Scholars and enthusiasts of western American history have praised Elliott West as a distinguished historian and an accomplished writer, and this book proves them right on both counts. Capitalizing on West’s wide array of interests, this collection of his essays touches on topics ranging from viruses and the telegraph to children, bison, and Larry McMurtry. Drawing from the past three centuries, West weaves the western story into that of the nation and the world beyond, from Kansas and Montana to Haiti, Africa, and the court of Louis XV. Divided into three sections, the volume begins with conquest. West is not the first historian to write about Lewis and Clark, but he is the first to contrast their expedition with Mungo Park’s contemporaneous journey in Africa. “The Lewis and Clark expedition,” West begins, “is one of the most overrated events in American history—and one of the most revealing.” The humor of this insightful essay is a chief characteristic of the whole book, which comprises ten chapters previously published in major journals and magazines—but revised for this edition—and four brand-new ones. West is well known for his writings about frontier family life, especially the experiences of children at work and play. Fans of his earlier books on these subjects will not be disappointed. In a final section, he looks at the West of myth and imagination, in part to show that our fantasies about the West are worth studying precisely because they have been so at odds with the real West. In essays on buffalo, Jesse James and the McMurtry novel Lonesome Dove, West directs his formidable powers to subjects that continue to shape our understanding—and often our misunderstanding—of the American West, past and present.
Winner of Columbia University's 2024 Bancroft Prize in American History 2024 Spur Award Winner Named a Best Civil War Book of 2023 by Civil War Monitor In Continental Reckoning renowned historian Elliott West presents a sweeping narrative of the American West and its vital role in the transformation of the nation. In the 1840s, by which time the United States had expanded to the Pacific, what would become the West was home to numerous vibrant Native cultures and vague claims by other nations. Thirty years later it was organized into states and territories and bound into the nation and world by an infrastructure of rails, telegraph wires, and roads and by a racial and ethnic order, with its Indigenous peoples largely dispossessed and confined to reservations. Unprecedented exploration uncovered the West's extraordinary resources, beginning with the discovery of gold in California within days of the United States acquiring the territory following the Mexican-American War. As those resources were developed, often by the most modern methods and through modern corporate enterprise, half of the contiguous United States was physically transformed. Continental Reckoning guides the reader through the rippling, multiplying changes wrought in the western half of the country, arguing that these changes should be given equal billing with the Civil War in this crucial transition of national life. As the West was acquired, integrated into the nation, and made over physically and culturally, the United States shifted onto a course of accelerated economic growth, a racial reordering and redefinition of citizenship, engagement with global revolutions of science and technology, and invigorated involvement with the larger world. The creation of the West and the emergence of modern America were intimately related. Neither can be understood without the other. With masterful prose and a critical eye, West presents a fresh approach to the dawn of the American West, one of the most pivotal periods of American history.
This newest volume in Oxford's acclaimed Pivotal Moments series offers an unforgettable portrait of the Nez Perce War of 1877, the last great Indian conflict in American history. It was, as Elliott West shows, a tale of courage and ingenuity, of desperate struggle and shattered hope, of short-sighted government action and a doomed flight to freedom. To tell the story, West begins with the early history of the Nez Perce and their years of friendly relations with white settlers. In an initial treaty, the Nez Perce were promised a large part of their ancestral homeland, but the discovery of gold led to a stampede of settlement within the Nez Perce land. Numerous injustices at the hands of the US government combined with the settlers' invasion to provoke this most accomodating of tribes to war. West offers a riveting account of what came next: the harrowing flight of 800 Nez Perce, including many women, children and elderly, across 1500 miles of mountainous and difficult terrain. He gives a full reckoning of the campaigns and battles--and the unexpected turns, brilliant stratagems, and grand heroism that occurred along the way. And he brings to life the complex characters from both sides of the conflict, including cavalrymen, officers, politicians, and--at the center of it all--the Nez Perce themselves (the Nimiipuu, "true people"). The book sheds light on the war's legacy, including the near sainthood that was bestowed upon Chief Joseph, whose speech of surrender, "I will fight no more forever," became as celebrated as the Gettysburg Address. Based on a rich cache of historical documents, from government and military records to contemporary interviews and newspaper reports, The Last Indian War offers a searing portrait of a moment when the American identity--who was and who was not a citizen--was being forged.
Deftly retracing a pivotal chapter in one of America's most dramatic stories, Elliott West chronicles the struggles, triumphs, and defeats of both Indians and whites as they pursued their clashing dreams of greatness in the heart of the continent. The Contested Plains recounts the rise of the Native American horse culture, white Americans' discovery and pursuit of gold in the Rocky Mountains, and the wrenching changes and bitter conflicts that ensued. After centuries of many peoples fashioning many cultures on the plains, the Cheyennes and other tribes found in the horse the power to create a heroic way of life that dominated one of the world's great grasslands. Then the discovery of gold challenged that way of life and led finally to the infamous massacre at Sand Creek and the Indian Wars of the late 1860s. Illuminating both the ancient and more recent history of the plains and eastern Rocky Mountains, West weaves together a brilliant tapestry interlaced with environmental, social, and military history. He treats the "frontier" not as a morally loaded term-either in the traditional celebratory sense or the more recent critical sense-but as a powerfully unsettling process that shattered an old world. He shows how Indians, goldseekers, haulers, merchants, ranchers, and farmers all contributed to and in turn were consumed by this process, even as the plains themselves were utterly transformed by the clash of cultures and competing visions. Exciting and enormously engaging, The Contested Plains is the first book to examine the Colorado gold rush as the key event in the modern transformation of the central great plains. It also exemplifies a kind of history that respects more fully our rich and ambiguous past--a past in which there are many actors but no simple lessons.
Elliott West’s careful analysis of the role and development of the saloon as an institution on the mining frontier provides unique insights into the social and economic history of the American West. Drawing on contemporaneous newspapers and many unpublished firsthand accounts, West shows that the physical evolution of the saloon, from crude tents and shanties into elegant establishments for drinking and gaming, reflected the growth and maturity of the surrounding community.
Following several routes, thousands of American Indians were forced from their homelands in the Southeast. On their tortuous trek west many died. These routes, lined with graves, mark the tragedy now known today as The Trail of Tears, commemorated as a National Historic Trail.
From its beginnings as a regional spa resort and an exclusive community of wealthy tobacco and textile families, Winston-Salem's West End has become an island of calm in the midst of a bustling Southern city of 200,000 residents. Built around one of the first electric streetcar lines in the country, the West End boasted "Millionaires' Row," where the Reynolds and Hanes families kept homes bought with manufacturing fortunes. When urban re-design and the aging of the neighborhood in the 1960s threatened the West End's streetscape, local residents and friends stepped in to preserve its beauty.
In her fictional turns as a detective, as in real life, Eleanor Roosevelt has proven to be an indomitable character of courage and conviction. As storm clouds gather over Europe and FDR receives such guests as Albert Einstein, Joe Kennedy, and crime buster Eliot Ness, Eleanor is thrust into danger much closer to home. One of the President's staff has been found dead, poisoned by cyanide mixed in his evening bourbon. Even worse, the accused killer is another White House aide, Therese Rolland. Although the police are determined to pin the crime on Therese, Eleanor is immediately convinced she is innocent. Calmly but firmly, the First Lady uncovers a web of lies and secrets until another shocking murder is discovered. Suddenly, the investigation is taking Eleanor Roosevelt places no proper First Lady would ever go -- to the darkest underside of society, and toward a shattering truth that lies within the White House itself!
A history of immigrants in the American West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and their effect on the region. At a time when immigration policy is the subject of heated debate, this book makes clear that the true wealth of America is in the diversity of its peoples. By the end of the twentieth century, the American West was home to nearly half of America’s immigrant population, including Asians and Armenians, Germans and Greeks, Mexicans, Italians, Swedes, Basques, and others. This book tells their rich and complex story—of adaptation and isolation, maintaining and mixing traditions, and an ongoing ebb and flow of movement, assimilation, and replenishment. These immigrants and their children built communities, added to the region’s culture, and contended with discrimination and the lure of Americanization. The mark of the outsider, the alien, the nonwhite passed from group to group, even as the complexion of the region changed. The region welcomed, then excluded, immigrants, in restless waves of need and nativism that continue to this day. “Written in the fashion of Oscar Handlin, this study makes a convincing case that immigration history comprises an essential part of the history of the American West, and that appreciation of the former and the roles played by myriad alien arrivals is essential for understanding the latter. . . . Barkan . . . combines vignettes based on immigrant reminiscences with keen analysis to explore four related themes: various groups’ arrivals, their economic influences, their effects on public policy, and their adaptation and assimilation. The resulting narrative is readable and informative. . . . Recommended.” —Choice “A remarkable synthesis of the West as a region of immigrants. It tells the story of how vital immigrants were to economic growth and modernization. This will be the prime reference for 21st century scholars of immigration and ethnicity in the American West.” —Annals of Wyoming, Spring 2010
Clay County extends from the banks of the Tombigbee River in the east across Mississippi's fertile Black Prairie, the Kilgore Hills, and ends in the Flatwoods to the west. West Point, the county seat, lies in the eastern part of the county in the midst of the Black Prairie and was first developed as a railroad center for the cotton trade during the 1850s. Today, the local economy is largely dominated by manufacturing and services. Images of America: West Point and Clay County features prehistoric Indian mounds, farms and plantations, such as Waverley on the Tombigbee, and 19th- and 20th-century homes and stores that reflect the county's charm.
What is the relationship between Marxist ideology and the politics of the contemporary West? The contributors to this book treat this question expansively, examining Marxism and the activities of European and Latin American communist parties in the broad context of contemporary Western politics. Their discussion encompasses not only political and p
The Pittsburgh Division had its earliest beginnings in 1837, but what would be known as the main line was not completed until 1871. At its height, the Pittsburgh Division consisted of five distinct main lines and 14 branch lines, and the division had trackage rights over the Western Maryland and Pittsburgh & Lake Erie Railroads. Images of Modern America: The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad's Pittsburgh Division looks at five of these lines: the B&O Main Line from Cumberland to Pittsburgh; the Pittsburgh and Western; the Somerset and Cambria; the Fairmont, Morgantown and Pittsburgh; and the Wheeling, Pittsburgh and Baltimore.
A study of the development of Christianity in the West, showing how the church developed in the different regions, based on literary and archaeological evidence. Appeal is often made in ecumenical discussion between East and West to the standard of the undivided church of the first centuries of the Christian era, but understanding is not helped by the assumption that the divergences between East and West did not seriously arise in this early period. One of the many services rendered by the author is to show that Western Christendom had distinctive features from the beginning, and that it had a unity of “culture” other than that imposed by the Papal See. In his use of recent archaeological studies and of the “apocryphal” New Testament, and in arrangement of the material at his disposal, Elliott-Binns’ history breaks new ground.
Can two cousins on opposite sides of the Cold War and a divided city come together when so much stands between them? Drew is an army brat in West Berlin, where soldiers like his dad hold an outpost of democracy against communist Russia. Drew’s cousin Matthias, an East Berliner, has grown up in the wreckage of Allied war bombing, on streets ruled by the secret police. From enemy sides of this Cold War standoff, the boys become wary friends, arguing over the space race, politics, even civil rights, but bonding over music. If informants catch Matthias with rock ’n’ roll records or books Drew has given him, he could be sent to a work camp. If Drew gets too close to an East Berliner, others on the army post may question his family’s loyalty. As the political conflict around them grows dire, Drew and Matthias are tested in ways that will change their lives forever. Set in the tumultuous year leading up to the surprise overnight raising of the Berlin Wall in August 1961, and illustrated with dozens of real-life photographs of the time, Walls brings to vivid life a heroic and tragic episode of the Cold War.
This document collection focuses on the U.S. military's November 1864 attack on a village of Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians along Sand Creek in southeastern Colorado. Students will read and reflect on several primary sources and evaluate the nature of the attack: was this a battle or a massacre? Students are guided through their analysis of the primary sources with an author-provided learning objective, central question, and historical context.
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