New Books in the American West

Most US history textbooks contain a familiar map: shaded colors stretch across North America, clearly and neatly demarcating the extent of US expansion from 1776 thru the late nineteenth century. In The Age of the Borderlands: Indians, Slaves, and the Limits of Manifest Destiny (UNC Press, 2025), University of Kansas distinguished historian Andrew Isenberg asks us to rethink the clean lines and si...

The first birth control clinic in El Paso, Texas, opened in 1937. Since then, Mexican-origin women living in the border cities of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez have confronted various interest groups determined to control their reproductive lives, including a heavily funded international population control campaign led by Planned Parenthood Federation of America as well as the Catholic Church and Mexi...

California has more natural hazards per square mile than any other state, but this hasn’t deterred people from moving here. Entire California towns and regions frequently contend with destruction caused by earthquakes, floods, landslides and debris flows, and sea-level rise and coastal erosion. As Dr. Gary Griggs demonstrates in California Catastrophes: The Natural Disaster History of the Golden S...

Hollywood Unions (Rutgers UP, 2024) is a unique collection that tells the stories of the unions and guilds that have organized motion picture and television labor: IATSE, the DGA, SAG-AFTRA, and the WGA. The Hollywood unions represent a wide swath of the workers making media: from directors and stars to grips and makeup artists. People today know some of these organizations from their glitzy annua...

Chinatown neighborhoods in the United States are about more than restaurants, shops, and architecture, argues San Jose State urban studies associate professor Laureen Hom in The Power of Chinatown: Searching for Spatial Justice in Los Angeles (California UP, 2024). They're also communities where people live, organize, and argue over politics. Chinatowns are vital political actors, places where cul...

There's more to Texas than hats, oil, and BBQ, writes Benjamin Johnson in his sweeping new synthesis, Texas: An American History (Yale UP: 2025) - though, those all matter too. The state's reach has traveled globally, Johnson argues, influencing everything from how people around the world eat, to how they pray, to the music they listen to. In his new book, Johnson describes the long history of the...

In the early years of American independence, Methodism emerged as the new republic’s fastest growing religious movement and its largest voluntary association. Following the contours of settler expansion, the Methodist Episcopal Church also quickly became the largest denomination in the early American West. With Sacred Capital: Methodism and Settler Colonialism in the Empire of Liberty (University...

Immigration is now a polarizing issue across most advanced democracies. But too much that is written about immigration fails to appreciate the complex responses to the phenomenon. Too many observers assume imaginary consensus, avoid basic questions, or disregard the larger context for human migration. In Borders and Belonging: Toward a Fair Immigration Policy (Oxford University Press, 2025), Hiros...

Often stereotyped as the land of unflaggingly perfect weather, California has a world-renowned reputation for sunny blue skies and infinitely even-keeled temperatures. But the real story of the Golden State's weather is vastly more complex. From the scorching heat of Death Valley to the coastal redwoods' dripping in dew, California is home to a dizzying array of landscapes and bespoke weather patt...

In today’s cultural and political climate of relative LGBTQ+ inclusion, Settler Tenses: Queer Time and Literatures of the American West (Texas Tech University Press, 2024) by Dr. Ryan Tan Wander provides a literary history that rewrites our understanding of when and how queerness began to align with US nationalism and settler colonialism, tracing the discursive production of masculinities in late...

California’s 1849 gold rush triggered creation of the “instant city” of San Francisco as a to base exploit the rich natural resources of the American West. City of Wood: San Francisco and the Architecture of the Redwood Lumber Industry (University of Texas Press, 2024) examines how capitalists and workers logged the state’s vast redwood forests to create the financial capital and construction mate...

Chile is more than just spice, writes Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and Cal Poly Ethnic Studies professor Victor Valle in The Poetics of Fire: Metaphors of Chile Eating in the Borderlands (U New Mexico Press, 2023). By tracing the meaning of chile as a plant and chile eating as an act. Valle shows how Indigenous cultivation and culinary practices troubled colonizers, sustained cultures, and fo...

Today I talked to Robert Wright about Indigenous Autonomy at La Junta de Los Rios: Traders, Allies, and Migrants on New Spain's Northern Frontier (Texas Tech UP, 2023). The Indigenous nations of the valley of the Rio Grande that is now centered upon Ojinaga, Chihuahua, and Presidio, Texas―the La Junta valley in colonial times―had a long and unique history with Hispanics during the colonial period....

In a book that pulls together both sides of the Pacific, Bundok: A Hinterland History of Filipino America (UNC Press, 2023) asks the question: what if we look at Filipino history not from the cities or the imperial metropoles, but from the mountains and the countryside? Or put another way, from the "bundok," the Tagalog word for "mountain" which American soliders in the late 19th century would com...

In this deeply personal account, University of Oklahoma associate professor of Native American Studies Dr. Farina King describes the history and present of Diné dóó Gáamalii, Navajo people who, in her words, "walk a Latter-day Saints pathway." The book, Diné dóó Gáamalii: Navajo Latter-day Saint Experiences in the Twentieth Century (UP of Kansas, 2023), uses her family's history of life in the LDS...

For much of her life, Angelique Renville had decisions made for her. Where to live, who to live with, where to attend school, what to do with her land. That changed in 1863 when she made a plan and successfully hatched her plan to escape, living the end of her life on her own terms. This is the story Dr. Linda Clemmons tells in Unrepentant Dakota Woman: Angelique Renville & the Struggle for Indige...

Beverly Hills Noir: Crime, Sin, & Scandal in 90210 (Post Hill Press, 2024) explores the city’s true crime history, delving deep inside cases that made headlines, scandals that engulfed Hollywood legends, and more strange-but-true tales that could only happen in the 90210. Beverly Hills Noir chronicles an assortment of jaw-dropping true crime stories spanning the legendary city’s history, each with...

Justin K.H. Tse captures the voices of Cantonese Protestant Christians from the San Francisco, Vancouver, and Hong Kong metropolitan areas as they reflect on their efforts to adapt to secular communities while retaining their identity and beliefs. In the context of the transpacific region between Asia and the Americas, the “Pacific Rim” refers to a window of time in which predominant narratives em...

From multiple New York Times bestselling author Tom Clavin comes the thrilling true story of the most infamous hangout for bandits, thieves and murderers of all time―and the lawmen tasked with rooting them out. Robbers Roost, Brown’s Hole, and Hole-in-the-Wall were three hideouts that collectively were known to outlaws as “Bandit Heaven.” During the 1880s and ‘90s these remote locations in Wyoming...

In Civil Rights in Bakersfield: Segregation and Multiracial Activism in the Central Valley (University of Texas Press, 2024), Oliver Rosales uncovers the role of the multiracial west in shaping the course of US civil rights history. Focusing on Bakersfield, one of the few sizable cities within California’s Central Valley for much of the twentieth century in a region most commonly known as a bastio...

In 1929, the United States government approved two ground-breaking and controversial drug addiction treatment programs. At a time when fears about a supposed rise in drug use reached a fevered pitch, the emergence of the nation’s first “narcotic farms” in Fort Worth, Texas, and Lexington, Kentucky, marked a watershed moment in the treatment of addiction. Rehab on the Range is the first in-depth hi...

In Dividing the Public: School Finance and the Creation of Structural Inequity (Cornell UP, 2024), Matthew Gardner Kelly takes aim at the racial and economic disparities that characterize public education funding in the United States. With California as his focus, Kelly illustrates that the use of local taxes to fund public education was never an inadvertent or de facto product of past practices,...

California has more unrecognized Native tribes than any other state - what led to this strange state of affairs, and what does this mean in practice?  In Unrecognized in California: Federal Acknowledgment and the San Luis Rey Band of Mission Indians (U Washington Press, 2024), San Diego State associate professor Olivia Chilcote answers these questions through the history and experience of her own...

From 1845 to 1865 the Gulf of Mexico was at the center of American expansion and southern imperialism. A Continuous State of War: Empire Building and Race Making in the Civil War–Era Gulf South (University of Georgia Press, 2024) by Dr. Maria Angela Diaz tells the story of several communities, such as Galveston, New Orleans, and Pensacola, as well as countries such as Mexico and Cuba, to uncover t...

Deep below the ground in Tucson, Arizona, lies an aquifer forever altered by the detritus of a postwar Superfund site. Disabled Ecologies: Lessons From a Wounded Desert (U California Press, 2024) by Dr. Sunaura Taylor, tells the story of this contamination and its ripple effects through the largely Mexican-American community living above. Drawing on her own complex relationship to this long-ago in...