The West Books
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Igler uses the rags-to-riches rise of two immigrant butchers to explore a series of issues including California's water and land politics and the impact of population and economic growth on the state's environment.
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Historians have challenged much of what Turner advanced in 1890. His "composite nationality" ignores important and persisting sources of division in American society; the democracy he saw advancing across the West ignores the very undemocratic power asserted by railroads, speculators, and banks. But more than a hundred years later, Turner's thesis is still debated.
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Nash traces American beliefs about nature and wilderness from their European and Biblically-based beginnings through the mid-20th century. The book is strongest in tracing the role of romanticism and transcendentalism in pushing American attitudes toward the conservationism of the 20th century.
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This award-winning book offers a fresh take on the farmers' movement of the late-19th century. Differing from other studies that have tended to treat Populists as either unrealistically utopian or hopelessly nostalgic, Postel's book suggests that the Populists offered a realistic and modern approach to politics and government.
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White travels from the European explorers of the 16th century to the last decades of the 20th in this sweeping exploration of the West. In analyzing the 19th-century American West, White argues that "the federal government shaped the West" and the West itself served as the kindergarten of the American state."