Product Description

Two eminent historians, Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher, present the American West as both frontier and region, real and imagined, old and new, and they show how men and women of all ethnic groups were affected when different cultures met and clashed. Their concise and engaging survey of frontier history traces the story from the first Columbian contacts between Indians and Europeans to the multicultural encounters of the modern Southwest.

The book attunes us to the voices of the frontiers many diverse peoples: Indians, struggling to defend their homelands and searching for a way to live with colonialism; the men and women who became immigrants and colonists from all over the world; African Americans, both slave and free; and border-land migrants from Mexico, Canada, and Asian lands. Profusely illustrated with contemporary drawings, posters, and photographs and written In lively and accessible prose, the book not only presents a panoramic view of historical events and characters but also provides fascinating details about such topics as western landscapes, environmental movements, literature, visual arts, and film.

Following in the tradition of Hine's earlier acclaimed work, The American West: An Interpretive History, this volume will be an essential resource for scholars, students, and general readers.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1272069 in Books
• Published on: 2000-01-11
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .2 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 632 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In a stirring and enlightening reexamination of the American West, Yale history professor Faragher (Women and Men on the Overland Trail) and Hine (Second Sight), a University of California professor emeritus of history, gauge the impact of key trends and events--the American Revolution, the multiethnic Gold Rush, the 1867 purchase of Russian America (dubbed Alaska, an Aleut word meaning "the big land"), the U.S.-Mexican War, the New Deal, etc.--in shaping the West's socioeconomic development. The American West of legend, brimming with ruggedly individualistic cowboys, intrepid pioneers and gunslingers, scarcely exists in this myth-shattering history. The real West was and continues to be a land of immigrants and of conflicting and melding cultures. "Manifest destiny," the authors maintain, was not a deeply held folk belief: rather, it was the deliberate creation of political propagandists determined to unyoke the policy of westward expansion from the growing sectional controversy over slavery in the 1830s and '40s. As the book moves from the West of the past to the present, the authors show how the region has become the nation's economic, political and cultural pacesetter: Hollywood became the capital of the U.S. "culture industry"; aerospace and defense industries soared; Silicon Valley booted up; Western states absorbed mass migrations from Mexico, Central America and Asia. A substantial revision and update of standard history, this gripping, wonderfully accessible populist saga deserves a place on the shelf alongside the works of Howard Zinn, William Appleman Williams and Ronald Takaki. 233 illus. (many from Yale's treasure-house, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library). (Dec.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Hine is professor emeritus of history at the University of California, Riverside and Irvine; Faragher is a professor of American history at Yale University. Both are distinguished experts in the fields of the westward movement and western regional history. In their superbly written work, they have synthesized the traditional and revisionist approaches to the West. They recognize the importance of successive waves of westward expansion in populating and developing the land. Yet, they also portray the West as a series of regions that were neither empty nor "uncivilized" before the arrival of Europeans and, later, Americans. They describe with insight and compassion the variety of peoples who inhabited these regions; the inevitable conflict with settlers and a government that wavered between contempt and misguided compassion is shown as both tragic and, occasionally, oddly heroic. They have done a masterful job of bringing a sense of fairness and perspective to a region and a saga that remain part of our national mythology. Jay Freeman