Twentieth-Century American West Research Articles

Bohemians West: Free Love, Family, and Radicals in the Twentieth-Century American West by Sherry L. Smith (review)

Bohemians West: Free Love, Family, and Radicals in the Twentieth-Century American West by Sherry L. Smith (review)

The Promise and Limitations of Working-Class Male Protagonists

The Promise and Limitations of Working-Class Male Protagonists

Rockstar Games, Red Dead Redemption, and Narratives of “Progress”

In both popular and historiographical discussions of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century American West, and the successive waves of popular culture that have come to represent Westward expansion and colonization, there has been much negotiation and debate over the nature and meaning of “progress.” Usually bound up with other loaded terms such as “civilization” (and its implicit antithesis, “savagery”), popular culture that falls under the broader umbrella of the Western genre has often used the idea of progress and development, from past to future, as a cornerstone of their stories and messages. This article uses game developer Rockstar Games and the company’s popular and commercially successful Red Dead Redemption franchise (2010-2018) to examine how narratives of “progress” have been used by the company not only to create their own representations of US history but, moreover, to prop up the promotional discourses that the company uses to brand themselves and sell their products. Ultimately, this article explores the tensions between a company that claims to offer games that are both “authentic” and critical of turn-of-the-century US history and culture, yet which implicitly rely on the ideologies that accompany narratives of “progress” and “civilization,” bound up as they are with the Frontier myth, white supremacy, and colonialism.

The Catholic Church in the Twentieth-Century American West: Spatial Realities, Demographic Growth, and Roman Observations

The population of the American West—defined here as the states west of the Missouri River, including Alaska and Hawaii—grew dramatically during the twentieth century. Lured by product demand, tourism, improved transportation, and heavy federal government investment, Americans flocked to these states, especially California and Texas. This demographic surge led to an increase in the numbers of Catholics in the West and an explosion of new dioceses. As the West grew, the Vatican took notice. Correspondence between authorities in Rome and U.S. bishops reflect Western Catholicism's growth and transnational identity but also evidence the particular challenges of Catholic expansion. This essay maps the West's dramatic growth and Rome's response, bringing to Western historians' attention the significance of the region's Catholic presence and providing a lens for better understanding the American West's social and cultural experience.

Imaging Hoover Dam: The Making of a Cultural Icon. By Anthony F. Arrigo.

Imaging Hoover Dam: The Making of a Cultural Icon . By Anthony F. Arrigo. (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2014. xiv + 297 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $39.95.) Hoover Dam (called Boulder Dam from 1933 through 1947) is among the world’s best-known engineering landmarks. At 726 feet tall and containing more than 3 million cubic yards of concrete, the massive curved gravity structure stands (in tandem with Grand Coulee Dam) as the greatest symbol of techno-cultural accomplishment in the twentieth-century American West. Anthony F. Arrigo, an English professor, writes about Hoover Dam through the lens of visual cultural studies, wherein he seeks to explore “how the visual culture of the project worked to establish the … jacksond{at}lafayette.edu

Municipal Housekeeping in the American West: Bertha Knight Landes’s Entrance into Politics

Abstract As Seattle’s mayor in 1926, Bertha Landes made history as the first woman elected to lead a large city in the United States. To respond to the complicated demands of female political leadership in the early twentieth century American West, Landes pragmatically appealed to expectations of both public men and domestic women by making arguments from both sameness and difference. Using a rhetoric of municipal housekeeping to justify her entrance into political office, Landes paradoxically asserted beliefs about the difference between men and women in leadership, while simultaneously suggesting her political service did not differ from a mans. Although her municipal housekeeping arguments essentialized women as moral and different, they also assisted her entrance into politics and attested to women’s suitability for political leadership. She simultaneously employed a rhetoric of Western masculinity and sameness that reified masculine conceptions of political leadership, and suggested that womens roles in the nation functioned similarly to mens roles, thus expanding the role of women in politics beyond exclusively municipal housekeepers. This analysis not only illustrates the use of sameness and difference arguments in elective office, but also how they oxymoronically functioned together.

Municipal Housekeeping in the American West: Bertha Knight Landes's Entrance into Politics

As Seattle's mayor in 1926, Bertha Landes made history as the first woman elected to lead a large city in the United States. To respond to the complicated demands of female political leadership in the early twentieth century American West, Landes pragmatically appealed to expectations of both public men and domestic women by making arguments from both sameness and difference. Using a rhetoric of municipal housekeeping to justify her entrance into political office, Landes paradoxically asserted beliefs about the difference between men and women in leadership, while simultaneously suggesting her political service did not differ from a man's. Although her municipal housekeeping arguments essentialized women as moral and different, they also assisted her entrance into politics and attested to women's suitability for political leadership. She simultaneously employed a rhetoric of Western masculinity and sameness that reified masculine conceptions of political leadership, and suggested that women's roles in the nation functioned similarly to men's roles, thus expanding the role of women in politics beyond exclusively municipal housekeepers. This analysis not only illustrates the use of sameness and difference arguments in elective office, but also how they oxymoronically functioned together.

Catholicism in the Twentieth-Century American West: The Next Frontier

The author presents a case for additional scholarship on the twentieth-century American West. He draws heavily on the methodology of the New Western historians, especially their emphasis on common regional identity even amidst the extensive geographical and cultural diversity of the West. The author suggests three overarching themes (extensive federal investment, tourism, and urbanization) derived from contemporary scholarship on this period that Catholic historians might profitably use to study the interplay between the region and the Roman Catholic Church.

A Companion to the American West

Notes on Contribuors. 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. (Ramon A. Gutierrez). 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

Newlands, Old Lands: Native American Labor, Agrarian Ideology, and the Progressive-Era State in the Making of the Newlands Reclamation Project, 1902–1926

Historical interpretations focusing on the development of irrigated agricultural communities in the early twentiethcentury American West have consistently repeated the neat division between "family" and "industrial" modes of production. However, these distinctions collapse when one recognizes that the seasonal demand for harvest labor could not be met from within the smallholders' households. Transient labor, as well as year-round wage work by property-less workers, appears to have been the rule even on the irrigated West's family farms. In the case of the Newlands Reclamation Project, dispossessed Native Americans provided essential labor, ensuring the nominal success of this initial Reclamation Service project during the first three decades of the twentieth century. In Nevada, Paiute and Shoshone laborers provided a local and low-cost work force. This irrigation culture could not avoid the pitfalls of capitalist agriculture that relied upon the dispossession of Indian lands and resources and the coerced labor of an underclass of Indian workers. While Paiute and Shoshone labor was certainly coerced, there were limits. This article demonstrates the degree to which these people maintained an autonomous community and culture. Drawing on precolonial roots, Native North American communities shared in the challenges and creative adaptations exhibited by indigenous communities globally in response to settler capitalism.

Devil's Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West Hal K. Rothman Country of Exiles: The Destruction of Place in American Life William Leach

Devil's Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West Hal K. Rothman Country of Exiles: The Destruction of Place in American Life William Leach

Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West by Hal K. Rothman

Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West by Hal K. Rothman

"Big Chief Izzy Horowitz": Theatricality and Jewish Identity in the Wild West

In the American musical theater, self-consciously theatrical characters have enormous freedom to determine their place within the social and cultural framework of the stage community. 1 Unlike characters who lack theatrical self-awareness, those who can adopt numerous characters in the course of a single play, altering their outward appearance, language, and gestures to suit the moment, are especially powerful in the world of the musical. They establish a special relationship with the ultimate arbiters of theatrical success--the audience beyond the footlights. The audience members are in on the secret; having seen the performer transform him- or herself, they are not fooled by the changes and can share the pleasure of watching the rest of the cast--the straight men--become increasingly confused. To American Jews of the 1920s and 1930s this ability to transform oneself was essential both on and off the stage. In the volatile interwar years in which American identity was perpetually being redefined, Jews often found themselves held up as examples in a public debate on immigration, assimilation and Americanness. 2 The definition of the Jew was of particular concern: were Jews an ethnic and cultural group, and hence assimilable, or were they a racially distinct people who could never [End Page 313] become true Americans? 3 In America there are only two operative racial categories, white and nonwhite, and privilege has always rested with the former. For Jews, especially those immigrating from Southern and Eastern Europe, being defined on the grounds of racial difference meant being defined as non-white. The danger of being essentialized, locked into an unwanted racial self-definition, therefore, was clear: to be racially other was to be forever excluded from the privileged white American community. 4 For this reason many Jews resisted racial definitions and clung tenaciously to the notion that one could become an American simply by adopting American culture, language and appearance. The musicals of the 1920s and 30s, many of them written and performed by Jews from immigrant backgrounds, likewise suggest a vehement opposition to rigid racial categorizations, advocating instead a more fluid conception of identity. Emerging from immigrant families and desperate to become Americans, Jewish performers in particular understood the crucial importance of being able to adopt whatever personae they chose. Their ability to become someone else with a simple change of costume helped them to negotiate the perilous landscape of American racial ideology both on and off stage. A popular setting for late 1920s and early 1930s musicals, the Wild West in particular highlighted the importance of theatrical role-playing in an environment in which identity was inherently unstable. While the West may seem an unlikely setting for such an urban form as the Broadway musical, there are actually striking similarities between the mythical West of the nineteenth century and the mythical city of the early [End Page 314] twentieth. According to Daniel Boorstin, "the modern American city [was] to be a twentieth-century American West, with its own special vagueness, its own mysteries, its own false promises and booster hopes" (246). Like the streets of New York City, the mythical nineteenth-century American West promised anonymity and freedom from conventional social hierarchies. 5 The newcomer in a Wild West town was like an immigrant--he started fresh. No one knew who he was, or where he came from, and so his chances of success depended on how well he inhabited the role he chose. 6 As in the theater, success in the mythical Wild West was largely dependent on the ability to perform-the best shot or the best horseman quickly earned the respect of the local community. While both settings called for capable role-playing, however, the specific skills required for success in the West or in the immigrant neighborhoods of New York differed significantly. The mythical West was populated by the mythical Western man-the cowboy. Dubbed by Daniel Boorstin "the first American athletic idol...

Devil's bargains: tourism in the twentieth-century American West

Devil's bargains: tourism in the twentieth-century American West

Home and Abroad: The Two "Wests" of Twentieth-Century United States History

Where lies the twentieth-century American West? The question goes beyond simple geography to historical sensibility. Take the case of oil extraction in the Amazon region of Ecuador since the 1960s. The similarities between petroleum development there and contemporaneous activities in Alaska, America's last frontier, underscore the profound connections between western development and the role of the United States in international capitalist expansion. Many of the processes, people, and institutions that actively shaped the

Selling the Meaning of Place: Entrepreneurship, Tourism, and Community Transformation in the Twentieth-Century American West

Tourism, as much as any other industry, has defined the high and low points in the development of the twentieth-century West.1 Despite its importance and its inclusion within an earlier generation's matrix of scholarly inquiry, the subject has remained largely unexplored even as its significance to the western economy has increased. Over the past century the West has experienced a proliferation in the varieties of tourism, from the marketing of the region's scenery and mythic past to the post-World War II development of recreation and entertainment. Tourism has also emerged as a hoped for panacea to which people turn when they seek to revive areas in economic decline. Because tourism is a malleable industry designed to anticipate and cultivate trends in American society, its growth since 1900 has been influenced by changing cultural iconography, increased wealth and broader distribution of income, and

Still Native: The Significance of Native Americans in the History of the Twentieth-Century American West

W ehen Frederick Jackson Turner looked at American history in 1893 he considered Native Americans to be of little significance. He demonstrated more interest in the process of heroic, white yeomen hewing out corridor of civilization in an environment that all but overwhelmed them, transforming them from immigrants into Americans. Indians were Indians, part of that wild frontier environment. They posed a common danger and served as a consolidating agent in our history, faceless obstacles to be overcome and subdued in the process of westering.1 Common wisdom and events of the day seemed to justify Turner's perspective. After all, Indian populations were at their low ebb, vanishing vestige of the frontier experience. Turner's contemporaries saw the breakup of Indian reservations and the final promise of assimilation through allotment and agrarian settlement as an eventuality-the ultimate realization of Euro-American belief in the unilinear progress of peoples from savagism to civility.2 One hundred years later, some Americans voice essentially the same attitudes-that modern Indians are unimportant in the larger picture; that they are obstacles in the development of the American West; that they must assimilate or disappear; and that the answer to the Indian problem again lies in abrogating their special relationship with the federal government.

"Citizens outside the Government": Business and Urban Policy in San Francisco and Los Angeles, 1890-1932

More is known about the urban history of the twentieth-century American West than ever before. For California, urbanization, the working class, city bosses and reform mayors, ethnic minorities, and the metropolitan-military complex can be discussed with increasing sophistication.1 Studies of these subjects provide important historical insight while at the same time provoking interest in another ques-

Cowboy Culture: A Saga of Five Centuries

A nationwide bestseller with more than 65,000 copies in print since publication by Alfred A. Knopf in 1981, this fascinating chronicle of life and legend is now available in a trade paperback edition. It's the 500-year saga of the real cowboy from fifteenth-century Mexico to the twentieth-century American West.

Review: Twentieth-Century American West: A Potpourri, by Gene M. Gressley

Review: <i>Twentieth-Century American West: A Potpourri</i>, by Gene M. Gressley