David M. Wrobel – författare

The American West has influenced important national developments throughout the twentieth century, not only in the cultural arena, but also in economic development, in political ideology and action, and in natural resource conservation and preservation. Using regionalism as a lens for illuminating these national trends, America's West: A History, 1890-1950 examines this region's history and explores its influence on the rest of America. Moving chronologically from the late nineteenth- to the mid-twentieth century, David M. Wrobel examines turn-of-the-century expansion, the Progressive Era, the 1920s, the Great Depression and the New Deal, World War II, and the early Cold War years. He emphasizes cultural and political history, showing how developments in the West frequently indicated the future direction of the country.

The American West has influenced important national developments throughout the twentieth century, not only in the cultural arena, but also in economic development, in political ideology and action, and in natural resource conservation and preservation. Using regionalism as a lens for illuminating these national trends, America's West: A History, 1890-1950 examines this region's history and explores its influence on the rest of America. Moving chronologically from the late nineteenth- to the mid-twentieth century, David M. Wrobel examines turn-of-the-century expansion, the Progressive Era, the 1920s, the Great Depression and the New Deal, World War II, and the early Cold War years. He emphasizes cultural and political history, showing how developments in the West frequently indicated the future direction of the country.

This work argues that American ""frontier anxiety"" was caused not by the closing of the frontier, but by the ""perception"" that it was closing. The author reassesses the impact of that perception and shows how it profoundly shaped the nation's cultural and political life between the 1870s and 1930s.

What does it mean to live in the West today? Do people tend to identify with states, with regions or with the larger West? This book examines the development of regional identity in the American West, demonstrating that it is a regionally diverse entity made up of many different wests - Great Plains, Southwest, Rocky Mountains, and more - in which American regionalism finds its fullest expression. These 14 essays tell how a sense of place emerged among residents of various regions and how a sense of those places was developed by people outside of them. The authors offer an overview of the West's regional nature; then 13 other scholars - from history, American studies, geography and literature - tell how regional consciousness formed among inhabitants of particular regions. All of these essays address the larger issue of the centrality of place in determining social and cultural forms and individual and collective identities. Some focus on race and culture as the primary influences on regional consciousness while others emphasize environmental and economic factors or the influences of literature. Some even examine western regionalism in areas that lie beyond the West as it has traditionally been conceived. Each of the contributors believes that where a people live helps determine what they are, and they write not only about the many wests within the larger West, but also about the constant state of flux in which regionalism exists. ""Many Wests"" presents a vision of the West that reflects both the common heritage and unique character of each major subregion, building on the revisionist impulse of the last decade to help redirect New Western History toward an appreciation of regional diversity and integrate scholarship in the regional subfields. It is a book for everyone who lives in, studies, or loves the West, for it confirms that it is home to very different peoples, economies, histories - and regions.

Exploring the vast literature produced by the romoters and reminiscers of the American West from the end of the Civil War through the 1920s, this book clarifies the pivotal impact of their works on our vision of both the historic and mythic West, and shows us that the West may well move into the twenty-first century, but our images of it are forever rooted in the nineteenth.

Winner of the 2014 Western Heritage Award for Nonfiction from the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, this thoughtful examination of a century of travel writing about the American West overturns a variety of popular and academic stereotypes. Looking at both European and American travelers’ accounts of the West, from de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America to William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways, David Wrobel offers a counter narrative to the nation’s romantic entanglement with its western past and suggests the importance of some long-overlooked authors, lively and perceptive witnesses to our history who deserve new attention.Prior to the professionalization of academic disciplines, the reading public gained much of its knowledge about the world from travel writing. Travel writers found a wide and respectful audience for their reports on history, geography, and the natural world, in addition to reporting on aboriginal cultures before the advent of anthropology as a discipline. Although in recent decades western historians have paid little attention to travel writing, Wrobel demonstrates that this genre in fact offers an important and rich understanding of the American West - one that extends and complicates a simple reading of the West that promotes the notions of Manifest Destiny or American exceptionalism.Wrobel finds counterpoints to the mythic West of the nineteenth century in such varied accounts as George Catlin’s Adventures of the Ojibbeway and Ioway Indians in England, France, and Belgium (1852), Richard Francis Burton’s The City of the Saints (1861), and Mark Twain’s Following the Equator (1897), reminders of the messy and contradictory world that people navigated in the past much as they do in the present. His book is a testament to the instructive ways in which the best travel writers have represented the West.

The American West has influenced important national developments throughout the twentieth century, not only in the cultural arena, but also in economic development, in political ideology and action, and in natural resource conservation and preservation. Using regionalism as a lens for illuminating these national trends, America''s West: A History, 1890–1950 examines this region''s history and explores its influence on the rest of America. Moving chronologically from the late nineteenth- to the mid-twentieth century, David M. Wrobel examines turn-of-the-century expansion, the Progressive Era, the 1920s, the Great Depression and the New Deal, World War II, and the early Cold War years. He emphasizes cultural and political history, showing how developments in the West frequently indicated the future direction of the country.