New Books In The American West

Michael J. Pfeifer's The Making of American Catholicism: Regional Culture and the Catholic Experience (NYU Press, 2021 traces the development of Catholic cultures in the South, the Midwest, the West, and the Northeast, and their contribution to larger patterns of Catholicism in the United States. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book argues that American Catholicism developed as transnational Catholics creatively adapted their devotional and ideological practices in particular American regional contexts. They emphasized notions of republicanism, individualistic capitalism, race, ethnicity, and gender, resulting in a unique form of Catholicism that dominates the United States today. The book also offers close attention to race and racism in American Catholicism, including the historical experiences of African American and Latinx Catholics as well as Catholics of European descent. Zach McCulley (@zamccull) is a historian of religion and literary cultures in early modern England and PhD candidate in H

Calamity Jane is an enigma of Western history. Clad in men’s clothing, she rode across the American West in the latter half of the 19th century, making a name for herself as a military scout, a hard drinker, dime-novel mainstay, and performer. Even after her death, Martha Jane Canary has proven immortal in Hollywood portrayals and, most recently, in an Emmy Award nominated performance by Robin Weigert in HBO’s series Deadwood (2004-2006, 20189.  Hidden beyond over a century of mythos, the real Calamity Jane can be hard to discern. In Calamity: The Many Lives of Calamity Jane (Yale UP, 2020), Dr. Karen Jones embraces the paradoxes and inconsistencies in Canary’s life story. Dr. Jones, professor of environmental and cultural history at the University of Kent, uses cultural and gender analysis to uncover the meanings of Calamity Jane as a character of the Wild West mythology – rather than playing the role of “truth detective,” Jones instead analyzes Jane’s many stories to uncover deeper meanings behind the stori

In the early twentieth century so many dead bodies surfaced in the rivers around Aberdeen, Washington, that they were nicknamed the "floater fleet." When Billy Gohl (1873-1927), a powerful union official, was arrested for murder, local newspapers were quick to suggest that he was responsible for many of those deaths, perhaps even dozens--thus launching the legend of the Ghoul of Grays Harbor.  More than a true-crime tale, The Port of Missing Men: Billy Gohl, Labor, and Brutal Times in the Pacific Northwest (University of Washington Press, 2020) sheds light on the lives of workers who died tragically, illuminating the dehumanizing treatment of sailors and lumber workers and the heated clashes between pro- and anti-union forces. Goings investigates the creation of the myth, exploring how so many people were willing to believe such extraordinary stories about Gohl. He shares the story of a charismatic labor leader--the one man who could shut down the highly profitable Grays Harbor lumber trade--and provides an e

The medium of cinema emerged during the height of Victorian-era European empires, and as a result, settler colonial imperialism has thematically suffused film for well over a century. In Cinematic Settlers: The Settler Colonial World on Film (Routledge, 2020), Drs. Janne Lahti (Academy of Finland Fellow in history, University of Helsinki) and Rebecca Weaver-Hightower (Professor of English, Virginia Tech University) bring together a collection of scholars from a variety of disciplines to examine how film has been used to both justify and, in some cases, push against global systems of settler colonial conquest. The essays in the collection are truly global, stretching from Australia to central Asia to Hawaii, the American West, and beyond, and cover film history from the early twentieth century up to the “final frontier” of early twenty first century science fiction films. Together, Lahti and Weaver-Hightower make a strong case for further settler colonial cultural studies as a means of understanding how entert

On January 6th, 2021, when right wing supporters of Donald Trump staged an insurrection at the US Capitol building, they were participating in a long tradition of conservative rebellion with its roots in the West. Dr. James Skillen, associate professor of environmental studies at Calvin University, traces those roots in his new book, This Land is My Land: Rebellion in the West (Oxford University Press, 2020).  By the late 20th century, the Bureau of Land Management owned and managed huge swaths of some western states. Skillen argues that change in the regulatory environment, with a new emphasis on ecosystem and wildlife management beginning in the 1970s, combined with a groundswell of conservative support to foment armed rebellion against perceived government overreach among ranchers, small-time miners, and other western resource users.  When Ammon Bundy and his family staged a takeover of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in eastern Oregon in 2014, it was just the latest episode in a series of rebellions across th

Herman J. (1897–1953) and Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1909–1993) wrote, produced, and directed over 150 pictures. With Orson Welles, Herman wrote the screenplay for Citizen Kane and shared the picture’s only Academy Award. Joe earned the second pair of his four Oscars for writing and directing All About Eve, which also won Best Picture. In The Brothers Mankiewicz: Hope, Heartbreak, and Hollywood Classics (University of Mississippi Press, 2019), Sydney Stern draws on interviews, letters, diaries, and other documents still in private hands to provide a uniquely intimate behind-the-scenes chronicle of the lives, loves, work, and relationship between these complex men. The book is part of the Hollywood Legends Series of the University of Mississippi Press. Despite triumphs as diverse as Monkey Business and Cleopatra, and Pride of the Yankees and Guys and Dolls, the witty, intellectual brothers spent their Hollywood years deeply discontented and yearning for what they did not have—a career in New York theater. Herman, f

Journalists, scholars, politicians, and citizens often assume that calls for secession are political or historical aberrations. Our founding myth is that the Civil War divided an otherwise united nation and we soon reconstructed the United States to form a more perfect union. But Richard Kreitner’s provocative new book, Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America's Imperfect Union (Little Brown, 2020), argues that “disunion” is the hidden thread in the history of the United States. Kreitner is a contributing writer to The Nation who has also published in The New York Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post, USA Today, Slate, Raritan, and The Baffler. American politics from colonial times to the present, Break it Up argues, has always included “forces that have conspired to divide it” and Kreitner insists that we get a more nuanced and comprehensive “understanding of both our contentious past and our uncertain future” if we confront that history. Drawing on rich scholarship from multiple d

There is something quintessentially American about the idea of the west. Though the time of western expansion has long since passed, stories about cowboys on horses and pioneers panning for gold resonate with us to this day, living on in our books, our movies, and our in cultural imaginations. Through these stories, the west has come to represent values like stoicism, self-reliance, and rugged individualism. For many who call it home, the west also represents a heritage, a tradition, and a way of life. But how many of these collective conceptions of the west are actually true? In her stunning debut essay collection, Anything Will Be Easy After This: A Western Identity Crisis (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), author Bethany Maile reaches into the depths of her childhood on the prairies of Eagle, Idaho to determine where the many myths about the American west begin and end. To help answer these questions, Maile goes on expeditions to an Idaho rodeo pageant, a Lady Antebellum concert, a livestock auction hou

In Voices from the Valley: Tech Workers Talk About What They Do and How They Do It (FSG Originals, 2020), the celebrated writers and Logic cofounders Moira Weigel and Ben Tarnoff take an unprecedented dive into the tech industry, conducting unfiltered, in-depth, anonymous interviews with tech workers at all levels, including a data scientist, a start-up founder, a cook who serves their lunch, and a PR wizard. In the process, Weigel and Tarnoff open the conversation about the tech industry at large, a conversation that has previously been dominated by the voices of CEOs. Deeply illuminating, revealing, and at times lurid, Voices from the Valley is a vital and comprehensive view of an industry that governs our lives. Logic dissects the way technology functions in everyday lives. The titans of Silicon Valley, for all their utopian imaginings, never really had our best interests at heart: recent threats to democracy, truth, privacy, and safety, as a result of tech’s reckless pursuit of progress, have shown as muc

What is the history of equal rights in Hollywood? In A Piece of the Action: Race and Labor in Post–Civil Rights Hollywood (Columbia UP, 2019), Eithne Quinn, a senior lecturer in American Studies at the University of Manchester, explores the transitional years following the civil rights movement of the 1960s, in order to chart the struggle by Black film makers for rights, recognition and representation. The book combines analysis of on-screen representations, with research on both the production and political economy of Hollywood films. Attentive to questions of gender and race, alongside a critical perspective on Hollywood’s myths of equality and diversity, the book will be essential reading across arts, humanities, and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in understanding why inequality persists in Hollywood today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1985, Greg Mack, a DJ working for Los Angeles radio station KDAY, played a song that sounded like nothing else on West Coast airwaves: Toddy Tee’s “The Batteram,” a hip hop track that reflected the experiences of a young man growing up in 1980s Compton. The song tells about the Los Angeles Police Department’s battering ram truck, an emblem of the city under Police Chief Daryl Gates, and which terrorized largely African American neighborhoods across Los Angeles under his watch. In To Live and Defy in LA: How Gangsta Rap Changed America (Harvard UP, 2020), historian at San Francisco State University Felicia Angeja Viator describes how rap leapt across the continent from its New York roots in the mid-1980s and took hold in Los Angeles. Often gaining popularity by word of mouth and mobile DJ parties, local groups like NWA pioneered a new, harder-edged, style of hip hop music that reflected their experiences as youth growing up in Gates era LA. Viator explains how the rapid rise of West Coast rap became engulfe

Farzaneh Hemmasi is the author of Tehrangeles Dreaming: Intimacy and Imagination in Southern California's Iranian Pop Music (Duke UP, 2020). The title obviously refers the song "California Dreamin'," but in this case the "Dreaming" refers to the active imagining, or reimagining, of Iranian and Persian identity by the artistic community that relocated to southern California following the 1979 Islamic Revolution. In our discussion, Farzaneh and I discuss the history of popular music in Iran, the correlation between notions of morality and music in general, and women's voices in particular, and the kind of cultural output that is generated by an artistic community in a highly-politicized and not impoverished diaspora. We talk about a couple of the artists she highlights in her book, Googoosh and Dariush Eghbali, and discuss their personal and political messages, as well as Farzaneh's personal experience of their music. Professor Farzaneh Hemmasi is an Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of T

After Laura Arata first visited Virginia City, Montana in graduate school, she became fascinated by the story of one historical figure—Sarah Bickford, a former slave, who migrated to this frontier, mining town in the late 1860s, and became a prominent business owner who promoted tourism at the site of a famous lynching of white “lawbreakers” by the Montana Vigilantes. In Race and the Wild West: Sarah Bickford, the Montana Vigilantes, and the Tourism of Decline, 1870–1930 (University of Oklahoma Press), a fascinating work of historical recovery, Arata provides a compelling biography of Sarah Bickford and the larger story of black life in the rural West. Ryan Driskell Tate holds a Ph.D. in history from Rutgers University. @rydriskelltate Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1800, tens of millions of bison roamed the North American Great Plains. By 1900, fewer than 1,000 remained. In The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920 (Cambridge UP, 2000), the University of Kansas Hall Distinguished Professor of History Andrew C. Isenberg explains how this ecological calamity came to pass. Bison populations always fluctuated along with changes to the volatile Great Plains climate. The adoption of horse-based nomadism by several Native societies in the 18th and 19th centuries put added pressure on bison populations, but it was the imposition of the capitalist marketplace in the form of white hunters who turned the dynamic bison population into an unsustainable tailspin. In this new 20th anniversary edition with an added foreword and afterword, Isenberg relates the book’s genesis and reflects on its legacy and the historiographical context of environmental history’s early days. Additionally, Isenberg argues that the story of the bison’s destruction serves as a warn

The opening years of the twentieth century saw a grand cast of radicals and reformers fighting for a new America, seeking change not only in labor picket lines and at women’s suffrage rallies but also in homes and bedrooms. In the thick of this heady milieu were Sara Bard Field and Charles Erskine Scott Wood, two aspiring poets and political activists whose love story uncovers a potent emotional world underneath this transformative time. Self-declared pioneers in free love, Sara and Erskine exchanged hundreds of letters that charted a new kind of romantic relationship, and their personal pursuits frequently came into contact with their deeply engaged political lives. In 1915 Sara’s star rose in the suffrage movement when she drove across the country in a daring car trip, carrying a four-mile long petition with thousands of signatures demanding Congress pass the Nineteenth Amendment. In the process, she began to ask questions about her own power in her relationship with Erskine. Charting a passionate and tumul

In August 1795, Apaches wiped out two Spanish patrols In the desert borderlands of the what is today the American Southwest and Mexican north. This attack ended what had bene an uneasy peace between various Apache groups and the Spanish Empire. In A Bad Peace and A Good War: Spain and the Mescalero Apache Uprising of 1795-1799 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018), Mark Santiago (the recently retired Director of the New Mexico Farm and Ranch Heritage Museum) examines why this peace broke down, as well as what the ensuing conflict looked like on the ground. Many historians argue that the 1790s were a period of peace in the Spanish/Apache borderlands, and Santiago presents an alternate view: that sustained conflict was the norm in this region during the twilight of the Spanish Empire. A Bad Peace and a Good War is remarkably detailed and well-researched and won the 2019 Robert Utley prize in military history from the Western History Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition was in many ways the crowning event of the nineteenth century United States. Held in Chicago, the metropolis of the West, and visited by tens of millions of people from around the world, it showcased America’s past, present, and future. And Indigenous people were there at center stage. In Unfair Labor?: American Indians and the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), David R. B. Beck, professor of Native American Studies at the University of Montana, addresses the question framed in the title: was the work done by Native people at the exposition fair? Beck goes to great lengths in answering the question and indeed, argues that there was not one single answer. Hundreds of Indigenous people from across North and South America attended the event and gave artifacts to be showcased, and the range of compensation received varied widely. Beck’s study is an entry in the burgeoning field of Native labor history, as well as a new perspecti

Colin Woodard's new book Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood (Viking, 2020) tells the story of the struggle to create a national myth for the United States, one that could hold its rival regional cultures together and forge, for the first time, an American nationhood. It tells the dramatic tale of how the story of our national origins, identity, and purpose was intentionally created and fought over in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On one hand, a small group of individuals--historians, political leaders, and novelists--fashioned and promoted a history that attempted to transcend and erase the fundamental differences and profound tensions between the nation's regional cultures. America had a God-given mission to lead humanity toward freedom, equality, and self-government and was held together by fealty to these ideals. This emerging nationalist story was immediately and powerfully contested by another set of intellectuals and firebrands who argued that the United S

In 1918 Lucile Berkeley Buchanan Jones received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Colorado, becoming its first female African American graduate (though she was not allowed to "walk" at graduation, nor is she pictured in the 1918 CU yearbook). In Remembering Lucile: A Virginia Family's Rise from Slavery and a Legacy Forged a Mile High (University Press of Colorado), author Polly McLean depicts the rise of the African American middle class through the historical journey of Lucile and her family from slavery in northern Virginia to life in the American West, using their personal story as a lens through which to examine the greater experience of middle-class Blacks in the early twentieth century. The first-born daughter of emancipated slaves, Lucile refused to be defined by the racist and sexist climate of her times, settling on a career path in teaching that required great courage in the face of pernicious Jim Crow laws. Embracing her sister’s dream for higher education and W. E. B. Du Bois’s ideology

In Breakaway Americas: The Unmanifest Future of Jacksonian America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020), Thomas Richards Jr., a history teacher at Springside Chestnut Hill Academy, argues that the map of North America was not preordained. Richards uses the Republic of Texas, the 1830s Patriot War, the Mormon exodus, and several other examples from the American West argue that during the 1830s and 1840s, people across North America saw the continent as a place where the flaws of the United States could be remedied by the creation of alternative republics. This is a book about the importance of contingency in understanding the past, and about recognizing that even the outcomes that seemed likely in hindsight often were unlikely in the moment. In the prolonged period of crisis that coincided with the presidencies of Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren, Americans looked West and imagined a vast continent of republics, or as Richards calls them, a “kaleidoscopic” map of different “flavors’ of American republican