New Books in the American West

As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might called "fundamental research." Their authors--dedicated researchers one and all--provide the scholarly stuff upon which many non-fiction trade books are based. So when you are reading, say, a popular hi...

In 1866, a sixteen year old cowboy—the name was literal in his case—named J.M. Daugherty bought 1,000 cattle, hired five cowboys, and headed north for Missouri. In Indian Territory, he took the long way around Cherokee land, to avoid paying them for crossing their lands. As Daugherty told it, some Yankee “Jayhawkers” ambushed him, shot some of his companions, and took him prisoner, accusing him of...

The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not necessarily make us good teachers. Jessamyn Neuhaus’s Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers (West Virginia University Press, 2019) helps us to id...

The guest this week on Historically Thinking is Jon Lauck. He’s the author of The Lost Region: Toward a Revival of Midwestern History (University of Iowa Press, 2013), which is several things at once: a brief illustration of the importance of the Midwest to both American and World History; the history of the concept of midwestern history; and a manifesto for the renewal of historical focus upon th...

Over fifty years ago, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) scolded the agricultural industry for its profligate spread of “poison” and pesticides “indiscriminately from the skies.” Now, in Chemical Lands: Pesticides, Aerial Spraying, and Health in North America’s Grasslands since 1945 (University of Alabama Press, 2018), David D. Vail re-examines aerial spraying in the North American Grasslands an...

O’Neil Ford on Architecture (University of Texas Press, 2019) brings together Ford’s major professional writings and speeches for the first time. Revealing the intellectual and theoretical underpinnings of his distinctive modernism, they illuminate his fascination with architectural history, his pioneering uses of new technologies and construction systems, his deep concerns for the landscape and e...

When people today visit or imagine Lake Superior, the largest freshwater lake in the world, they often perceive a cold, remote, and pristine body of water, relatively untouched by industrialization. Yet, Lake Superior has experienced substantial environmental change—including today’s impressive but incomplete ecological recovery—in its existence, especially over the last 150 years. So argues the r...

Jeffrey Ostler’s Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas (Yale University Press, 2019) is the first of what will be a two-volume set that comprehensively chronicles the devastating effects of U.S. expansionism on Native Nations. Surviving Genocide covers the eastern United States from the 1750s to the start of the Civil War. In it Os...

In Empire of Timber: Labor Unions and the Pacific Northwest Forests (Cambridge University Press, 2015), the historian Erik Loomis examines the relationship between workers and their environments in this century-long history of timber workers in the Pacific Northwest. He shows that the “jobs vs. environment” tradeoff oversimplifies the history of natural resource workers who have, ever since the 19...

In America's West: A History, 1890-1950 (Cambridge University Press, 2017), David M. Wrobel describes a sixty year period of remarkable change for the vast region. By focusing on politics, demography, race, and cultural change, Wrobel argues that while the West was colonized space, it was also a crucible for the broader changes in American society during the first half of the twentieth century. Am...

After the discoveries of dinosaur fossils in the American West in the late nineteenth century, the United States became world renown for vertebrate paleontology. In his new book Assembling the Dinosaur: Fossil Hunters, Tycoons, and the Making of a Spectacle(Harvard University Press, 2019), Lukas Rieppel explains how the discoveries projected American exceptionalism and, at the height of the Gilded...

On January 28, 1918, just outside of town of Porvenir, Texas, US Army servicemen, Texas Rangers, and civilians murdered 15 unarmed Mexican men and boys. This massacre was not an aberration, writes Monica Muñoz Martinez, the Stanley J. Bernstein Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies at Brown University and former Andrew Carnegie Fellow. In The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-M...

The secession of Texas from Mexico was a dry run for the slaveholder’s republic of the Confederate States of America, argues Andrew Torget in Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850(University of North Carolina Press, 2015). Torget, the University Distinguished Teaching Professor of history at the University of North Texas (and the Guinness Worl...

In Copper Stain: ASARCO’s Legacy in El Paso (University of Oklahoma Press, 2019), Elaine Hampton and Cynthia Ontiveros tell the story of how a Mexican American community in El Paso have fought back against environmental injustice. The physical and social legacy of the ASARCO smelter are told through the testimonies of more than one hundred workers and community members living and surviving in the...

“Wilderness,” “nature,” and their “preservation” are concepts basic to how the National Park Service organizes our relationship to American land. They are also contested concepts, geographer and environmental historian Laura Alice Watt shows in The Paradox of Preservation: Wilderness and Working Landscapes at Point Reyes National Seashore (University of California Press, 2016), and when used as ad...

The “Dust Bowl” remains a mainstay in American history textbooks. When dust storms swept over the southern plains in the 1930s, they upended farming communities and left thousands of migrants in search of brighter horizons in the “Dirty Thirties.” The historian Douglas Sheflin takes a closer look at the Dust Bowl’s long-term legacy in the often overlooked Colorado plains that border Kansas and Okl...

Nearly every consumer today is familiar with the name Levi Strauss thank to the jeans that bear his name. As Lynn Downey explains in her book Levi Strauss: The Man Who Gave Blue Jeans to the World (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), to understand the man behind the brand requires sorting through decades of popular legends created to fill a vacuum of knowledge. Born Löb Strauß, he changed hi...

In her new book, Collisions at the Crossroads: How Place and Mobility Make Race (University of California Press, 2019), Professor Genevieve Carpio considers tensions around mobility and settlement in the 19th- and 20th-century American West, especially California’s Inland Empire. In this wide-ranging study, the first academic work to draw on the Inland Mexican Heritage archives, Carpio examines po...

Life and Times of John Pierce Hawley: A Mormon Ulysses of the American West (Greg Kofford Books, 2019) narrates the wide-ranging life of John Hawley’s search for an authentic Mormon faith. Melvin C. Johnson has been researching Hawley’s adventurous life along the American borderlands and frontier for three decades. Hawley was an active member of several Latter Day Restoration denominations in Miss...

In Charros: How Mexican Cowboys Are Remapping Race and American Identity (University of California Press, 2019), Dr. Laura R. Barraclough tells a surprising story about the urban American West. Barraclough, the Sarai Ribicoff Associate Professor in American Studies at Yale University, writes the history of elite Mexican and Mexican-American cowboys – charros – and how charro culture served as a si...

The sixties happened in Oklahoma too, argued Sarah Eppler Janda in Prairie Power: Student Activism, Counterculture, and Backlash in Oklahoma, 1962–1972(University of Oklahoma Press, 2018). While not a hub of activism and student protest on the scale of UC-Berkeley or Columbia, schools such as the University of Oklahoma and (to a lesser extent) Oklahoma State nonetheless had active student organiza...

The historian Nick Estes traces two centuries of Indigenous-led resistance and anti-colonial struggle. Our History is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (Verso, 2019) moves from settler colonialism and Indian Wars to the front lines of indigenous climate activism today. He places the #NoDAPL movement, to block Dakota Access...

The Pacific Northwest was a hotbed of labor radicalism in the early twentieth century, where the revolutionary Industrial Workers of the World (commonly known as the “Wobblies”) fought for better working conditions for all workers regardless of race, sex, or creed. The historian Heather Mayer takes a new look at the well-worn vision of the Wobblies as predominately radical young, itinerant men. He...

The Mexican-American War was one of the pivotal moments in 19th-century American history. It bridged the Jacksonian period and the Civil War era and was a highly controversial and politically partisan conflict, the first American war to result in significant land acquisition for the young nation. In The Dead March: A History of the Mexican-American War(Harvard University Press, 2017), Indiana Univ...

Tracking the movement of finance capital toward far-flung investment frontiers, Noam Maggor, Lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, re-conceives the emergence of modern capitalism in the United States. Brahmin Capitalism: Frontiers of Wealth and Populism in America's First Gilded Age (Harvard University Press, 2017) reveals the decisive role of established wealth in the transformation of the...