Richard W. Etulain

The American West : a twentieth-century history

The mystique of the Wild West perpetuated by Buffalo Bill, Zane Grey and Louis LAmour, John Wayne, and the Marlboro Man has hindered the serious study of the real region west of the ninety-eighth meridian. Michael P. Malone and Richard W. Etulain move beyond myth and beyond the influential frontier thesis advanced by Frederick Jackson Turner to write about the American West as it has actually developed in the twentieth century. In vivid detail they describe a region too richly varied and dynamic to be contained by the imagination. Extending into the 1980s, The American West: A Twentieth-Century History is the first comprehensive survey of the modern West to appear in many years. Malone and Etulain discuss economic, political, social, and cultural developments in the West from the turn of the century to the onset of the Great Depression, when the region was still in a colonial relationship to the urban, industrial Northeast and upper Midwest; from 1930 to the end of World War II, when the West was transformed by New Deal programs and by even greater federal spending in military installations; and from 1945 to the present, when the West experienced rapid changes in demographics and a series of trendsetting lifestyles. Unique to this history are chapters about the rich cultural heritage of the modern West and about the lives of men, women, and children of various ethnic groups. Detailed bibliographical essays are included.

Writing Western history : essays on major Western historians

The diversity and vitality of the study of western history are indebted to the scholarly pioneers of the late-19th and early-20th centuries who established western history as a viable discipline and defined some of its principal themes. In this text, historian Richard Etulain has gathered 11 essays by western historians on ten of the disciplines early studentshe result is a survey of the evolution of a scholarly field and of the ways in which the study of history reflects the concerns and interests of the society around it. Each essay in the work analyzes the background and work of a single western historian, setting each scholar into the intellectual context of his times and analyzing his contributions and limitations. Etulains introduction and afterword provide a linking commentary on the individual essays and remind us that the study of history is never static, never isolated from the cultural world. Originally published in 1991, this edition includes a new foreword by Glenda Riley.

Portraits of Basques in the New World

This collection of essays provides an overview of the varied Basque experiences throughout the American Far West. It covers four centuries in three parts: the Basque diaspora in the New World; immigration and assimilation; and modern Basques.

The American Literary West and Its Interpreters: The Rise of a New Historiography

TWO SIGNIFICANT books published in 1950 illustrate the major trends in the historiography of the American literary West. Franklin Walkers A Literary History of Southern California exemplifies the most popular approach to western literature before 1950, and Henry Nash Smiths Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth became the major paradigm for studies of western writing undertaken after 1950. Taken together these two books and the methods of research they utilize provide important keys to understanding interpretations of the literary West during the present century.

Western lives : a biographical history of the American West

The history of the American West is full of intriguing life stories, and the fifteen essays in this collection weave a selection of those lives together to focus on the main currents in the regions history. The first five essays cover the period from contact to the mid-nineteenth century and feature Indian leaders and Spanish colonisers, characters from the Mexican period, explorers, mountain men, and missionaries. Familiar names in this portion are Juan Bautista de Anza, Stephen F. Austin, Dona Tules, Lewis and Clark, Jedediah Smith, and Narcissa Whitman. The second group of essays reflects on Mormons, miners, California Hispanics, American Indians, ranchers, farmers, and the Wild West of Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley. The essays on the twentieth-century West examine the careers of James J. Hill, John Muir, Jeannette Rankin, Aimee Semple McPherson, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Walt Disney, Cesar Chavez, Barbara Jordan, Microsofts Paul Allen, and the mythical figure of Rosie the Riveter.

Wild women of the Old West

Presents the sensational lives and exploits of nine notorious women from the days of boisterous frontier saloons and high-noon showdowns.

Researching western history : topics in the twentieth century

Research opportunities in the economic history of the twentieth-century West / Gerald D. Nash -- Research opportunities in twentieth-century western history : natural resources and environment / Thomas R. Cox -- The impending western urban past : an essay on the twentieth-century West / Roger W. Lotchin -- Research opportunities in twentieth-century western history : politics / Robert W. Cherny -- Twentieth-century western women : research issues and possibilities / Glenda Riley -- Research opportunitiesin twentieth-century western cultural history / Richard W. Etulain -- The enduring myth and the modern West / Fred Erisman -- Research in a theater in the round / Gene M. Gressley.

A Country in the Mind: Wallace Stegner, Bernard DeVoto, History, and the American Land

In this beautifully written account, John Thomas details an intimate portrait of the intellectual friendship between two commanding figures of western letters and the early environmental movement--Wallace Stegner and Bernard DeVoto. The authors of enormously popular works--Stegner most well known for his novels The Big Rock Candy Mountain and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Angle of Repose and DeVoto for his classic history of western exploration, The Course of Empire--they also played important roles in the efforts to stop government and private interests from carving up the vanishing West. Part of the fractious group of public intellectuals at Harvard that included Edmund Wilson, Mary McCarthy, and Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., they saw no contradiction between their literary and political selves and entered the public debate with conviction and passion. Drawing on their writings, personal correspondence, and dozens of articles from the pages of Harpers, where DeVoto was a columnist for years, this illuminating account demonstrates how their concerns for the western environment continue to resonate today.

Let the Cowboy Ride: Cattle Ranching in the American West.

The dime novel and dude ranch, the barbecue and rodeo, the suburban ranch house and the urban cowboy - all are a direct legacy of 19th-century cowboy life which still enlivens American popular culture. Yet at the same time, reports of environmental destruction or economic inefficiency have led to calls for restrictions in grazing livestock on public lands, or even an end to ranching altogether. In fact, writes Paul F. Starrs, the history of ranching in the United States is a full one of ongoing tension and conflict - between ranchers and farmers, between US citizens and their government, between Texas cowboys and California buckaroos. In Let the Cowboy Ride, Starrs offers a detailed and comprehensive look at one of Americas most enduring institutions. Richly illustrated with more than 130 photographs and maps, the book combines the authentic detail of an insiders view (Starrs spent six years working cattle on the high desert Great Basin range) with a scholars keen eye for objective analysis. Tracing the geography and history of ranching in the US, Starrs tells how Anglo settlers first encountered the open grasslands of the West - an environment quite alien to most of the European experience. Knowing little of the Wests unique geography, Congress in far-off Washington enacted land-use laws better suited to the needs of Jeffersonian yeoman farmers, with idealized 160-acre plots in the Ohio Valley, than to those of cattle ranchers in the semi-arid West. Starrs describes how these laws, which made it extremely difficult for citizens to obtain the large tracts of land needed for cattle raising, soon came into conflict not only with the stern realities of Western climate, but also with the customs and practices of the regions Hispanic inhabitants, whose system of land grants - based on group ownership of large tracts of land - was far better suited to ranchers needs. Starrs tracks the imprint of these conflicts in shaping ranching today. He explores the paradox of the lonesome cowboy, whose rugged individualism is in constant conflict with the need to accommodate federal land-use laws (resulting in a situation in which the level of rancher unease ...is roughly proportional to the amount of rangeland controlled by the federal government). And he shows how understanding past mistakes can shape land-use reform in the West today.

Rodman Wilson Paul, Historical Perspectives of an Adopted Westerner

me to work with him on the project, and what I learned over the next two or three years during that joint venture was what many specialists in the history of the American West already knew: Rodman Paul had a splendid grasp of western history coupled with a broad knowledge of primary and secondary sources, particularly those dealing with mining and economic history, the Mormons, women in the mining West, and other topics in political and social history. And he was very much interested in sharing what he had learned with other scholars.1 That sharing continued until his death on May 15, 1987. Rodman Pauls career illustrates a noteworthy trend in the development of western historical studies and the major currents of western historiography-the born and bred