Explore the vast range of titles available.

Hernandez discusses essays on borderland history. Spanish borderlands scholars have detailed the lives of everyday men, women, and families living in the interstices between empires and nations. Against narratives of frontiers at the edge of indomitable empires and nation-states, these scholars have found power disputes everywhere. Focused on life, politics, and culture in the regions at the outermost reach of the empire, then nation-state, then back to empire again, they have deftly chronicled the vibrant and complicated life that existed in the American West before Anglo-Americans arrived; their accounts show the incompleteness and uncertainty of that push into the region. The shift from dueling empires to the multicultural West required an array of new methods attuned to voices and experiences long ignored. In this essay, Hernandez discusses how new regional, conceptual, and methodological approaches to life in border areas will, in the years ahead, deepen understanding and challenge the history of the region. While historians have, for the most part, remained focused upon colonial domains and national borders, geographers, anthropologists, constitutional scholars, cultural theorists, and many others have explored how borderland regions are not simply created by national territories abutting one another. Borderlands, they suggest, are zones defined by any consequential social, political, or cultural divide.

Blackhawk discusses two of the most visible, recent moments in western North American history, the Games of the XIX and XXI Winter Olympiad that brought together tens of thousands of athletes, millions of visitors, and global audiences and regaled them with unprecedented displays of pageantry, festivity, and sponsorship. While three western cities--Lake Tahoe, Los Angeles, and Calgary--had previously hosted the Games, the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City and Vancouver projected communal visions in which indigenous peoples remained integral to each host city's respective self-identity. For scholars of American Indian history, these twenty-first-century western Olympics provide opportunities to evaluate the relative historiographical currents animating these respective visions. As major urban cores within the ethnographic \"culture areas\" of the Great Basin and the Northwest Coast, Salt Lake City and Vancouver occupy the center of long-standing intellectual traditions in which Indian peoples have figured prominently. From a historiographical perspective, the inclusion of Native communities in the Olympic Games disrupted larger national teleologies of indigenous disappearance and cultural assimilation.

Fiege discusses the changes that express deeper economic, social, and cultural transformations. In keeping with the changing episteme, historians adopted terms and concepts--interdisciplinary, postmodern, hybrid, transnational, postcolonial, diaspora, borderland, and the like--that conveyed a sense of connection, movement, and change across boundaries. The breakdown of older epistemic categories challenges scholars to reconsider how they study the American West, a subset of the nation.

Western historians continue to adopt social history techniques such as analyzing census documents, union archives, voting records, and patterns of mobility and urban growth. Interdisciplinary approaches have also emerged, most notably those drawing upon contemporary cultural theory to explore the region's past. Nevertheless, the persistent reluctance of many American historians to engage western history's broader themes in their work continues to cloud the future of social and cultural history. Here, Mitchell looks at recent works of several historians that point to the enduring strength of social and cultural history methodologies in the West.

Etulain investigates western biographies in transition. By 1970, even though the region had marched seven decades into the twentieth century, few biographies of the post-1900 West appeared. Undoubtedly the absence of a much-needed historical overview of the twentieth-century West discouraged some biographers. Authors published a handful of biographies on modern politicians and writers but only rarely treated them as western figures. The two most notable transitions occurred in the treatment of western ethnic and racial groups and women. New approaches to Indian topics became clear: the word savage disappeared from western texts; Native Americans were no longer the denigrated Other; and a few energetic historians began incorporating ethnographic details into their biographies of Indian-fighting soldiers and Native leaders.

Jacobs discusses the full inclusion of gender history in the works of Western historians. Historians have cultivated the field of Western women's and gender history for more than 30 years. They initially focused on white women in the 19th century, mainly as travelers on the Overland Trail, homesteaders and ranchers, and suffragists and reformers. He says that gender history analyzes the changing meaning and value attached to maleness and femaleness and the relationship between the two. Gender manifests itself in production (economics and labor) and reproduction (both physical and social), bedrocks of any society. Gender rarely works in isolation from other identifying markers and means of acquiring power and status, such as race, age, religious authority, and national identity or citizenship. Because of its link to power, gender is often contested and is rarely static. Moreover, it is inextricably bound up with colonialism, which is, of course, inseparable from the history of the West. To neglect, overlook, or dismiss gender as irrelevant means that historians are not representing the fullest possible picture of the past.

Weisiger discusses a subversive exhibit titled The Frontier in American Culture created by Richard White and the Newberry Library, which powerfully paired the two master narratives that Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill Cody presented at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. Turner delivered his scholarly paper to a small group of historians at the Chicago Art Institute while Cody performed his Wild West extravaganza in front of a midway grandstand filled with perhaps eighteen thousand people. Turner spoke of the orderly settlement of a seemingly empty continent and the creation of a distinctive American culture; Cody told of violently wresting the continent from the Indian peoples who occupied the land. Each man claimed to represent history and--as different as these two stories were--each led to a remarkably similar conclusion: the frontier had come to a close.

Johnston reflects on Western political historiography. He perceives a kind of exhaustion, where \"western history\" primarily represents not a proud, self-conscious subdiscipline with any sense of unity but is simply a placeholder for scholars doing Indian history or environmental history or the history of the borderlands. So while those who are today identified primarily as western historians currently take delight in queering, greening, and otherwise deconstructing their subjects, they seem reluctant to explore or seriously question what on the surface appears to be their most fundamental professional identity. Here, he also examines the works of some scholars, including Michael Kazin, Thomas G. Andrews, and Lisa McGirr, who neglect regionalism.