The American West in 2000

The American West in 2000 PDF Author: Richard W. Etulain
Publisher: UNM Press
ISBN: 9780826329431
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
The ten original essays commissioned for this book focus on historical subjects in the post-World War II American West. The late Gerald Nash, in whose honor the essays were written, made major contributions to the study of modern American and western American history, and his impact on those fields is demonstrated in these essays by several generations of his students and colleagues. Emphasizing social and cultural developments, the essays draw on methodologies and topics from comparative history, environmental history, urban history, and political history. The authors write on subjects ranging from women's rights to urban sprawl, from organized religion to tourism, from mining to American Indian culture. An autobiographical essay by Nash himself situates his life's work in the context of two formative experiences: his intellectual development as a German refugee arriving in New York in the late 1930s and his commitment to the study of the American West when he began graduate school. The contributors include Margaret Connell-Szasz, Arthur R. Gómez, Donald J. Pisani, Marjorie Bell Chambers, Carol Lynn MacGregor, Christopher J. Huggard, Roger W. Lotchin, and Gene M. Gressley, as well as Nash and the volume editors.

The American West in 2000

The American West in 2000 PDF Author: Richard W. Etulain
Publisher: UNM Press
ISBN: 9780826329431
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Get Book Here

Book Description
The ten original essays commissioned for this book focus on historical subjects in the post-World War II American West. The late Gerald Nash, in whose honor the essays were written, made major contributions to the study of modern American and western American history, and his impact on those fields is demonstrated in these essays by several generations of his students and colleagues. Emphasizing social and cultural developments, the essays draw on methodologies and topics from comparative history, environmental history, urban history, and political history. The authors write on subjects ranging from women's rights to urban sprawl, from organized religion to tourism, from mining to American Indian culture. An autobiographical essay by Nash himself situates his life's work in the context of two formative experiences: his intellectual development as a German refugee arriving in New York in the late 1930s and his commitment to the study of the American West when he began graduate school. The contributors include Margaret Connell-Szasz, Arthur R. Gómez, Donald J. Pisani, Marjorie Bell Chambers, Carol Lynn MacGregor, Christopher J. Huggard, Roger W. Lotchin, and Gene M. Gressley, as well as Nash and the volume editors.

Land in the American West

Land in the American West PDF Author: William G. Robbins
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295802898
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Throughout the history of the United States, the concepts of “land” and “the West” have fired the American imagination and fueled controversy. The essays in Land in the American West deal with complex, troublesome, and interrelated questions regarding land: Who owns it? Who has access to it? What happens when private rights infringe upon the public good, or when one ethnic group is pitted against another, or when there is a conflict between economic and environmental values? Many of these questions have deep historical roots. They all have special significance in the modern American West, where natural resources are still abundant and large areas of land are federally owned.

The American West

The American West PDF Author: Michael P. Malone
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803260221
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
Chronicles the history of the American West during the twentieth century, tracing economical, political, social, and cultural developments in the region from 1900 to the turn of the twenty-first century, in an updated edition that includes new sections that explore the roles of ethnic groups in the new West, urban developments, western women, and events since the mid-1980s. Original.

Slavery and the American West

Slavery and the American West PDF Author: Michael A. Morrison
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807864323
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 411

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Book Description
Tracing the sectionalization of American politics in the 1840s and 1850s, Michael Morrison offers a comprehensive study of how slavery and territorial expansion intersected as causes of the Civil War. Specifically, he argues that the common heritage of the American Revolution bound Americans together until disputes over the extension of slavery into the territories led northerners and southerners to increasingly divergent understandings of the Revolution's legacy. Manifest Destiny promised the literal enlargement of freedom through the extension of American institutions all the way to the Pacific. At each step--from John Tyler's attempt to annex Texas in 1844, to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, to the opening shots of the Civil War--the issue of slavery had to be confronted. Morrison shows that the Revolution was the common prism through which northerners and southerners viewed these events and that the factor that ultimately made consensus impossible was slavery itself. By 1861, no nationally accepted solution to the dilemma of slavery in the territories had emerged, no political party existed as a national entity, and politicians from both North and South had come to believe that those on the other side had subverted the American political tradition.

The Mobilized American West, 1940-2000

The Mobilized American West, 1940-2000 PDF Author: John M. Findlay
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496235568
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 493

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Book Description
In the years between 1940 and 2000, the American Far West went from being a relative backwater of the United States to a considerably more developed, modern, and prosperous region--one capable of influencing not just the nation but the world. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, the population of the West had multiplied more than four times since 1940, and western states had transitioned from rural to urban, becoming the most urbanized section of the country. Massive investment, both private and public, in the western economy had produced regional prosperity, and the tourism industry had undergone massive expansion, altering the ways Americans identified with the West. In The Mobilized American West, 1940-2000, John M. Findlay presents a historical overview of the American West in its decades of modern development. During the years of U.S. mobilization for World War II and the Cold War, the West remained a significant, distinct region even as its development accelerated rapidly and, in many ways, it became better integrated into the rest of the country. By examining events and trends that occurred in the West, Findlay argues that a distinctive, region-wide political culture developed in the western states from a commitment to direct democracy, the role played by the federal government in owning and managing such a large amount of land, and the way different groups of westerners identified with and defined the region. While illustrating western distinctiveness, Findlay also aims to show how, in its sustaining mobilization for war, the region became tethered to the entire nation more than ever before, but on its own terms. Findlay presents an innovative approach to viewing the American West as a region distinctive of the United States, one that occasionally stood ahead of, at odds with, and even in defiance of the nation.

The North American West in the Twenty-First Century

The North American West in the Twenty-First Century PDF Author: Brenden W. Rensink
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496233271
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 546

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Book Description
In 1893 Frederick Jackson Turner famously argued that the generational process of meeting and conquering the supposedly uncivilized western frontier is what forged American identity. In the late twentieth century, "new western" historians dissected the mythologized western histories that Turner and others had long used to embody American triumph and progress. While Turner's frontier is no more, the West continues to present America with challenging processes to wrestle, navigate, and overcome. The North American West in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Brenden W. Rensink, takes stories of the late twentieth-century "modern West" and carefully pulls them toward the present--explicitly tracing continuity with or unexpected divergence from trajectories established in the 1980s and 1990s. Considering a broad range of topics, including environment, Indigenous peoples, geography, migration, and politics, these essays straddle multiple modern frontiers, not least of which is the temporal frontier between our unsettled past and uncertain future. These forays into the twenty-first-century West will inspire more scholars to pull histories to the present and by doing so reinsert scholarly findings into contemporary public awareness.

Painters and the American West

Painters and the American West PDF Author: Joan Carpenter Troccoli
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780988177406
Category : Painting
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


Empires, Nations, and Families

Empires, Nations, and Families PDF Author: Anne Farrar Hyde
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803224052
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 647

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Book Description
To most people living in the West, the Louisiana Purchase made little difference: the United States was just another imperial overlord to be assessed and manipulated. This was not, as Empires, Nations, and Families makes clear, virgin wilderness discovered by virtuous Anglo entrepreneurs. Rather, the United States was a newcomer in a place already complicated by vying empires. This book documents the broad family associations that crossed national and ethnic lines and that, along with the river systems of the trans-Mississippi West, formed the basis for a global trade in furs that had operated for hundreds of years before the land became part of the United States. ø Empires, Nations, and Families shows how the world of river and maritime trade effectively shifted political power away from military and diplomatic circles into the hands of local people. Tracing family stories from the Canadian North to the Spanish and Mexican borderlands and from the Pacific Coast to the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, Anne F. Hyde?s narrative moves from the earliest years of the Indian trade to the Mexican War and the gold rush era. Her work reveals how, in the 1850s, immigrants to these newest regions of the United States violently wrested control from Native and other powers, and how conquest and competing demands for land and resources brought about a volatile frontier culture?not at all the peace and prosperity that the new power had promised.

Major Problems in the History of the American West

Major Problems in the History of the American West PDF Author: Clyde A. Milner
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 708

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Book Description


The American West at Risk

The American West at Risk PDF Author: Howard G. Wilshire
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199881669
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 634

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Book Description
The American West at Risk summarizes the dominant human-generated environmental challenges in the 11 contiguous arid western United States - America's legendary, even mythical, frontier. When discovered by European explorers and later settlers, the west boasted rich soils, bountiful fisheries, immense, dense forests, sparkling streams, untapped ore deposits, and oil bonanzas. It now faces depletion of many of these resources, and potentially serious threats to its few "renewable" resources. The importance of this story is that preserving lands has a central role for protecting air and water quality, and water supplies--and all support a healthy living environment. The idea that all life on earth is connected in a great chain of being, and that all life is connected to the physical earth in many obvious and subtle ways, is not some new-age fad, it is scientifically demonstrable. An understanding of earth processes, and the significance of their biological connections, is critical in shaping societal values so that national land use policies will conserve the earth and avoid the worst impacts of natural processes. These connections inevitably lead science into the murkier realms of political controversy and bureaucratic stasis. Most of the chapters in The American West at Risk focus on a human land use or activity that depletes resources and degrades environmental integrity of this resource-rich, but tender and slow-to-heal, western U.S. The activities include forest clearing for many purposes; farming and grazing; mining for aggregate, metals, and other materials; energy extraction and use; military training and weapons manufacturing and testing; road and utility transmission corridors; recreation; urbanization; and disposing of the wastes generated by everything that we do. We focus on how our land-degrading activities are connected to natural earth processes, which act to accelerate and spread the damages we inflict on the land. Visit www.theamericanwestatrisk.com to learn more about the book and its authors.