The American West and its history have generated exceptional media attention in the past few years. New scholarship and interpretations have enriched and enlivened almost every part of the field. This book collects seventeen of the most exciting and provocative essays that have appeared in historical journals. Two date from the 1960s, and some as recently as the mid-1990s. Each essay is intended to illuminate a topic, and each is prefaced by a brief statement by the editors both summarising the essay and pointing out questions for side-ranging classroom discussion. Three opening essays by the editors define the West as frontier and region, and place American frontiers in comparative context. Then follow essays that consider women’s property rights in Spanish-Mexican California; the mountain men and national identity; Indians and bison on the Great Plains in the early nineteenth century; the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848; the Latter-day Saints from 1830-1890; the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 as a case of Indian-white conflict; cowboys as wage workers in the 1880s; homesteading and the homesteading ideal; miners and ethnic conflict in early twentieth-century Arizona; the Great Depression in Idaho; how World War II changed Los Angeles; Japanese-American women in World War II; African-Americans in the West; and the Pacific Northwest since 1945. The editors also provide a general introduction to the study of western history, as well as a "timeline" chronology.
Intended for college classes in the history of the American West, Western History: The Reader focuses the student on many of the topics encountered in surveys of the field, yet treats those topics in sufficient scholarly depth to support intensive classroom discussion as well as suggesting questions to stimulate and focus that discussion.