New Books in the American West

From Frederick Jackson Turner to Walter Prescott Webb, the high cliffs of Yosemite to the flat deserts and blasted rock of the Nevada Test Range, the American West has long been defined by its environments. The human history of western ecologies extends back thousands of years, writes the historian Sara Dant in her new synthesis, Losing Eden: An Environmental History of the American West (Wiley Bl...

From the American Revolution to the present day, African Americans have stepped forward in their nation’s defense. Fighting for Uncle Sam: Buffalo Solders in the Frontier Army (Schiffer, 2016) breathes new vitality into a stirring subject, emphasizing the role men who have come to be known as “buffalo soldiers” played in opening the Trans-Mississippi West. This concise overview reveals a cast of c...

Calamity Jane was a celebrity of the 19th century American West, yet the woman portrayed in the newspapers and dime novels was one very different from the actual person. In The Life and Legends of Calamity Jane (University of Oklahoma Press, 2014), Richard Etulain sorts through over a century of fiction and half-truths to uncover who Calamity Jane was in real life. Born Martha Canary, she was orph...

In “Georgia O’Keeffe: At Home in the Wonderful Nothing,” a text accompanying the exhibition catalogue Georgia O’Keeffe: Watercolors 1916-1918 (Radius Books and the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, 2016), Amy Von Lintel investigates a lesser studied period in O’Keeffe’s life and work: the artist’s time in West Texas. In 1916, at the age of twenty-eight, O’Keeffe moved to Canyon, Texas to accept a position...

The West, particularly the mountain West of states like Colorado, Utah, Idaho, has long had an image as a land of white men. This image dates to the 19th century, yet it is counterintuitive. Before it became a white man’s paradise, the West was the land of Native Americans, immigrants, Hispanics, and even occasionally free blacks. In his new book, Making the White Man’s West: Whiteness and the Cre...

Kevin Bubriski, a New Englander and internationally acclaimed photographer, was a freelance photojournalist when he first arrived in New Mexico in 1981 to study filmmaking in Santa Fe. Bubriski recalls, “Although I was working as a news photographer on my own, I was looking for images that I enjoyed for their own visual merit and innate curiosity.” Bubriski found himself in a new culture as distin...

In Unruly Waters: A Social and Environmental History of the Brazos River (University of New Mexico, 2015), Kenna R. Archer examines the history of the Brazos river. The river, which runs from eastern New Mexico through Texas and to the Gulf of Mexico, is not among the most well-known rivers in the nation. Over the past two centuries, despite their best efforts, politicians and engineers have mostl...

In Curious Unions: Mexican American Workers and Resistance in Oxnard, California, 1898-1961 (University of Nebraska Press, 2012) Dr. Frank P. Barajas details the central role of Mexican labor in the development of the agriculturally rich coastal plane located between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. In this thoroughly researched history, Barajas relates the curious unions (i.e., unlikely partnership...

In Of Forests and Fields: Mexican Labor in the Pacific Northwest (Rutgers University Press, 2016), Dr. Mario Jimenez Sifuentez combines U.S. labor, environmental, and Chicana/o history to tell the story of Mexican laborers in the states of Oregon and Washington. Beginning with the initial migration of Mexican guest workers to the Northwest in 1942 and culminating with the formation and success of...

In Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants and the California Farmworker Movement (Yale University Press, 2015), Lori A. Flores illuminates a neglected part of Salinas Valley’s past “to show how this agricultural empire was continually a center, a microcosm, of significant transitions and moments in U.S. labor, immigration, and Latino history.” Focusing on a period some conside...

As multifaceted as it was multinucleated, the Chicana/o Movement of the late-1960s and 1970s was “the largest and most widespread civil rights and empowerment struggle by Mexican Americans in U.S. history.” Since the early 2000s, scholarship on El Movimiento has blossomed, initiating a process of excavation that has revealed the multiple sites, issues, participants, and strategies engaged in this...

In Traders and Raiders: The Indigenous World of the Colorado Basin, 1540-1859 (UNC Press, 2014) Assistant Professor of History at Whittier College Natale Zappia provides an in-depth look into the “interior world” of the Lower Colorado River. Tracking the people, networks, economies, and social relations of an expansive indigenous world that includes parts of the modern-day states of Colorado, New...

The Emergency Farm Labor Program (a.k.a. Bracero Program) was initiated in 1942 as a bilateral wartime agreement between the governments of the United States and Mexico. The program’s initial objectives were two-fold, address labor shortages in U.S. agriculture, and promote the modernization of rural Mexican peasants through a type of worker training (i.e., contract labor) that would infuse the Me...

Due in large part to sensationalist representations in contemporary media and politics, the U.S.-Mexico border is popularly understood as a space of illegal activity defined by threats of foreign intrusion including: undocumented migration, drug trafficking, and national security risks. Viewed through the late-20th and early-21st century prisms of drug wars, immigration restriction, terrorism, sur...

Last month, VICE NEWS released a short documentary about the Navajo Nation called “Cursed by Coal.” The images and stories confirm the title. “Seems like everything’s just dying out here,” says Navajo citizen Joe Allen. “It’s because of the mine. Everything is being ruined. They don’t care about people living on that land.” About four hundred miles southwest of the Four Corners Power Plant, where...

David Bullock is the author of Coal Wars: Unions, Strikes, and Violence in Depression-Era Central Washington (Washington State University Press, 2014). Bullock is professor and is the chair of the Communications and Languages Department at Walla Walla University. Coal Wars is at once a political history, a regional history, and a labor organizing history. Through archival research and interviews,...

Dede Feldman is the author of Inside the New Mexico Senate: Boots, Suits, and Citizens (University of New Mexico Press, 2014). Feldman retired from the New Mexico Senate in 2012 and is a former journalist and now is a political commentator in Albuquerque. Feldman provides a first-hand account of the state legislative process. Her colorful stories of many legends of New Mexico politics reveal the c...

Gilbert Mireles is the author of Continuing La Causa: Organizing Labor in California’s Strawberry Fields (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2013). He is associate professor of sociology at Whitman College. Mireles applies theories from political sociology and organizational management to the question of how unions organize workers. He examined the effective and ineffective strategies of United Farm Worker...

New Mexico is a cultural borderland, marked by the interaction of Indian, Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo-American peoples over the past four hundred years. The question of how to commemorate this history and promote the traditions that arose from it is the subject of ongoing discussing, disagreement, and activism. In Recognizing Heritage: the Politics of Multiculturalism in New Mexico (University of...

Brendan C. Lindsay‘s impressive if deeply troubling new book centers on two concepts long considered anathema: democracy and genocide. One is an ideal of self-government, the other history’s most unspeakable crime. Yet as Lindsay deftly describes, Euro-American settlers in California harnessed democratic governance to expel, enslave and ultimately murder 90% of a population on their ancestral home...

From illicit marijuana farms wedged deep in the canyons of the Angeles National Forest to the fire-bombed laboratories of the University of Washington, Char Miller takes readers on a wild romp through the contests, debates, and full-out battles that have surrounded American public lands for over a century in Public Lands, Public Debates: A Century of Controversy (Oregon State University Press, 201...

Anyone who’s turned on the television in the past several decades is familiar with the ubiquitous before-and-after picture. On the left, your present state: undesirable, out of shape, balding perhaps. Add ingredient X – maybe a fad diet or a hair transplant – and the picture on the right shows your new and improved future. While this visual juxtaposition might seem harmless enough – save for the w...

Essay collections are often a repository of an author’s lesser works, an attempt by publishers to milk every last penny from a well-regarded scholar. This is not the case with Jace Weaver’s new book Notes from a Miner’s Canary: Essays on the State of Native America (University of New Mexico Press, 2010). He is, indeed, a well-regarded scholar. As director of the Institute of Native American Studie...

Today we talked with Eric Gardner, who is chair and professor of English at Saginaw Valley State University. The interview focuses on Jennie Carter: A Black Journalist of the Early West (University Press of Mississippi, 2008), a new book which Dr. Gardner both authored an introduction to and edited. This is the first collection from an African American journalist writing for the San Francisco base...

Welcome to New Books in History. In this, our inaugural podcast, we’re honored to have Malcolm Rohrbough on the show. As many of you may know, Mac is a distinguished historian of the American West at the University of Iowa. He’s the author of many books and articles, among them The Land Office Business: The Settlement and Administration of American Public Lands, 1789-1837 (Oxford University Press,...