Frontiers: A Short History of the American West

Front Cover
Yale University Press, 2007 M01 1 - 248 pages
Published in 2000 to critical acclaim, The American West: A New Interpretive History quickly became the standard in college history courses. Now Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher offer a concise edition of their classic, freshly updated. Lauded for their lively and elegant writing, the authors provide a grand survey of the colorful history of the American West, from the first contacts between Native Americans and Europeans to the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Frontiers introduces the diverse peoples and cultures of the American West and explores how men and women of different ethnic groups were affected when they met, mingled, and often clashed. Hine and Faragher present the complexities of the American West—as frontier and region, real and imagined, old and new. Showcasing the distinctive voices and experiences of frontier characters, they explore topics ranging from early exploration to modern environmentalism, drawing expansively from a wide range of sources. With four galleries of fascinating illustrations drawn from Yale University's premier Collection of Western Americana, some published here for the first time, this book will be treasured by every reader with an interest in the unique saga of the American West.

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Contents

Dreams and Homelands
1
Chapter 1 A New World Begins
7
Chapter 2 Contest of Cultures
17
Chapter 3 The Struggle of Empires
28
Chapter 4 The Western Land and Its Markers
39
Chapter 5 The Fur Trade
52
Chapter 6 From Texas to Oregon
62
Chapter 7 War and Destiny
80
Chapter 10 Open Range
121
Chapter 11 The Safety Valve
133
Chapter 12 A Search for Community
147
Chapter 13 The Urban Frontier
163
Chapter 14 Plunder and Preservation
176
Chapter 15 The Myth of the Frontier
191
Chapter 16 The Frontier and West in Our Time
204
Further Reading
227

Chapter 8 Mining Frontiers
94
Chapter 9 The Power of the Road
109

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About the author (2007)

Robert V. Hine is professor emeritus, University of California, Riverside and Irvine. He lives in Irvine. John Mack Faragher is Arthur Unobskey Professor of American History, Yale University. He is the author of Women and Men on the Overland Trail and Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie, both published by Yale University Press. He lives in Hamden, CT.

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