How to Read the American West
How to Read the American West

Author: William Wyckoff

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2014-05-01

Total Pages: 441

ISBN-13: 0295805374

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From deserts to ghost towns, from national forests to California bungalows, many of the features of the western American landscape are well known to residents and travelers alike. But in How to Read the American West, William Wyckoff introduces readers anew to these familiar landscapes. A geographer and an accomplished photographer, Wyckoff offers a fresh perspective on the natural and human history of the American West and encourages readers to discover that history has shaped the places where people live, work, and visit. This innovative field guide includes stories, photographs, maps, and diagrams on a hundred landscape features across the American West. Features are grouped according to type, such as natural landscapes, farms and ranches, places of special cultural identity, and cities and suburbs. Unlike the geographic organization of a traditional guidebook, Wyckoff's field guide draws attention to the connections and the differences between and among places. Emphasizing features that recur from one part of the region to another, the guide takes readers on an exploration of the eleven western states with trips into their natural and cultural character. How to Read the American West is an ideal traveling companion on the main roads and byways in the West, providing unexpected insights into the landscapes you see out your car window. It is also a wonderful source for armchair travelers and people who live in the West who want to learn more about the modern West, how it came to be, and how it may change in the years to come. Showcasing the everyday alongside the exceptional, Wyckoff demonstrates how asking new questions about the landscapes of the West can let us see our surroundings more clearly, helping us make informed and thoughtful decisions about their stewardship in the twenty-first century. Watch the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYSmp5gZ4-I

Navigating the American West
Navigating the American West

Author: Thomas A. Permar

Publisher: The Western Sea Press

Published: 2015-03-14

Total Pages: 152

ISBN-13: 0990730603

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If you’ve ever stared in awe at the Rocky Mountains and wondered how early travelers could possibly traverse those peaks, then this is the book for you! In a time of smartphones, GPS devices, and voice automated navigation systems, it’s difficult to imagine crossing unknown desserts, mountains, and prairies with just a few ancient techniques and the heavens above. This history of movement across the American West brings three centuries of travel to life. It shows how four different cultures, in four different areas, migrated across this harsh and beautiful land: the native travelers on foot, Spanish conquistadors on horseback, Frenchmen by canoe, and American settlers by wagon. In this history, the “who,” “where,” and “when” take a back seat to the fascinating “how.” How did they find their way from place to place? How did they measure time, distance, and direction traveled? How did they provide themselves with food, water, and shelter—the barest necessities of human existence? Travel the myth and reality of the raw land that made the American West. Discover the depth of human bravery, determination, and ingenuity. And enjoy the adventure.

Navigating the West
Navigating the West

Author: Nenette Luarca-Shoaf

Publisher: Other Distribution

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780300206708

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A new look at George Caleb Bingham's iconic river paintings and his creative process in making them George Caleb Bingham (1811-1879) moved to Missouri as a child and began painting the scenes of Missouri life for which he is now famous in the 1840s. Navigating the West explores how Bingham's iconic river paintings reveal the cultural and economic significance of the massive Mississippi and Missouri waterways to mid-19th-century society. Focusing on the artist's working methods and preparatory drawings, the book also explores Bingham's representations of people and places and situates these images in a dialogue with other contemporary depictions of the region. Of particular note are two landmark essays investigating Bingham's creative process through comparisons of infrared images of 17 of his paintings with both his preparatory drawings and the completed works, casting new light on his previously understudied process. Technical analysis of the artist's lauded masterpiece, Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, reveals Bingham's considerable revisions to the painting. In the concluding essay, the 20th-century revival of the artist's work is discussed within the context of American Regionalism and in light of a shifting sequence of narratives about the nation's past and future. Distributed for the Amon Carter Museum of American Art and the Saint Louis Art Museum Exhibition Schedule: Amon Carter Museum of American Art (10/04/14-01/04/15) Saint Louis Art Museum (02/22/15-05/17/15) The Metropolitan Museum of Art (06/22/15-09/20/15)

The American West
The American West

Author: Dee Brown

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2012-12-25

Total Pages: 815

ISBN-13: 147110933X

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As the railroads opened up the American West to settlers in the last half of the 19th Century, the Plains Indians made their final stand and cattle ranches spread from Texas to Montana. Eminent Western author Dee Brown here illuminates the struggle between these three groups as they fought for a place in this new landscape. The result is both a spirited national saga and an authoritative historical account of the drive for order in an uncharted wilderness, illustrated throughout with maps, photographs and ephemera from the period.

Re-living the American Frontier
Re-living the American Frontier

Author: Nancy Reagin

Publisher: University of Iowa Press

Published: 2021-12

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 1609387902

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Who owns the West? -- Buffalo Bill and Karl May : the origins of German Western fandom -- A wall runs through it : western fans in the two Germanies -- Little houses on the prairie -- "And then the American Indians came over" : fan responses to indigenous resurgence and political change -- Indians into Confederates : historical fiction fans, reenactors, and living history.

The North American West in the Twenty-First Century
The North American West in the Twenty-First Century

Author: Brenden W. Rensink

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 418

ISBN-13: 1496230434

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This edited volume takes stories from the "modern West" of the late twentieth century and carefully pulls them toward the present--explicitly tracing continuity with and unexpected divergence from trajectories established in the 1980s and 1990s.

Making the White Man's West
Making the White Man's West

Author: Jason E. Pierce

Publisher: University Press of Colorado

Published: 2016-01-15

Total Pages: 323

ISBN-13: 1607323966

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The West, especially the Intermountain states, ranks among the whitest places in America, but this fact obscures the more complicated history of racial diversity in the region. In Making the White Man’s West, author Jason E. Pierce argues that since the time of the Louisiana Purchase, the American West has been a racially contested space. Using a nuanced theory of historical “whiteness,” he examines why and how Anglo-Americans dominated the region for a 120-year period. In the early nineteenth century, critics like Zebulon Pike and Washington Irving viewed the West as a “dumping ground” for free blacks and Native Americans, a place where they could be segregated from the white communities east of the Mississippi River. But as immigrant populations and industrialization took hold in the East, white Americans began to view the West as a “refuge for real whites.” The West had the most diverse population in the nation with substantial numbers of American Indians, Hispanics, and Asians, but Anglo-Americans could control these mostly disenfranchised peoples and enjoy the privileges of power while celebrating their presence as providing a unique regional character. From this came the belief in a White Man’s West, a place ideally suited for “real” Americans in the face of changing world. The first comprehensive study to examine the construction of white racial identity in the West, Making the White Man’s West shows how these two visions of the West—as a racially diverse holding cell and a white refuge—shaped the history of the region and influenced a variety of contemporary social issues in the West today.

Slavery and the American West
Slavery and the American West

Author: Michael A. Morrison

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2000-11-15

Total Pages: 411

ISBN-13: 0807864323

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Tracing the sectionalization of American politics in the 1840s and 1850s, Michael Morrison offers a comprehensive study of how slavery and territorial expansion intersected as causes of the Civil War. Specifically, he argues that the common heritage of the American Revolution bound Americans together until disputes over the extension of slavery into the territories led northerners and southerners to increasingly divergent understandings of the Revolution's legacy. Manifest Destiny promised the literal enlargement of freedom through the extension of American institutions all the way to the Pacific. At each step--from John Tyler's attempt to annex Texas in 1844, to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, to the opening shots of the Civil War--the issue of slavery had to be confronted. Morrison shows that the Revolution was the common prism through which northerners and southerners viewed these events and that the factor that ultimately made consensus impossible was slavery itself. By 1861, no nationally accepted solution to the dilemma of slavery in the territories had emerged, no political party existed as a national entity, and politicians from both North and South had come to believe that those on the other side had subverted the American political tradition.

Backroads of the Great American West
Backroads of the Great American West

Author:

Publisher: Back Roads

Published: 2021-06-22

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 0760369976

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Backroads of the Great American West describes and details with full-color photos and maps the most scenic routes in the Rocky Mountains, Texas, Desert Southwest, California, and Pacific Northwest.

This Land
This Land

Author: Christopher Ketcham

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 0735220980

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"The public lands of the western United States comprise some 450 million acres of grassland, steppe land, canyons, forests, and mountains. It's an American commons, and it is under assault as never before. Journalist Christopher Ketcham has been documenting the confluence of commercial exploitation and governmental misconduct in this region for over a decade. His revelatory book takes the reader on a journey across these last wild places, to see how capitalism is killing our great commons. Ketcham begins in Utah, revealing the environmental destruction caused by unregulated public lands livestock grazing, and exposing rampant malfeasance in the federal land management agencies, who have been compromised by the profit-driven livestock and energy interests they are supposed to regulate. He then turns to the broad effects of those corrupt politics on wildlife. He tracks the Department of Interior's failure to implement and enforce the Endangered Species Act--including its stark betrayal of protections for the grizzly bear and the sage grouse--and investigates the destructive behavior of U.S. Wildlife Services in their shocking mass slaughter of animals that threaten the livestock industry. Along the way, Ketcham talks with ecologists, biologists, botanists, former government employees, whistleblowers, grassroots environmentalists and other citizens who are fighting to protect the public domain for future generations. This Land is a colorful muckraking journey--part Edward Abbey, part Upton Sinclair--exposing the rot in American politics that is rapidly leading to the sell-out of our national heritage"--