Introduction: American Wests

Abstract

‘Introduction: American Wests’ shows that the confusion of legend and fact, of myth and history, makes it hard to disentangle the stories we have told about the development of the American West from our understanding of what really happened. This VSI explains how the gap between projections and reality has shaped the development of the West and confounded our interpretations of its history. This history of the American West expands the chronology, enlarges the geography, complicates the casting, and pluralizes the subject to show that across the centuries, the movements of peoples and the minglings of cultures have shaped the history of sharp confrontations and murky convergences.