Into the West
The Story of Its People
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1.0 • 1 Rating
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
Acclaimed historian Walter Nugent brings us what is perhaps the most comprehensive and fascinating account to date of the peopling of the American West. In this epic social-demographic history, Nugent explores the populations of the West as they grow, change and intersect from the Paleo-Indians, the Spanish Conquistadors, to displaced Okies, wartime African American immigrants, and all the disparate groups that have made California the most ethnically diverse state in the union.
Their tale, in all its complexity, is a tale that surprises, that subverts traditional stereotypes and that illuminates the multifaceted character of one of the world’s most unique and dynamic territories.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nugent's vibrant multicultural history of the American West shatters a number of myths. He finds that the popular mythology of an Old West of wagon trains, Indian raids and range wars is an "entirely Anglocentric" narrative that conceals the West's richly diverse ethnic and racial heritage. His boldly inclusive chronicle begins with Paleo-Indians like the Mogollon people, who settled the mountains east of Phoenix, Ariz., by 300 B.C. As he summarizes how Spanish missionaries, soldiers and ordinary people penetrated the Southwest and California, converting, decimating, interacting with and transforming the lives of Native Americans, he evokes a West that existed as something more than the proving ground of manifest destiny for the young American republic. Based on excerpts from letters, memoirs and testimonies of pioneers, his eye-opening mosaic gives us a West of Basque sheepherders and restaurateurs; Ukrainian and Greek railroad workers; Polish, Swiss and Croat miners; migrant workers dispossessed by the 1890s depression. Nugent persuasively argues that, between 1914 and 1929, the West spearheaded the country's fundamental shift from rural to urban. With a keen eye, he examines recent trends, such as resurgent environmentalism, depopulation of rural areas, the postwar baby boom (most explosive in the nation's six westernmost states) and the advent of Latinos as the West's largest minority. Nugent's picture of the real West--complex, multicultural and, above all, real--serves as a modern alternative, if not a correction, to Frederick Jackson Turner's classic The Frontier in American History. Photos, maps.
