William Deverell 
A Companion to the American West 

A Companion to the American West is a rigorous, illuminating introduction to the history of the American West. Twenty-five essays by expert scholars synthesize the best and most provocative work in the field and provide a comprehensive overview of themes and historiography.

* Covers the culture, politics, and environment of the American West through periods of migration, settlement, and modernization

* Discusses Native Americans and their conflicts and integration with American settlers

Table of Content

Notes on Contributors viii

Introduction 1
William Deverell

Part I Thinking Through the American West

1 The Making of the First American West and the Unmaking of Other Realms 5
Stephen Aron

2 Thinking West 25
Elliott West

Part II Conquest and Its Patterns: The Nineteenth Century

3 Passion and Imagination in the Exploration of the American West 53
James P. Ronda

4 Environment and the Nineteenth-Century West: Or, Process Encounters Place 77
Andrew C. Isenberg

5 Engineering the Elephant: Industrialism and the Environment in the Greater West 93
David Igler

6 Mining and the Nineteenth-Century American West 112
Malcolm J. Rohrbough

7 Law and the Contact of Cultures 130
Sarah Barringer Gordon

8 Native Americans in the Nineteenth-Century American West 143
David Rich Lewis

9 Western Violence 162
Michael A. Bellesiles

10 Bringing It All Back Home: Rethinking the History of Women and the Nineteenth-Century West 179
Elizabeth Jameson

11 Empire and Liberty: Contradictions and Conflicts in Nineteenth-Century Western Political History 200
Jeffrey Ostler

Part III Exceptionalism or Regionalism? The Twentieth-Century American West

12 African Americans in the Twentieth-Century West 221
Douglas Flamming

13 The West and Workers, 1870-1930 240
James N. Gregory

14 Societies to Match the Scenery: Twentieth-Century Environmental History in the American West 256
Dan Flores

15 Where to Draw the Line? The Pacific, Place, and the US West 271
Chris Friday

16 Religion and the American West 286
Philip Goff

17 Transients and Stickers: The Problem of Community in the American West 304
Anne Hyde

18 American Indians in the Twentieth Century 329
Peter Iverson

19 The New Deal’s West 346
Karen R. Merrill

20 Art, Ideology, and the West 361
Douglas R. Nickel

21 ‘The West Plays West’: Western Tourism and the Landscape of Leisure 375
Marguerite S. Shaffer

22 Hispanics and Latinos 390
Ramón A. Gutiérrez

23 City Lights: Urban History in the West 412
Robert O. Self

24 Politics and the Twentieth-Century American West 442
William Deverell

25 The Literary West and the Twentieth Century 460
David M. Wrobel

Bibliography 481

Index 553

About the author

William Deverell is Professor of History at the University of Southern California and director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. He is the author of Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad, 1850-1910 (1994) and Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past (2004). He co-authored Eden by Design: The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region (2000) and The West in the History of the Nation (2000) and co-edited California Progressivism Revisited (1994) and Metropolis in the Making: Los Angeles in the 1920s (2001).