Reopening the American West

Take a good look at the American West and you'll see that the frontier is undergoing constant changes—not only changes made to the land but also changes in attitudes about the land held by the people who live there.

In this book Mike Davis, Stephen Pyne, William deBuys, Donald Worster, Dan Flores, and others re-examine the relationship between people and the environment in the American West over five hundred years, from the legacy of Coronado's search for the Cities of Gold to the social costs of tourism and gaming inflicted by modern adventurers. By exploring places in the West, aspects of the region's past, and ways of understanding some of its pressing issues, the authors foster a better understanding of how people interact and perceive land.

Reopening the American West takes a fresh approach to the history of the region, examining the premises of earlier scholars as well as those who have redefined the study of the West over the past two decades. It combines provocative essays with insightful analyses to address issues that are representative of the West in the twentieth century—multiculturalism, water issues, resource exploitation—and to reopen the West for all readers interested in new ways of looking at its wide-open spaces.

Contents:

Places
Dreams of Earth, William deBuys
Environmentalism and Multiculturalism, Dan L. Flores
Pyre on the Mountain, Stephen J. Pyne
Las Vegas Versus Nature, Mike Davis

Pasts
The Legacy of John Wesley Powell, Donald Worster
Pokey’s Paradox: Tourism and Transformation on the Western Navajo Reservation, Hal K. Rothman
Negotiating National Identity: Western Tourism and "See American First," Marguerite Schaffer

Understanding
Place Humanists at the Headgates, Helen Ingram
Tapping the Rockies: Resource Exploitation and Conservation in the Intermountain West, Char Miller
The Meaning of Place: Reimagining Community in a Changing West, Robert Gottlieb

Hal K. Rothman is a professor of history at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. He is the editor of the Environmental History Review and the author of numerous books and articles on both environmental history and the history of the American West.