A Companion to 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 and provide a comprehensive overview of themes and historiography. Covers the culture, politics, and environment of the American West through periods of migration, settlement, and modernization Discusses Native Americans and their conflicts and integration with American settlers

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