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Full Description
Finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in History
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.
Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Maps
Series Editor's Introduction, by Richard Etulain
Prelude: 773,510,680 Acres
Acknowledgments
Part 1. Unsettling America
1. The Great Coincidence
2. Division and Multiplication
3. Letting Blood
4. The Horse and the Hammer
5. Conquest in Stutter-Step
6. Carnal Property
7. The Fluid West
8. Continental Reckoning
9. Civil War and the "Indian Problem"
Part 2. Things Come Together
10. Iron Bands and Tongues of Fire
11. Connections Real and Imagined
12. Maps
13. The "Science of Man" and the American Sublime
14. The World's Convention
15. Crew Cultures, Cribs and Schoolhouses, Women on the Fringe
Part 3. Worked into Being
16. Cattle and the New America
17. Wind, Fever, and Indians Unhorsed
18. Breaking the Land
19. Domination and Extinction
20. When the West Turned Inside Out
21. Legal Wrestling, the Land Convulsed
22. The Final Undoing
23. Creating the West
Notes
Bibliography
Index
