Introduction. (William Deverell).

Part I: Thinking Through the American West.

1. The Making of the First American West and the Unmaking of Other Realms. (Steven Aron).

2. Thinking West. (Elliott West).

Part II: Conquest and Its Patterns. The Nineteenth Century.

3. Passion and Imagination in the Exploration of the American West. (James P. Ronda).

4. Environment and the Nineteenth-Century West; or, Process Encounters Place. (Andrew C. Isenberg).

5. Engineering the Elephant: Industrialism and Environment in the Greater West. (David Igler).

6. Mining and the Nineteenth Century American West. (Malcolm J. Rohrbough).

7. Law and the Confluence of Legal Cultures. (Sarah Barringer Gordon).

8. Native Americans in the Nineteenth-Century American West. (David Rich Lewis).

9. Western Violence.(Michael A. Bellesiles).

10. Bringing It All Back Home: Rethinking the History of Women and the 19th Century West. (Elizabeth Jameson).

11. Empire and Liberty: Contradictions and Conflicts in Nineteenth Century Western Political History. (Jeffrey Ostler).

Part III: Exceptionalism or Regionalism? The Twentieth-Century American West.

12. African Americans in the Twentieth-Century West. (Douglas Flamming).

13. The West and Workers, 1870-1930. (James Gregory).

14. Societies to Match the Scenery: Twentieth Century Environmental History. (Dan Flores).

15. Where to Draw the Line? The Pacific, Place, and the U.S. West. (Chris Friday).

16. Religion and the American West. (Philip Goff).

17. Transients and Stickers: The Problem of Community in the American West. (Anne Hyde).

18. American Indians in the Twentieth Century. (Peter Iverson).

19. The New Deal’s West. (Karen Merrill).

20. Art, Ideology, and the West. (Douglas R. Nickel).

21. The West Plays West: Western Tourism and the Landscape of Leisure. (Marguerite Shaffer).

22. Hispanics and Latinos. (Ramón A. Gutiérrez).

23. City Lights: Urban History in the West. (Robert O. Self).

24. Politics and the Twentieth Century West. (William Deverell).

25. The Literary West and the Twentieth Century. (David M. Wrobel).

Bibliography.

Index