New Books in the American West

Conversations with LeAnne Howe (UP of Mississippi, 2022) is the first collection of interviews with the groundbreaking Choctaw author, whose genre-bending works take place in the US Southeast, Oklahoma, and beyond our national borders to bring Native American characters and themes to the global stage. Best known for her American Book Award-winning novel Shell Shaker (2001), LeAnne Howe (b. 1951) i...

Tejanaland: A Writing Life in Four Acts (Texas A&M UP, 2021) by Teresa Palomo Acosta--poet, historian, author, and activist--spans three decades of her writing, from 1988 through 2018. The collection is divided into four parts: poems, essays, a children's story, and plays. Each work addresses cultural, historical, political, and gender realities that she experienced from her childhood to the prese...

Mirelsie Velázquez (Associate Professor & Rainbolt Family Endowed Presidential Professor, University of Oklahoma) speaks with Natalie Lira (Associate Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) about Lira’s recent book, Laboratory of Deficiency: Sterilization and Confinement in California, 1900-1950s (University of California Press, 2021). Over 20,000 residents of California were steril...

John Luther Adams's Silences So Deep: Music, Solitude, Alaska (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020) is a profound, funny, and enlightening memoir from one of our greatest contemporary composers. Adams describes the process of writing music inspired by the wild landscapes of the far north, pieces with titles like Arctic Dreams, In the White Silence, and Become Ocean. But as much as Silences So Deep is...

In the summer of 1925, Enid Justin--daughter of H. J. Justin, founder of legendary Justin Boots--announced to her family that she was going to start her own boot company in her hometown of Nocona, Texas. The announcement shocked her family, who prophesied failure and begged her to reconsider, but thirty-one-year-old Enid’s mind was made up. What followed would be a multi-decade saga of tenacity, e...

In 1951, Doña Natalia Barraza opened the Nayarit, a Mexican restaurant in Echo Park, Los Angeles. With A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community (U California Press, 2022), historian Natalia Molina traces the life's work of her grandmother, remembered by all who knew her as Doña Natalia--a generous, reserved, and extraordinarily capable woman. Doña Natalia immigrated a...

The air in Los Angeles can be lethal, and nobody knows this better than the city’s Latinx and Asian immigrants, argues Dr. Nadia Kim in Refusing Death: Immigrant Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice in LA (Stanford UP, 2021). Kim, a professor of Asian and Asian American Studies and Sociology at Loyola Marymount University, spend years interviewing environmental justice activists and other...

Wanda M. Corn's book Georgia O'Keeffe: Living Modern (Prestel Publishing, 2017) explores how Georgia O’Keeffe lived her life steeped in modernism, bringing the same style she developed in her art to her dress, her homes, and her lifestyle. Richly illustrated with images of her art and views of the two homes she designed and furnished in New Mexico, the book also includes never before published pho...

In 1871 an expedition entered the territory now encompassed by Yellowstone National Park. Led by doctor and self-taught geologist Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden, it was to be the first scientific expedition into that mysterious place. But it was also, says my guest Megan Kate Nelson, part of a larger struggle over the expansion of federal power during Reconstruction. Hayden would be one of the three m...

In less than half a century, the American West changed dramatically from a region of dynamic borders, politics, and identities to a more fixed zone of borders and demarcations. This is the argument made by Sarah Deutsch, professor of history at Duke University, in Making a Modern U.S. West: The Contested Terrain of a Region and Its Borders, 1898-1940 (U Nebraska Press, 2022), a major new synthetic...

For centuries Comanches have captivated imaginations. Yet their story in popular accounts abruptly stops in 1875, when the last free Comanches entered a reservation in southwestern Oklahoma. In Cinematic Comanches: The Lone Ranger in the Media Borderlands (U Nebraska Press, 2022), the first tribal-specific history of Comanches in film and media, Quanah Parker descendant Dustin Tahmahkera examines...

Ask you average high school student or undergraduate about nineteenth century US history and if nothing else, they likely know the phrase "manifest destiny." The idea that the United States was destined, even pre-ordained, to construct a continent-spanning nation is widely assumed to have been a motivating force in American political life in during the pre-Civil War era, and is similarly thought t...

In Academic Apartheid: Race and the Criminalization of Failure in an American Suburb (U California Press, 2022), sociologist Sean J. Drake addresses long-standing problems of educational inequality from a nuanced perspective, looking at how race and class intersect to affect modern school segregation. Drawing on more than two years of ethnographic observation and dozens of interviews at two distin...

Stewart Brand has long been famous if you know who he is, but for many people outside the counterculture, early computing, or the environmental movement, he is perhaps best known for his famous mantra "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." Steve Jobs's endorsement of these words as his code to live by is fitting; Brand has played many roles, but one of the most important is as a model for how to live. In Wh...

Rivers host vibrant multispecies communities in their waters and along their banks, and, according to queer-trans-feminist river scientist Cleo Wölfle Hazard, their future vitality requires centering the values of justice, sovereignty, and dynamism. At the intersection of river sciences, queer and trans theory, and environmental justice, Underflows: Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice (U Washi...

In Frontier Religion: The Mormon-American Contest for the Meaning of America, 1857-1907 (U Utah Press, 2019) Konden Smith Hansen examines the dramatic influence these perceptions of the frontier had on Mormonism and other religions in America. Endeavoring to better understand the sway of the frontier on religion in the United States, this book follows several Mormon-American conflicts, from the Ut...

Stunning Indigenous resistance to the Keystone XL and the Dakota Access pipelines has made global headlines in recent years. Less remarked on are the crucial populist movements that have also played a vital role in pipeline resistance. Kai Bosworth explores the influence of populism on environmentalist politics, which sought to bring together Indigenous water protectors and environmental activists...

No matter what people call them today the northwestern Great Plains have been and continue to be Blackfoot country, argues Colgate University assistant professor Ryan Hall in Beneath the Backbone of the World: Blackfoot People and the North American Borderlands, 1720-1877 (University of North Carolina Press, 2020). By maintaining their boundaries and enforcing power between both European empires a...

Prophets and Ghosts: The Story of Salvage Anthropology (Harvard UP, 2021) is a searching account of nineteenth-century salvage anthropology, an effort to preserve the culture of “vanishing” Indigenous peoples through dispossession of the very communities it was meant to protect. In the late nineteenth century, anthropologists, linguists, archaeologists, and other chroniclers began amassing Indigen...

In The Apache Diaspora: Four Centuries of Displacement and Survival (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021), Paul Conrad brings to life the stories of displaced Apaches and the kin from whom they were separated. Conrad uses the lens of “diaspora” to analyze four centuries of Ndé/Apache history, from their initial interactions with Europeans in the sixteenth century to the early twentieth century, when severa...

Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands (Norton, 2022)tells the dramatic story of the magonistas, the migrant rebels who sparked the 1910 Mexican Revolution from the United States. Led by a brilliant but ill-tempered radical named Ricardo Flores Magón, the magonistas were a motley band of journalists, miners, migrant workers, and more, who organized thousands of Mexican worke...

With a reputation as the hot-air balloon capital of the world and the home of the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta, the southwestern desert city of Albuquerque frequently showcases the magic and adventure of ballooning. This legacy links back to the 1880s and a man by the name of Park Van Tassel. Through his pioneering flight, Van Tassel not only opened the skies to future generations acro...

"I don't care what people do in their bedroom, but do they need to flaunt it?" This sentiment is a common refrain in American culture and politics when talking about LGBTQ rights, and as Ohio State historian Dr. Clayton Howard argues, it's a sentence with a history. In The Closet and the Cul-de-Sac: The Politics of Sexual Privacy in Northern California (University of Pennsylvania, 2019), Howard tr...

Animals are both the focus of rodeo and its most invisible participants, argues University of Guelph history professor Susan Nance in Rodeo: An Animal History (U Oklahoma, 2020). Nance flips the usual script on rodeo history, focusing on the experiences of animals in rodeo's long history. Often that history is one of animals struggling to survive in a world that requires them but does not tend to...

Often overlooked, there is mixed blood at the heart of America. And at the heart of Native life for centuries there were complex households using intermarriage to link disparate communities and create protective circles of kin. Beginning in the seventeenth century, Native peoples—Ojibwes, Otoes, Cheyennes, Chinooks, and others—formed new families with young French, English, Canadian, and American...