The American West: Competing Visions

The American West was once the story of gunfights, glory, wagon trails, and linear progress. Historians such as Frederick Jackson Turner and Hollywood movies including Stagecoach (1939) and Shane (1953) cast the trans-Mississippi region as an epic frontier in which "savagery" met "civilization" and boys became men.During the late 1980s, this idea of the West came under fire. Scholars such as Patricia Nelson Limerick and Richard White forged a fresh story of the region, a new vision based on the conquest of peoples and landscapes. The American West: Competing Visions explores the contrast between Turner's Old West and Limerick's New West, highlighting the values and ambiguities associated with each tradition. Sections on Lewis and Clark, the frontier, and the cowboy accompany research on Indian genocide and excerpts from women's trail diaries. Images of the region as seen through the arcade Western, Hollywood film, and Disney theme parks reaffirm the West as a symbolic and contested landscape. Tapping into the popular fascination with the cowboy, the Western, the Indian Wars, and Custer's Last Stand, the authors deconstruct the imagery and reality of the history of the American West.