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.

To tell the story, West begins with the early history of the Nez Perce and their years of friendly relations with white settlers. In an initial treaty, the Nez Perce were promised a large part of their ancestral homeland, but the discovery of gold led to a stampede of settlement within the Nez Perce land. Numerous injustices at the hands of the US government combined with the settlers' invasion to provoke this most accomodating of tribes to war. West offers a riveting account of what came next: the harrowing flight of 800 Nez Perce, including many women, children and elderly, across 1500 miles of mountainous and difficult terrain. He gives a full reckoning of the campaigns and battles--and the unexpected turns, brilliant stratagems, and grand heroism that occurred along the way. And he brings to life the complex characters from both sides of the conflict, including cavalrymen, officers, politicians, and--at the center of it all--the Nez Perce themselves (the Nimiipuu, true people). The book sheds light on the war's legacy, including the near sainthood that was bestowed upon Chief Joseph, whose speech of surrender, I will fight no more forever, became as celebrated as the Gettysburg Address.

Based on a rich cache of historical documents, from government and military records to contemporary interviews and newspaper reports, The Last Indian War offers a searing portrait of a moment when the American identity--who was and who was not a citizen--was being forged.

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. Continental Reckoning argues that these changes should be given equal billing with the Civil War in this crucial transition of national life.

As the American 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, Continental Reckoning presents a fresh approach to the dawn of the American West, one of the most pivotal periods of American history.

Drawing from the past three centuries, West weaves the western story into that of the nation and the world beyond, from Kansas and Montana to Haiti, Africa, and the court of Louis XV.

Divided into three sections, the volume begins with conquest. West is not the first historian to write about Lewis and Clark, but he is the first to contrast their expedition with Mungo Park's contemporaneous journey in Africa. The Lewis and Clark expedition, West begins, is one of the most overrated events in American history--and one of the most revealing. The humor of this insightful essay is a chief characteristic of the whole book, which comprises ten chapters previously published in major journals and magazines--but revised for this edition--and four brand-new ones.

West is well known for his writings about frontier family life, especially the experiences of children at work and play. Fans of his earlier books on these subjects will not be disappointed. In a final section, he looks at the West of myth and imagination, in part to show that our fantasies about the West are worth studying precisely because they have been so at odds with the real West. In essays on buffalo, Jesse James and the McMurtry novel Lonesome Dove, West directs his formidable powers to subjects that continue to shape our understanding--and often our misunderstanding--of the American West, past and present.

The Contested Plains recounts the rise of the Native American horse culture, white Americans' discovery and pursuit of gold in the Rocky Mountains, and the wrenching changes and bitter conflicts that ensued. After centuries of many peoples fashioning many cultures on the plains, the Cheyennes and other tribes found in the horse the power to create a heroic way of life that dominated one of the world's great grasslands. Then the discovery of gold challenged that way of life and led finally to the infamous massacre at Sand Creek and the Indian Wars of the late 1860s.

Illuminating both the ancient and more recent history of the plains and eastern Rocky Mountains, West weaves together a brilliant tapestry interlaced with environmental, social, and military history. He treats the frontier not as a morally loaded term--either in the traditional celebratory sense or the more recent critical sense--but as a powerfully unsettling process that shattered an old world. He shows how Indians, goldseekers, haulers, merchants, ranchers, and farmers all contributed to and in turn were consumed by this process, even as the plains themselves were utterly transformed by the clash of cultures and competing visions.

Exciting and enormously engaging, The Contested Plains is the first book to examine the Colorado gold rush as the key event in the modern transformation of the central great plains. It also exemplifies a kind of history that respects more fully our rich and ambiguous past--a past in which there are many actors but no simple lessons.

This poignant history of the great migrations of the Cheyenne Indians and Anglo pioneers onto the arid Central Plains tells a complex story of the relationship between people and the environment. Elliott West, a distinguished western historian, turns his attention here to land, animals, families, and stories. Focusing on a region embracing parts of present-day Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, and Wyoming, he examines both the facts and myths of the migrations. How did the environment and people affect one another? How did families respond to the challenges of the Central Plains? How have our stories shaped our consciousness of that history? The Way to the West combines deep research with insightful analysis and narrative skill to present a story that both historians and students will enjoy.

An accomplished social historian, West argues forcefully here that history can never be only about human society. It always takes place--unfolds within the shifting, particular complexity of nature. His treatment of the Indian era on the plains is a particularly fresh, insightful demonstration of that fact.--Donald Worster

It may not be possible to take a fresher look at a slice of the West that Elliott West does here. These are inventive, compelling and original essays. Like their author, they are wry, learned, and just plain curious. A wonderful book.--Richard White

The thirteen essays in Small Worlds take a different tack. They treat children as active, influential participants in society. Here children and adolescents from the pre-Civil War generation to 1950 are seen as actors in their own right, shapers of their own history who not only mirror adult values, but also modify them.

Editors Elliott West and Paula Petrik have organized the essays in Small Worlds around four topics: cultural and regional variations, toys and play, family life, and the ways evolving memories of childhood shape how adults think of themselves. And, since photography provides the best record of childhood, they've added a photographic essay by Ray Hiner entitled Seen but Not Heard.

A youthful perspective on the past can provide a much better understanding of changes in American material and economic life, write West and Petrik. Young people, they argue, performed many of the essential jobs in newly industrialized America, and they continued to play vital roles on their families' farms well into the twentieth century. As a result, children have been increasingly influential in American economic life--as consumers.

According to West and Petrik, the study of children also reveals how values evolve out of the mutual give-and-take between society and child in the socialization process. This enormously complex evolution continues as the child matures and, in turn, tries mightily to pass on values to a new generation of children who work just as strenuously to make up their own minds.

This book represents a new and imaginative reconception of the American experience. . . . Especially noteworthy is the emphasis on material culture.--David M. Katzman, author of Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America.

We cannot understand the United States in the twentieth century, the century of the child, without understanding the prominent part that children and adolescents have played in the American story. Much has changed for young people during this century and this is the first work to illuminate those developments from the turn of the century to today. Rich in detail, this work tells the story, often through the words of children themselves, of young people not only as part of the broader changes that have swept American life but as initiators of change in our everyday life, work and play, institutions and values. No other book has done this.

As a reference tool the work is divided into four chronological chapters, 1900-1920, 1921-1940, 1941-1960, and 1960 to the present. Each chapter contains six sections, At Home, At Play, At Work, At School, Health, and Children and the Law. From the teddy bear to the Barbie doll; from child labor in sweatshops to teenage workers in McDonald's; from the one-room schoolhouse to the SATS, from childhood scourges to the eradication of many childhood diseases, each chapter offers copious detail and fascinating narrative about children's lives. The reader can learn about all the topics in a particular era or focus on one topic and follow it through the decades. The many tables and statistics will aid the reader and researcher. Each chapter concludes with a narrative bibliography of recommended works of interest on the topics discussed. A selection of photos complements the text. This work will be invaluable to social studies and American history classes and teachers, high school and public libraries, and students of American social history.

Historians have paid little attention to the lives and contributions of children who took part in westward expansion. In this major study of American childhood, now available again in paperback, Elliott West explores how children helped shape--and in turn were shaped by--the frontier experience. Frontier children's first vivid perceptions of the new country, when deepened by their work, play, and exploration, forged a stronger bond with their surroundings than that of their elders. Through diaries, journals, letters, novels, and oral and written reminiscences, West has reconstructed the lives of the children who grew to become the first truly Western generation.