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Winner of Columbia University's 2024 Bancroft Prize in American History
Winner of the 2024 Caughey Western History Prize
Winner of the 2024 Spur Award
Named a Best Civil War Book of 2023 by Civil War Monitor
In Continental Reckoning renowned historian Elliott West presents a sweeping narrative of the American West and its vital role in the transformation of the nation. In the 1840s, by which time the United States had expanded to the Pacific, what would become the West was home to numerous vibrant Native cultures and vague claims by other nations. Thirty years later it was organized into states and territories and bound into the nation and world by an infrastructure of rails, telegraph wires, and roads and by a racial and ethnic order, with its Indigenous peoples largely dispossessed and confined to reservations.
Unprecedented exploration uncovered the West's extraordinary resources, beginning with the discovery of gold in California within days of the United States acquiring the territory following the Mexican-American War. As those resources were developed, often by the most modern methods and through modern corporate enterprise, half of the contiguous United States was physically transformed. Continental Reckoning guides the reader through the rippling, multiplying changes wrought in the western half of the country, arguing that these changes should be given equal billing with the Civil War in this crucial transition of national life.
As the West was acquired, integrated into the nation, and made over physically and culturally, the United States shifted onto a course of accelerated economic growth, a racial reordering and redefinition of citizenship, engagement with global revolutions of science and technology, and invigorated involvement with the larger world. The creation of the West and the emergence of modern America were intimately related. Neither can be understood without the other. With masterful prose and a critical eye, West presents a fresh approach to the dawn of the American West, one of the most pivotal periods of American history.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
February 1, 2023 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781496234445
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781496234445
- File size: 18780 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Starred review from December 15, 2022
Richly rewarding survey of the history of the frontier West. "It is always easy to miss the obvious," writes prolific historian West of what he considers to be its defining characteristic--namely, "its sheer energy and fluidity, movement and change of a degree that set it apart at the time and, arguably, from any time before or since." As the author shows, the acquisition of the West, from the Texas Revolution to the wresting of the Northwest and Southwest from Britain and Mexico, brought so much territory to the U.S. that, if the same bonanza were to happen today, the nation would extend deep into South America. The American population tripled between 1800 and 1840, and a significant number headed west only to find that, even then, the myths of rugged individualism were thoroughly compromised by a cabal of corporatists and politicians. As he did in The Last Indian War and other books, West writes with an eye to irony and telling details. He notes, for instance, that John Wesley Powell's groundbreaking classification of Native American nations and languages was but one more instrument of their captivity on reservations. While life for non-Whites was exceedingly difficult, White Americans could readily reinvent themselves. Among the greatest ironies the author uncovers is the fact that by the mid-1880s, ranching was "one of the most corporatized businesses in the nation," with investment pouring in from the East and Europe. Though the Homestead Act--bitterly opposed by the South--did offer land to individual farmers and "enshrined an agrarian version of the ideal of free labor," its success was mixed. Of lasting effect, in West's view, is that where the disunion that led to civil war was furthered by lack of interregional communications, the postwar expansion of railroads, fast ships, and telegraphy created a superpower. A comprehensive, lucid, and often surprising history of western settlement in America.COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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