New Books in the American West

Historian Kevin Starr described Carey McWilliams as "the finest nonfiction writer on California—ever" and "the state's most astute political observer." But as Peter Richardson argues in American Prophet: The Life and Work of Carey McWilliams (University of California Press, 2019), McWilliams was also one of the nation's most versatile and productive public intellectuals of his time. Richardson's a...

Oklahoma's Black towns aren't just places of the past - they maintain an enduring allure, and look toward the future, argues Karla Slocum in her new book, Black Towns, Black Futures: The Enduring Allure of a Black Place in the American West (UNC Press, 2019). Dr. Slocum, the Thomas Willis Lambeth Chair of Public Policy and a professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, traveled e...

Underlying every great city is a rich and vibrant culture that shapes the texture of life within. In The Speculative City: Art, Real Estate, and the Making of Global Los Angeles (U Minnesota Press, 2021), Susanna Phillips Newbury teases out how art and Los Angeles shaped one another’s evolution. She compellingly articulates how together they transformed the Southland, establishing the foundation f...

From Double Indemnity to The Godfather, the stories behind some of the greatest films ever made pale beside the story of the studio that made them. In the golden age of Hollywood, Paramount was one of the Big Five studios. Gulf + Western's 1966 takeover of the studio signaled the end of one era and heralded the arrival of a new way of doing business in Hollywood. In Engulfed: The Death of Paramoun...

From rocky coves at Mendocino and Monterey to San Diego’s reefs, abalone have held a cherished place in California culture for millennia. Prized for iridescent shells and delectable meat, these unique shellfish inspired indigenous artisans, bohemian writers, California cuisine, and the popular sport of skin diving, but also became a highly coveted commercial commodity. Mistakenly regarded as an in...

Between 1942 and 1945, the United States government forcibly removed approximately 120,000 people "of Japanese ancestry" from their homes and into self-proclaimed concentration camps across the American West and South. At every step in the way, social workers played integral roles in the intricate machinery of racism and bureaucracy that allowed this process to take place. Dr. Yoosun Park, an asso...

The controversial Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) made headlines around the world in 2016. Supporters called the pipeline key to safely transporting American oil from the Bakken oil fields of the northern plains to markets nationwide, essential to both national security and prosperity. Native activists named it the "black snake," referring to an ancient prophecy about a terrible snake that would one...

David Schmalz is a staff writer at the Monterey County Weekly, where his longform pieces have won numerous awards from the California News Publishers Association, including a first place for enterprise reporting in 2014 for an expose he wrote about a local church's attempt to evict residents from 98 federally subsidized apartments from a property it managed. Those residents were able to keep their...

Home to over 730,000 people, with close to four million people living in the metropolitan area, Seattle has the third-highest homeless population in the United States. In 2018, an estimated 8,600 homeless people lived in the city, a figure that does not include the significant number of "hidden" homeless people doubled up with friends or living in and out of cheap hotels. In Skid Road: On the Fron...

Ranching in the West meant more than cowboys and cattle drives, writes Dr. Iker Saitua, and assistant professor of public policy and economic history at the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain. Dr. Saitua’s new book, Basque Immigrants and Nevada’s Sheep Industry: Geopolitics and the Making of an Agricultural Workforce, 1880-1954 (University of Nevada Press, 2019), offers insight into...

How is it possible for a town to exist where the median household income is about $73,000, but the median home price is about $4,000,000? In Aspen and the American Dream: How One Town Manages Inequality in the Era of Supergentrification (U Chicago Press, 2021), Dr. Jenny Stuber digs into the "impossible" math of Aspen, Colorado by exploring how middle-class people have found a way to live in this...

Living the California Dream: African American Leisure Sites During the Jim Crow Era (Nebraska, 2020) is about the places where the past and future meet. Throughout the early twentieth century, African Americans moved to California for jobs, for the beautiful weather and landscapes, and to start futures for themselves and their families. Like their white neighbors, they found sites of play and fun...

The story of how the American military—and more particularly the regular army—has played a vital role in the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United States that extended beyond the battlefield is the focus of Robert Wooster’s The United States Army and the Making of America: From Confederation to Empire, 1775–1903 (University Press of Kansas, 2021). As Wooster shows, Americans repeatedly us...

In Writing Kit Carson: Fallen Heroes in a Changing West (UNC Press, 2020), Susan Lee Johnson braids together lives over time and space, telling tales of two white women who, in the 1960s, wrote books about the fabled frontiersman Christopher Kit Carson: Quantrille McClung, a Denver librarian who compiled the Carson-Bent-Boggs Genealogy, and Kansas-born but Washington, D.C.- and Chicago-based Berni...

The geography of American slavery was continental, argues Dr. Kevin Waite, an assistant professor at Durham University, in West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire (UNC Press, 2021). Rather than being confined to the South, the institution of slavery infected North America as the American empire expanded across the Mississippi River, including places often thought of as "fr...

It’s hard to imagine a place more central to American mythology today than Silicon Valley. To outsiders, the region glitters with the promise of extraordinary wealth and innovation. But behind this image lies another Silicon Valley, one segregated by race, class, and nationality in complex and contradictory ways. Its beautiful landscape lies atop underground streams of pollutants left behind by de...

If floods are inevitable, why do humans insist on building alongside riverbanks? Todd Kerstetter, professor of history at Texas Christian University, tries to answer that question in Flood on the Tracks: Living, Dying, and the Nature of Disaster in the Elkhorn River Basin (Texas Tech University Press, 2019). Kerstetter examines a relatively small river system, the Elkhorn River basin in Nebraska,...

The vision for America’s cross-cultural future lies beyond the multicultural myth of the "great melting pot." That idea of diversity often imagined ethnically distinct urban districts—the Little Italys, Koreatowns, and Jewish quarters of American cities—built up over generations and occupying spaces that excluded one another. But the neighborhood of Boyle Heights shows us something altogether diff...

California is often used as a synecdoche for the United States itself - America in microcosm. Yet, California was, is, and will always be, Native space. This fact is forcefully argued by Damon Akins and William J. Bauer, Jr. in We Are the Land: A History of Native California (University of California Press, 2021). Akins, an associate professor history at Guilford College, and Bauer, a professor of...

What happens to rural communities when their traditional economic base collapses? When new money comes in, who gets left behind? Pushed Out: Contested Development and Rural Gentrification in the US West (U Washington Press, 2021) offers a rich portrait of Dover, Idaho, whose transformation from "thriving timber mill town" to "economically depressed small town" to "trendy second-home location" over...

In 1976, the San Francisco Giants headed north of the border and became the Toronto Giants - or so the sportswriters of the time would have you believe. In The Giants and Their City: Major League Baseball in San Francisco, 1976-1992 (Kent State UP, 2021), the journalist and scholar Lincoln Mitchell explains how the team and the city narrowly avoided what seemed in the moment to be an inevitable fa...

Today I talked to Nelson Johnson about his new book Darrow's Nightmare: The Forgotten Story of America's Most Famous Trial Lawyer (Rosetta Books, 2021) In 1911 the 26-year-span in which Clarence Darrow took on capital punishment, advocated for civil rights, and handled the Scopes trial was still before him. Those accomplishments might never have happened if he hadn’t survived two torturous years i...

How rural areas have become uneven proving grounds for the American Dream. Small-town economies that have traditionally been based on logging, mining, farming, and ranching now increasingly rely on tourism, second-home ownership, and retirement migration. In Dividing Paradise: Rural Inequality and the Diminishing American Dream (University of California Press, 2021), Jennifer Sherman tells the sto...

Bounded by desert and mountains, El Centro, California, is isolated and difficult to reach. However, its location close to the border between San Diego and Yuma, Arizona, has made it an important place for Mexican migrants attracted to the valley’s agricultural economy. In 1945, it also became home to the El Centro Immigration Detention Camp. The Shadow of El Centro: A History of Migrant Incarcera...

Boston, Philadelphia, London...Fort Loudon, PA. One of these places is not usually included when imagining the crucial scenes of the American Revolution. In Frontier Rebels: The Fight for Independence in the American West, 1765-1776 (W. W. Norton, 2018), Dr. Patrick Spero argues that the early West was just as important to the unfolding American Revolution as events in imperial centers and colonia...