Imagining The Big Open

The American West has long played a role in our consciousness as a place apart, a site of perpetual optimism and romanticism. In Imagining the Big Open a wide range of scholars deftly examine our projections upon and uses of the New West—a projection that not only includes how we imagine the West but how we use Western places. Addressing the history, popular culture, geography, and public policy of the region the contributors unravel our collective psyche where SUVs and REI cards exist in symbiosis with the wilderness movement and Sierra Club memberships.

Elaine Bapis is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Utah and teaches at Westminster College of Salt Lake City.

Thomas Harvey is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Utah and a news editor of government and education at the Salt Lake Tribune.

Liza Nicholas lives, writes, and teaches in Bozeman, Montana. Her first book, Culture and the Cowboy State: The Making of Westerners, is forthcoming.