Clyde A. Milner - Böcker

This is a view of the history of the American West at the end of the 20th century. It is the first systematic attempt to assess the current state of Western History. It covers the major new areas of emphasis. The individual essays (developed for a conference in 1993 at Utah State University) are written by the most promising scholars of the younger generation of Western historians.

In 1893, Fredrick Jackson Turner published his revolutionary essay, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." A century later, many of the country's most innovative scholars of Western history assembled at a conference at Utah State University under the direction of historian Clyde A. Milner II. Here they delivered essays meant to map the exciting new territory opened in recent years in the history of the West. Gathering the best of these essays, thiscollection aims to produce a compelling assessment of the newest Western historiography. The entries include William Deverell on the significance of the West in American history; David Gutiérrez onMexican Americans; Susan Rhodes Neel on nature and the environment; Gail M. Nomura on Asia and Asian Americans; Anne F. Hyde on cultural perceptions; David Rich Lewis on Native Americans; Susan Lee Johnson on men, women, and gender; and Qunitard Taylor on race and African-Americans. Each essay is accompanied by commentaries written by other top scholars, and the eminent historian Allan G. Bogue supplies a penetrating introduction.

When we think of the American West, we tend to conjure up images that are known the world over: bearded forty-niners leading pack mules up a mountain trail, the Oklahoma land stampede, Custer's Last Stand, and especially the range-riding, quick-shooting cowboy. But these familiar images are only a small part of western history. From the arrival of the Navajos in the Southwest more than seven hundred years ago, to the first Spanish settlements in New Mexico in the late sixteenth century, to the large Mormon migration to the Great Salt Lake, to the tourists flocking to the neon landscape of modern Las Vegas, the complex story of the West stretches across centuries, embracing many voices and contrasting cultures. The West is in fact as varied as America itself. Indeed, to enlarge on Wallace Stegner's singular phrase, the West is America, only more so.Lavishly illustrated and based on the finest scholarship, The Oxford History of the American West is the first comprehensive study to do full justice to the rich complexity of this region. It brings together the work of twenty-eight leading western historians who explore this area from a dazzling number of perspectives. They provide insightful portraits of the West as a distinctive place of varied peoples - native and non-native, European and Asian, African and Latino - and of varied terrain - from the timbered Pacific Northwest to the Dakota Badlands, and from the fires of Kilauea to the ice cliffs of Glacier Bay, Alaska. They describe the great wealth generated by a series of spectacular bonanzas, such as gold at Sutter's Mill, copper in Butte, Montana, and oil on Alaska's north shore; illuminate the role of the West in the national and global economy; and consider the environmental challenges created by replacing buffalo with cattle or by designating national parks and military test sites. The book also examines the social forces behind the violence of the West, the great political movements that affected the region (most notably, the Populist Party), and the importance of families in settling the West (for instance, tracing one family's westward migration over 150 years). The authors provide important insights about many longstanding controversies, and they offer not only the fruits of the latest thinking about the West, but also a vivid sense of how people actually lived. For instance, we read of pioneers who grated green corn to make pudding they flavored with berries and grasshoppers, and who ate the culms (the soft inner linings of the stalks) like asparagus. Finally, each chapter concludes with an extensive annotated bibliography, offering a full review of related material, and there is a comprehensive index to guide readers to topics of special interest.Ranging from a thoughtful analysis of John Ford's classic My Darling Clementine, to a revisionist look at cattle grandee Granville Stuart (once Montana's most revered pioneer), to a survey of Western art and literature (including figures as diverse as Francis Parkman, Frederic Remington, Willa Cather, Georgia O'Keeffe, and N. Scott Momaday), this lively, authoritative volume continually challenges the familiar as it broadens the reader's understanding of a vast and varied region.

The South has been the standard focus of Reconstruction, but reconstruction following the Civil War was not a distinctly Southern experience. In the post-Civil War West, American Indians also experienced reconstruction through removal to reservations and assimilation to Christianity, and Latter-day Saints - Mormons - saw government actions to force the end of polygamy under threat of disestablishing the church. These efforts to bring nonconformist Mormons into the American mainstream figure in the more familiar scheme of the federal government's reconstruction - aimed at rebellious white Southerners and uncontrolled American Indians. In this volume, more than a dozen contributors look anew at the scope of the reconstruction narrative and offer a unique perspective on the history of the Latter-day Saints.Marshaled by editors Clyde A. Milner II and Brian Q. Cannon, these writers explore why the federal government wanted to reconstruct Latter-day Saints, when such efforts began, and how the initiatives compare with what happened with white Southerners and American Indians. Other contributions examine the effect of the government's policies on Mormon identity and sense of history. Why, for example, do Latter-day Saints not have a Lost Cause? Do they share a resentment with American Indians over the loss of sovereignty? And were nineteenth-century Mormons considered to be on the ""wrong"" side of a religious line, but not a ""race line""? The authors consider these and other vital questions and topics here. Together, and in dialogue with one another, their work suggests a new way of understanding the regional, racial, and religious dynamics of reconstruction - and, within this framework, a new way of thinking about the creation of a Mormon historical identity.