New Books In The American West

The Western as a genre is alive and vibrant, argues University of Maine - Farmington professor of English literature Michael K. Johnson. In Speculative Wests: Popular Representations of a Region and a Genre (U Nebraska Press, 2023), Johnson explains how authors, directors, and storytellers are pushing the classic genre into new directions by hybridizing Western tropes with science fiction, horror, and fantasy storytelling. These new speculative Westerns are revitalizing a genre, which has grown incredibly popular in recent years through television series like The Last of Us and Westworld, as well as many examples in film and literature. Speculative Westerns have also allowed space for Native and African American writers and storytellers to expand the genre into more inclusive spaces, telling stories about people often left out or stereotyped in more traditional Western stories. By including time travel, zombies, and vampires, Johnson argues that the Western has cemented itself with a new generation of America

Between 1902 and 1934, the United States confined hundreds of adults and children from dozens of Native nations at the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians, a federal psychiatric hospital in South Dakota. But detention at the Indian Asylum, as families experienced it, was not the beginning or end of the story. For them, Canton Asylum was one of many places of imposed removal and confinement, including reservations, boarding schools, orphanages, and prison-hospitals. Despite the long reach of institutionalization for those forcibly held at the Asylum, the tenacity of relationships extended within and beyond institutional walls. In Committed: Remembering Native Kinship in and Beyond Institutions (UNC Press, 2021), Susan Burch tells the story of the Indigenous people—families, communities, and nations, across generations to the present day—who have experienced the impact of this history. Drawing on oral history interviews, correspondence, material objects, and archival sources, Burch reframes the histories of instit

For almost fifty years, coal dominated the Navajo economy. But in 2019 one of the Navajo Nation’s largest coal plants closed. This comprehensive new work offers a deep dive into the complex inner workings of energy shift in the Navajo Nation. In Carbon Sovereignty: Coal, Development, and Energy Transition in the Navajo Nation (University of Arizona Press, 2023) geographer Andrew Curley, a member of the Navajo Nation, examines the history of coal development within the Navajo Nation, including why some Diné supported coal and the consequences of doing so. He explains the Navajo Nation’s strategic choices to use the coal industry to support its sovereignty as a path forward in the face of ongoing colonialism. Carbon Sovereignty demonstrates the mechanism of capitalism through colonialism and the construction of resource sovereignty, in both the Navajo Nation’s embrace and its rejection of a coal economy. For the people of the Navajo Nation, energy sovereignty is dire and personal. Thanks to on-the-ground interv

Despite the seeming supremacy of car culture in the United States, the train has long been and continues to be a potent symbol of American exceptionalism, ingenuity, and vastness. For almost two centuries, the train has served as the literal and symbolic vehicle for American national identity, manifest destiny, and imperial ambitions. It’s no surprise, then, that the train continues to endure in depictions across literature, film, ad music. The Racial Railroad (NYU Press, 2022) highlights the surprisingly central role that the railroad has played―and continues to play―in the formation and perception of racial identity and difference in the United States. Julia H. Lee argues that the train is frequently used as the setting for stories of race because it operates across multiple registers and scales of experience and meaning, both as an invocation of and a depository for all manner of social, historical, and political narratives. Lee demonstrates how, through legacies of racialized labor and disenfranchisement―

The Lakȟóta are among the best-known Native American peoples. In popular culture and even many scholarly works, they were once lumped together with others and called the Sioux. This book tells the full story of Lakȟóta culture and society, from their origins to the twenty-first century, drawing on Lakȟóta voices and perspectives. In Lakȟóta culture, "listening" is a cardinal virtue, connoting respect, and here authors Rani-Henrik Andersson and David C. Posthumus listen to the Lakȟóta, both past and present. The history of Lakȟóta culture unfolds in this narrative as the people lived it.  The book opens with an origin story, that of White Buffalo Calf Woman (Ptesanwin) and her gift of the sacred pipe to the Lakȟóta people. Drawing on winter counts, oral traditions and histories, and Lakȟóta letters and speeches, the narrative proceeds through such periods and events as early Lakȟóta-European trading, the creation of the Great Sioux Reservation, Christian missionization, the Plains Indian Wars, the Ghost Dan

Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and Energy in Making the North American West (U California Press, 2022) deepens the analysis of settler colonialism's endurance in the North American West and how infrastructures that ground sexual modernity are both reproduced and challenged by publics who have inherited them. E Cram redefines sexual modernity through extractivism, wherein sexuality functions to extract value from life including land, air, minerals, and bodies. Analyzing struggles over memory cultures through the region's land use controversies at the turn of and well into the twentieth century, Cram unpacks the consequences of western settlement and the energy regimes that fueled it. Transfusing queer eco-criticism with archival and ethnographic research, Cram reconstructs the linkages—"land lines"—between infrastructure, violence, sexuality, and energy and shows how racialized sexual knowledges cultivated settler colonial cultures of both innervation and enervation. From the residential school system t

Over one quarter - some 640 million acres - of the United States consists of public land owned, not privately, but by the federal government, much of it in the American West. University of Idaho professor emeritus of history Adam Sowards explains why in his new book, Making America's Public Lands: The Contested History of Conservation on Federal Lands (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022). Sowards explains the origins of the concept of public land and how the idea has come into conflict with American's adoration for private property, as well as how different stakeholders have come into conflict over the proper use of resources on these lands. From ranching and timber cutting to tourism and wilderness, the US government has attempted to make public lands fulfill several different roles, and in doing so have turned them into something of a political football over the course of the twentieth century. But, as Sowards argues, by being such a malleable, egalitarian, and controversial project, they have come to represent t

Tom Zoellner walked across the length of Arizona to come to terms with his home state. But the trip revealed more mountains behind the mountains. Rim to River: Looking Into the Heart of Arizona (U Arizona Press, 2023) is the story of this extraordinary journey through redrock country, down canyons, up mesas, and across desert plains to the obscure valley in Mexico that gave the state its enigmatic name. The trek is interspersed with incisive essays that pick apart the distinctive cultural landscape of Arizona: the wine-colored pinnacles and complex spirituality of Navajoland, the mind-numbing stucco suburbs, desperate border crossings, legislative skullduggery, extreme politics, billion-dollar copper ventures, dehydrating rivers, retirement kingdoms, old-time foodways, ghosts of old wars, honky-tonk dreamers, murder mysteries, and magical Grand Canyon reveries. In Rim to River, Zoellner does for Arizona what Larry McMurtry did for Texas in In a Narrow Grave and what Wallace Stegner did for Utah in Mormon Coun

For countless Americans, the open road has long been a place where dangers lurk. In the era of Jim Crow, Black travelers encountered locked doors, hostile police, and potentially violent encounters almost everywhere, in both the South and the North. From 1936 to 1967, millions relied on The Negro Motorist Green Book, the definitive guide to businesses where they could safely rest, eat, or sleep. Most Americans only know of the guide from the 2018 Green Book movie or the 2020 Lovecraft Country TV show. Alvin Hall set out to revisit the world of the Green Book to instruct us all on the real history of the guide that saved many lives. With his friend Janée Woods Weber, he drove from New York to Detroit to New Orleans, visiting motels, restaurants, shops, and stores where Black Americans once found a friendly welcome. They explored historical and cultural landmarks, from the theatres and clubs where stars like Duke Ellington and Lena Horne performed to the Lorraine Motel where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assa

Urban landscapes are complex spaces of sociocultural diversity, characterized by narratives of both conviviality and conflict. As people with multiple ethnicities and nationalities find their common destinies in thriving globalizing cities, social cohesiveness becomes more precarious as different beliefs, practices, ambitions, values, and affiliations intersect in close proximity, producing social tensions.  Felicity Hwee-Hwa Chan's Tensions in Diversity: Spaces for Collective Life in Los Angeles (U Toronto Press, 2022) presents a multi-method comparative study that draws on the experiences of 140 residents of native and immigrant origin, community organizers, and municipal officers in three culturally diverse neighborhoods of varying income levels in Los Angeles County. Using cognitive mapping analysis combined with data from interviews, surveys, and participant observation, this book explores how exactly coexistence is socio-spatially experienced and negotiated in daily life. Tensions in Diversity identifie

What can an airport tell us about a city? Quite a bit, according to UC-Santa Cruz history professor Eric Porter in A People's History of SFO: The Making of the Bay Area and an Airport (University of California Press, 2023). San Francisco's SFO airport has been reshaping the Bay Area's politics and reflecting the region's inequalities since its founding in 1927, Porter argues. From the dispossessed Native land on which it was built, to the class dynamics shaping airport noise and amenities, to the airport's mid-century racist hiring practices, the facility served as a microcosm of Bay Area problems, promise, and growth. Even in recent years, with the airport serving as a site for pro-immigrant activism during the Trump era, SFO continues to be a symbol for the city s a whole. As sea level rises threaten to swamp the runways, the airport's future is uncertain, but its past is a useful lens for viewing western urban history in the twentieth century.  Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history a

Abandoning Their Beloved Land: The Politics of Bracero Migration in Mexico (U California Press, 2023) offers an essential new history of the Bracero Program, a bilateral initiative that allowed Mexican men to work in the United States as seasonal contract farmworkers from 1942 to 1964. Using national and local archives in Mexico, historian Alberto García uncovers previously unexamined political factors that shaped the direction of the program, including how officials administered the bracero selection process and what motivated campesinos from central states to migrate. Notably, García's book reveals how and why the federal government's delegation of Bracero Program-related responsibilities, the powerful influence of conservative Catholic opposition groups in central Mexico, and the failures of the revolutionary agrarian reform all profoundly influenced the program's administration and individual decisions to migrate as braceros. Rachel Grace Newman is a historian of modern Mexico with particular interests i

Sonia Robles, an assistant professor of history at the University of Delaware, talks about her book, Mexican Waves: Radio Broadcasting Along Mexico’s Northern Border, 1930-1950 (University of Arizona Press, 2019), with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Mexican Waves tells the fascinating history of radio stations entrepreneurs set up along the Mexican side of the Mexico-USA border, primarily to reach laborers working in the United States. Robles covers fascinating dimensions of the radio broadcasting industry, including advertisements that played over the airwaves, how regulation shaped the behavior of radio station owners, and how radio fit into the lives of touring performers. Robles and Vinsel also discuss recent efforts of historians to capture the history of local radio stations throughout North America. Lee Vinsel is an associate professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech. He studies human life with technology, with particular focus on the relationship between gover

This highly original story reflects on how the carceral state shapes daily life for young Black people--and how Black Americans resist, find joy, and cultivate new visions for the future. Joy and Pain: A Story of Black Life and Liberation in Five Albums (University of California Press, 2022) is about a young man, Marley, and a particular place, the Southern California Library--an archive of radical and progressive movements and a community organization where the author meets Marley.  Taking music as its thematic undercurrent, the book is structured as a "record collection." Each of the five "albums" relates Marley's personal encounters with everyday aspects of the carceral state through an ethnographic A side and then offers deeper context through an anthropological and archival B side. In telling Marley's story, Damien M. Sojoyner depicts the overwhelming nature of Black precarity in the twenty-first century through the lenses of housing, education, health care, social services, and juvenile detention facili

Matt Hern began to examine urban displacement when he first encountered an empty lot in the northeast sector of Portland, OR. This corner was the site of a community resisting against gentrification. In this episode, Chris Gondak speaks with Matt Hern about the inspiration for his book, and the battles that many urban communities are fighting across North America. Portland, Oregon, is one of the most beautiful, livable cities in the United States. It has walkable neighborhoods, bike lanes, low-density housing, public transportation, and significant green space--not to mention craft-beer bars and locavore food trucks. But liberal Portland is also the whitest city in the country. This is not circumstance; the city has a long history of officially sanctioned racialized displacement that continues today. Over the last two and half decades, Albina--the one major Black neighborhood in Portland--has been systematically uprooted by market-driven gentrification and city-renewal policies. African Americans in Portland

Oakland grew up on the shadow of the dynamo of the nineteenth century West, always the "other" city on San Francisco Bay.  But as Mitchell Schwarzer, Professor Emeritus of art history and visual culture at California College of the Arts, argues in Hella Town: Oakland's History of Development and Disruption (University of California, 2021), the city also has much to tell us about the history of urban development, inequality, and the role of transit in shaping city life. In this way, Oakland is every city in the United States, a synecdoche for 20th century urban renewal, American car culture, and recent trends in labor such as remote work. From sports to cable cars, the story of 20th century Oakland is both tragedy and triumph, and its center, the story of people and a culture changing and creating change in the inherently dynamic urban American West. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-w

The history of Black Alaskans runs deep and spans generations. Decades before statehood and earlier even than the Klondike gold rush of the 1890s, Black men and women participated in Alaska's politics and culture. They hunted whales, patrolled the seas, built roads, served in the military, and opened businesses, even as they endured racism and fought injustices. Into the twentieth century, Alaska's Black residents were often part of the larger, nationwide freedom struggle. At the same time, Black settlers found themselves in a far different context than elsewhere in the United States, as Alaska's strategic military location, economic reliance on oil, and unique racial landscape influenced how Black Alaskans made a home for themselves in the northwesternmost corner of the country. Centering the agency and diversity of Black Alaskans, Ian C. Hartman and David Reamer's book Black Lives in Alaska: A History of African Americans in the Far Northwest (U Washington Press, 2022) chronicles how Alaska's Black populati

In A Lovely Girl: The Tragedy of Olga Duncan and the Trial of California's Most Notorious Killer (Pegasus Crime, 2022), Deborah Larkin tells the incredible story of a 1958 murder that ended with the last woman to ever be executed in California—a murder so twisted it seems ripped from a Greek tragedy. Larkin was only ten years old when the quiet calm of her California suburb was shattered. Thirty miles north, on a quiet November night in Santa Barbara, a pregnant nurse named Olga Duncan disappeared from her apartment. The mystery deepens when it is discovered that Olga’s mother in-law—a deeply manipulative and deceptive woman—had been doing everything in her power to separate Olga and her son, Frank, prior to Olga’s disappearance. From a forged annulment to multiple attempts to hire people to “get rid” of Olga, to a faked excoriation case, Elizabeth seemed psychopathically attached to her son. Yet she denied having anything to do with Olga’s disappearance with a smile. But when Olga’s brutally beaten body is f

In Kids on the Street: Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco's Tenderloin (Duke UP, 2023), Joseph Plaster explores the informal support networks that enabled abandoned and runaway queer youth to survive in tenderloin districts across the United States. Tracing the history of the downtown lodging house districts where marginally housed youth regularly lived beginning in the late 1800s, Plaster focuses on San Francisco’s Tenderloin from the 1950s to the present. He draws on archival, ethnographic, oral history, and public humanities research to outline the queer kinship networks, religious practices, performative storytelling, and migratory patterns that allowed these kids to foster social support and mutual aid. He shows how they collectively and creatively managed the social trauma they experienced, in part by building relationships with johns, bartenders, hotel managers, bouncers, and other vice district denizens. By highlighting a politics where the marginal position of street kids is the basis for a

When miners arrived in California seeking their fortune during the gold rush of the 1840s and early 1850s, they encountered a place with few existing legal systems. Recently acquired from Mexico, California was truly America's frontier, and when American miners arrived they did what Americans have always done: they held meetings.  In We the Miners: Self-Government in the California Gold Rush (Harvard UP, 2022), Seton Hall law professor Andrea McDowell explains the development and working of miners codes and other legal systems put in place during the heady and often violent early days of the California Gold Rush. Before statehood, miners were on their own to construct a version of direct democracy that reflected their values and gave them power to govern, until the creation of state government and the arrival of corporate mining entities. In McDowell's telling, the early days of the gold rush speak to Americans strong belief in democracy and self-governance, and who gets a say in justice when gold is on the l