New Books In The American West

In his book, The Comanche Empire (Yale University Press, 2008), Pekka Hämäläinen refutes the traditional story that Indians were bit players or unfortunate victims of the white man’s conquest of the American West. Old maps that divided America into Spanish, French, and British territories, Hämäläinen argues, are “fictions” insofar as they entirely miss great indigenous contenders of military, economic, and political power. Such a one were the Comanches who fought, traded, and cooperated—often simultaneously—with European and Native American rivals, and rose to be a dominating power in the Great Plains for almost 200 years. The Comanche Empire brings a riveting narrative in a dialectical spirit to the fields of American, American Indian, Spanish and Mexican Imperial, and Borderlands histories. Professor Hämäläinen is Rhodes Professor at the University of Oxford, specializing in early and nineteenth-century North American history especially in indigenous, colonial, imperial, borderlands, and environmental histo

Northern California’s giant redwoods are among the state’s most recognizable natural wonders. These massive trees were also under threat of clear-cut logging for much of the twentieth century, writes Darren Frederick Speece in Defending Giants: The Redwood Wars and the Transformation of American Environmental Politics (University of Washington Press, 2017). The book is an exhaustive study of the California timber industry and the environmentalists who used a wide range of tactics, from sit ins and sabotage to courtroom battles, to protect redwood ecosystems. Speece takes a bottom up approach to this history, telling the story from the perspective of the myriad individuals on both sides of the battle who shaped Pacific Coast environmental politics in the mid to late twentieth century. Defending Giants argues that historians of environmentalism have focused too much on birds-eye, national-level politics and have missed the important front line work performed by rural activists, who often put their lives on the

In The Heart of the Mission: Latino Art and Politics in San Francisco (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), Cary Cordova combines urban, political, and art history to examine how the Mission District, a longtime bohemian enclave in San Francisco, has served as an important place for an influential and largely ignored Latino arts movement from the 1960s to the present. Well before the anointment of the “Mission School” by art-world arbiters at the dawn of the twenty-first century, Latino artists, writers, poets, playwrights, performers, and filmmakers made the Mission their home and their muse. The Mission, home to Chileans, Cubans, Guatemalans, Mexican Americans, Nicaraguans, Puerto Ricans, and Salvadorans never represented a single Latino identity. In tracing the experiences of a diverse group of Latino artists from the 1940s to the turn of the century, Cordova connects wide-ranging aesthetics to a variety of social movements and activist interventions. The book begins with the history of the

With so much political effort placed into forcing a wall between the US and Mexico, Andrew Selee’s new book shows how the ties that bind the two countries together are much stronger. Selee has been on the podcast before with his book, What Should Think Tanks Do?: A Strategic Guide to Policy Impact (Stanford, 2018). His latest book, Vanishing Frontiers: The Forces Driving Mexico and the United States Together (PublicAffairs, 2018), focuses on the variety of ways Mexico and the US have been working together, on everything from air transportation to border security to innovation. The dozens of stories about cooperation suggest a bi-lateral relationship that has been growing stronger and deeper over the last several decades. At the end of our conversation, Selee addresses the current border issues and whether changes in US policy will harm the burgeoning relationship between the two countries. Selee is President of the Migration Policy Institute, he had been Vice President of the Woodrow Wilson Center and directo

In Search of the Mexican Beverly Hills: Latino Suburbanization in Postwar Los Angeles (Rutgers University Press, 2018) by Professor Jerry Gonzalez challenges conventional interpretations of postwar U.S. history by focusing on the hidden story of the central role Mexican Americans played in the suburbanization of Los Angeles. Examining the expansion of Metropolitan Los Angeles along its eastern fringe after World War II, Gonzalez explains how Mexican colonias served as “stepping stones toward suburbanization” as real estate developers looked to these working-class ethnic neighborhoods as promising locations for their burgeoning master-planned communities in the 1950s and 1960s. Whereas Mexican colonias had previously been ignored by local officials—functioning as de facto segregated communities—theses spaces were desirable due to their affordability and proximate location to Los Angeles’ industrial corridor. Capitalizing on the postwar economic boom that transformed LA into a center for aerospace and automobil

More than just a civil war, the Mexican Revolution in 1910 triggered hostilities along the border between Mexico and the United States. In particular, the decade following the revolution saw a dramatic rise in the lynching of ethnic Mexicans in Texas. Nicholas Villanueva Jr.‘s new book The Lynching of Mexicans in the Texas Borderlands (University of New Mexico Press, 2017) argues that ethnic and racial tension brought on by the fighting in the borderland made Anglo-Texans feel justified in their violent actions against Mexicans. They were able to use the legal system to their advantage, and their actions often went unpunished. Villanueva’s work further differentiates the borderland lynching of ethnic Mexicans from the Southern lynching of African Americans by asserting that the former was about citizenship and sovereignty, as many victims’ families had resources to investigate the crimes and thereby place the incidents on an international stage. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at T

The plight of today’s coal miners has gained significant attention in recent U.S. politics. As coal mining practices and technologies change in the United States, coal miners face job reductions, but their futures are wrapped up in broader national questions surrounding global trade, the environment, mechanization, and deindustrialization. In his new book, Augustana College professor Brian James Leech examines a previous moment of technological change in American mining history that created social, economic, and environmental disruption. In the early to mid-twentieth century, open-pit mining became more common in hard-rock mining in the western United States. The City That Ate Itself: Butte, Montana and Its Expanding Berkeley Pit (University of Nevada Press, 2018), examines this transition from underground to open-pit mining in Butte, Montana. Open-pit mining required more space, but fewer, lower-skilled workers. Whole communities were relocated, while new environmental hazards developed. The book explo

Researching and writing about infrastructure is a tall task. Infrastructure’s vastness, complexity, and, if it’s functioning, invisibility can defy narratives. Andrew Needham, however, succeeds beautifully. His book, called Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest (Princeton University Press, 2016), tells the important and dramatic story of how the creation and development of a regional energy system linked Southwestern metropolitan and rural spaces. The book, Needham writes, “constructs a broad new map of postwar urban, environmental, and political change.” Needham shows how that system produced and concealed geographic inequality. Post-World War II Southwest cities depended on abundant cheap energy, namely coal, and the primary source was far away in the Navajo lands. In addition to fueling the rapid metropolitan development, those lands also absorbed the majority of the energy system’s pollution. In other words, while city-dwellers and suburbanites consumed cheap energy, the Navajo bore

In a remarkable new book, Daniel Heath Justice, an author and professor of First Nations and Indigenous Studies and English at the University of British Columbia, makes an argument for the vitality of Indigenous literatures and their ability to help make sense of our world. Why Indigenous Literatures Matter (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2018) is one-part literary exegesis, one-part memoir, and many parts radical text which calls for, among other things, broader human and non-human kinship, and the use of indigenous literatures to push back against settler colonial forms of erasure and oppression. Justice explores the vibrant universe of over two hundred years of literatures (written and non-written alike), from autobiography to spoken word poetry, to fantasy and wonderworks, in order to make the case that yes, of course indigenous literatures matter; they do so because indigenous people matter. Why Indigenous Literatures Matter thus acts as both indigenous literary bibliography and call to action to peop

When Pope Francis visited the United States in 2015, he canonized the eighteenth-century Franciscan missionary Junípero Serra, rekindling the smoldering controversy that surrounds this historical figure—both a holy man with zeal for the Gospel and an imperial agent with little concern for the indigenous culture he was supplanting. Serra is also a secular figure, a “founding father” of California, who established missions and presidios with names like San Diego, Santa Barbara, and San Francisco, that would become the backbone of the civic infrastructure of a territory that was first Spanish, then Mexican, then briefly independent, and finally part of the United States. Serra’s likeness stands in the National Statuary Hall in the US Capitol Building, the only Hispanic out of the 100 historical figures enshrined therein. On the podcast today, Steven Hackel speaks about his recent book, Junípero Serra: California’s Founding Father (Hill and Wang, 2014), a remarkable investigation into the cultural context of Serr

In An American Language: The History of Spanish in the United States (University of California Press, 2018), Rosina Lozano details the entangled relationship between language and notions of individual, community, and national belonging in the U.S. Through an innovative analysis of Spanish-language newspapers, territorial and municipal records, federal officials’ correspondence, Senate hearings, election results, and so much more, Dr. Lozano eloquently explains how the Spanish language moved from one essential to the governance of the Southwest during the transition from Mexican to U.S. rule in the mid-to-late 19th  century to one of foreignness by the mid-20th century. Whereas much of the existing scholarship on the U.S. Southwest narrates the history of the region through the lenses of conquest and ethno-racial conflict and marginalization, Lozano provides new insight into the central role played by treaty citizens—the former residents of Mexico in California, New Mexico, Colorado, and Arizona—as, they press

The American West has always been home to many deities, argues Jennifer Graber in The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West (Oxford University Press, 2018). Graber, an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Texas-Austin, tells the story of the Kiowa over the course of the long nineteenth century. For Kiowas, the continuation of well-established spiritual beliefs and practices sustained them in the face of great challenges, but at times these same elements were dynamic enough to change and adapt to fit new realities. Among the new realities were alliances with powerful neighbors such as the Comanche, with whom the Kiowa shared the Sun Dance ritual. Another was a growing rivalry and at times widespread bloodshed with Americans, whose Christian missionaries fought as much amongst themselves as they did for Native converts. Missionaries often operated under the guise of being “friends of the Indian,” even when their purposes were ultimately dispossession an

In Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016), David J. Silverman argues that Indian societies adopted firearm technology not because they were visually impressive or culturally significant (though they were both), but simply because they killed more efficiently. Using his concept of the “gun frontier,” Silverman, a professor of history at George Washington University, shows how contact between Natives and those Europeans willing to trade weapons for furs and other goods fundamentally altered the politics and power dynamics of a given region. Thundersticks draws on case studies from a broad sweep of time from the seventeenth to the mid-twentieth century, including the consolidation of Iroquois power, King Philip’s War, the otter fur trade in the Pacific Northwest, and the ascendency of the Blackfeet in the mountain west. Each story underscores the point that guns could both undermine colonial power as well as cause catastrophi

Not all city dwellers are bipedal, according to Frederick L. Brown, author of The City is More Than Human: An Animal History of Seattle (University of Washington Press, 2016). The history of Seattle, and all cities, is as much about its non-human inhabitants as its human ones, argues Brown, an independent scholar working on a contractual basis with the National Park Service. Salish-speaking people, the earliest inhabitants of the Puget Sound, had myriad relationships with animals. They thought of them as important symbols and as spiritual guides, and used them as a critical resource base. The species of animals living around the Puget Sound changed with European arrival and conquest, but the complicated relationships they had with humans did not. Cattle, horses, mountain lions, dogs, and salmon, all meant different things to different people at different times. Brown tracks these changes in use and attitude and argues that our perception of animals is shaped by the paradox of the pet food dish. The bowl we pu

Environmental historian Peter A. Kopp‘s book Hoptopia: A World of Agriculture and Beer in Oregon’s Willamette Valley (University of California Press, 2016) examines the fascinating history of a very special plant: the hop. From its prehistoric origins to its use in ancient and medieval beermaking, the hop was already an important crop in human agriculture when it first appeared on Colonial American shores, but when it made its way to Oregon’s lush Willamette Valley in the mid-19th century, it changed itself, the region, and the world forever. Savvy farmers, brewers and marketers soon turned the Willamette Valley into the “Hops Capital of the World,” and began to bend the entire world’s beer industry to their will. The hop somehow managed to survive and even flourish during Prohibition of the 1920s and 1930s, then almost fell victim to a disease that nearly destroyed the fields of aromatic plenty, but laboratory science and big business spelled a resurrection for the hardy h

Land is central in the construction of identity for many communities. For Ute Native Americans the meaning of a twelve million acre homeland in western Colorado is intricately linked to the various ways they understand their heritage and future. Brandi Denison, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at University of North Florida, narrates the history of this community’s removal, remembrance, and return to this land in Ute Land Religion in the American West, 1879-2009 (University of Nebraska Press, 2017). She argues that discourses about religion were essential to settler colonialism in the American West. These took shape through justifications for the displacement of Utes, in civilizing missionary projects, imagined nostalgia about pre-contact Colorado, and as a means for Ute to warrant inclusion and return. The category of religion was deployed in a variety of ways by natives and white settlers in order to establish, deny, exclude, and restore communities within the region. In our con

In Legal Codes and Talking Trees: Indigenous Women’s Sovereignty in the Sonoran and Puget Sound Borderlands, 1854-1946 (Yale University Press, 2016), Katrina Jagodinsky recovers the stories too often presumed lost in the silences of colonial archives: those of Indigenous women operating within systems of American law. In doing so, she argues that Indigenous women in the American southwest and Pacific northwest used Indigenous epistemologies, legal codes, and community connections, to navigate American settler colonial legal regimes and in some cases emerging victorious. Jagodinsky, an Associate Professor in the history department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, uses unique methodologies combining traditional legal history, poetry, and non-written knowledge networks to recount the histories of six women from the border regions of what is today Arizona/Sonora and Washington/British Columbia. Legal Codes and Talking Trees shows how even under ardently white supremacist power structures and within se

The story of the American West as it is often told typically involves Spanish, British, and American Empires struggling with Indigenous people for control of the vast territory lands and riches from the Mississippi to the Pacific. After the seventeenth century, French colonists and French-speaking Metis are often relegated to the role of bit players in this tale. Songs Upon the Rivers: The Buried History of the French-Speaking Canadiens and Metis From the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Across to the Pacific (Baraka Books, 2016) reemphasizes the importance of the French imperial legacy and Metis influence in the Great Lakes region, on the northern plains, and in the far Pacific West. In doing so, this book challenges American and Canadian narratives about the west which too often tend toward racial and national binaries. By telling the stories of people who lived across ethnic and national boundaries, Robert Foxcurran, Michel Bouchard, and Sebastien Mallett show how historians can use the complications of the

It’s a sad story known well. In dead of winter at Wounded Knee Creek in 1890, U.S. soldiers with the Seventh Cavalry Regiment gunned down over two hundred Lakota men, women, and children. Their crime? Taking part in the Ghost Dance ritual. What happened afterwards is a story told less often. David W. Grua, historian and editor with the Joseph Smith Papers project, tells about the competing memory and counter-memory of Wounded Knee as the U.S. Army first shaped the narrative, and later, Lakotas attempted to have their side of the story heard. In his Robert M. Utley Prize winning book, Surviving Wounded Knee: The Lakotas and the Politics of Memory (Oxford University Press, 2016), Grua argues that race, official memory, and public memorialization served the purposes of white supremacy on the northern Great Plains throughout much of the early twentieth century. Official army reports as well as physical memorialization at the massacre site spun a narrative of Indian savagery and white innocence that helped m

Wile E. Coyote has a family tree with many roots and branches, argues University of Montana A.B. Hammond Professor Emeritus Dan Flores in his recent book, Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History (Basic Books, 2016). Coyotes as a species predate humans in North America, and people have been, by turns, fascinated and horrified by coyotes for as long as the two creatures have coexisted. The coyote’s relationship with humans has been, as Flores describes it, a rollercoaster. Considered a semi-deity figure and trickster god among many Indigenous cultures across the American West, the first Europeans to encounter the coyote were puzzled by the animal. Lewis and Clark struggled to fit coyotes into existing categories; was it a jackal, or closer to a wolf? By the end of the nineteenth century however, Americans had largely decided the coyote was, above all, a nuisance and took up arms to eradicate the animal. The effects were both gruesome and surprising. While government-laid traps and poisons kille