "new western history," reflecting a resurgence in both scholarly and public interest in the region, but also reflect other schools and positions, such as ethnic studies, cultural studies, and subfields of environmental and gender history.The Companion covers such topics as industrialism, women, Native Americans, exploration, religion, politics, and art. Also included is a combined bibliography to aid further research. The essays are lively, well written, and suited to the student, scholar, and all interested readers of the history of the American West.
A Companion to the American West is a rigorous, illuminating introduction to the history of the American West. Twenty-five essays by expert scholars synthesize the best and most provocative work in the field. Each essay covers a subtopic of western American history, its major concerns, and its major works to provide a comprehensive overview of themes and historiography. The essays not only come from the perspective of the "new western history," reflecting a resurgence in both scholarly and public interest in the region, but also reflect other schools and positions, such as ethnic studies, cultural studies, and subfields of environmental and gender history.The Companion covers such topics as industrialism, women, Native Americans, exploration, religion, politics, and art. Also included is a combined bibliography to aid further research. The essays are lively, well written, and suited to the student, scholar, and all interested readers of the history of the American West.
Notes on Contributors viii
Introduction 1
William Deverell
Part I Thinking Through the American West
1 The Making of the First American West and the Unmaking of
Other Realms 5
Stephen Aron
2 Thinking West 25
Elliott West
Part II Conquest and Its Patterns: The Nineteenth Century
3 Passion and Imagination in the Exploration of the American
West 53
James P. Ronda
4 Environment and the Nineteenth-Century West: Or, Process
Encounters Place 77
Andrew C. Isenberg
5 Engineering the Elephant: Industrialism and the Environment in
the Greater West 93
David Igler
6 Mining and the Nineteenth-Century American West 112
Malcolm J. Rohrbough
7 Law and the Contact of Cultures 130
Sarah Barringer Gordon
8 Native Americans in the Nineteenth-Century American West
143
David Rich Lewis
9 Western Violence 162
Michael A. Bellesiles
10 Bringing It All Back Home: Rethinking the History of Women
and the Nineteenth-Century West 179
Elizabeth Jameson
11 Empire and Liberty: Contradictions and Conflicts in
Nineteenth-Century Western Political History 200
Jeffrey Ostler
Part III Exceptionalism or Regionalism? The Twentieth-Century American West
12 African Americans in the Twentieth-Century West 221
Douglas Flamming
13 The West and Workers, 1870–1930 240
James N. Gregory
14 Societies to Match the Scenery: Twentieth-Century
Environmental History in the American West 256
Dan Flores
15 Where to Draw the Line? The Pacific, Place, and the US West
271
Chris Friday
16 Religion and the American West 286
Philip Goff
17 Transients and Stickers: The Problem of Community in the
American West 304
Anne Hyde
18 American Indians in the Twentieth Century 329
Peter Iverson
19 The New Deal’s West 346
Karen R. Merrill
20 Art, Ideology, and the West 361
Douglas R. Nickel
21 “The West Plays West”: Western Tourism and the Landscape of
Leisure 375
Marguerite S. Shaffer
22 Hispanics and Latinos 390
Ramón A. Gutiérrez
23 City Lights: Urban History in the West 412
Robert O. Self
24 Politics and the Twentieth-Century American West 442
William Deverell
25 The Literary West and the Twentieth Century 460
David M. Wrobel
Bibliography 481
Index 553
William Deverell is Professor of History at the University of Southern California and director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. He is the author of Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad, 1850-1910 (1994) and Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past (2004). He co-authored Eden by Design: The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region (2000) and The West in the History of the Nation (2000) and co-edited California Progressivism Revisited (1994) and Metropolis in the Making: Los Angeles in the 1920s (2001).
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