Description
Book SynopsisA collection of 13 biographies of men and women who have contributed to the development of the American West. It includes the lives that collectively offer racial and gender diversity as well as differing class and sexual orientation backgrounds.
Trade ReviewDuring the 1980s and 1990s, the pioneering work of such scholars as Patricia Limerick gave rise to the New Western History, an intellectual crusade that has completely altered the way most Americans view their own past and the westward movement. Women, Hispanics, and African Americans were just as conspicuous in the westward movement as white men, and The Human Tradition in the American West captures that diversity and complexity. Benson Tong and Regan Lutz have assembled a series of essays that are richly nuanced, intellectually balanced, and true to the rich traditions of the American West. -- James S. Olson, Sam Houston State University
This superb reader helps to explain the American West in all its complexities and varieties. Through individual biographies that span the centuries from the late eighteenth to the present, the authors animate a region that, despite the legends, maddeningly defies convenient geographical expression. Place and process, region and multiplicity of places—all are set gracefully within the context of a larger American history. This book may be used with great success in both seminars and surveys. -- L. G. Moses, Oklahoma State University
Table of ContentsChapter 1 Introduction: The West in Its Many Incarnations Chapter 2 Francisco Javier Clavijero and the Founding of the Literary West Chapter 3 Eliza Hart Spalding: Missionary Legacy of a Forgotten Feminist Chapter 4 MarÌa Amparo Ruiz Burton and The Squatter and the Don Chapter 5 Henry De Groot and the Mining West Chapter 6 William Jefferson Hardin: Wyoming's Nineteenth-Century Black Legislator Chapter 7 Henry Ossian Flipper: African American Western Pioneer Chapter 8 Clare True and Female Moral Authority Chapter 9 Joseph W. Brown: Native American Politician Chapter 10 Eugene Pulliam: Municipal Booster Chapter 11 William O. Douglas: The Environmental Justice Chapter 12 Margaret Chung and the Dilemma of a Bicultural Identity Chapter 13 Robert Burnette: A Postwar Lakota Activist Chapter 14 Harvey Milk: San Francisco and the Gay Migration
