- 728 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
About this book
Finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in History
Winner of Columbia University's 2024 Bancroft Prize in American History
Winner of the 2024 Caughey Western History Prize
Winner of the 2024 Spur Award
Named a Best Civil War Book of 2023 by Civil War Monitor
In Continental Reckoning renowned historian Elliott West presents a sweeping narrative of the American West and its vital role in the transformation of the nation. In the 1840s, by which time the United States had expanded to the Pacific, what would become the West was home to numerous vibrant Native cultures and vague claims by other nations. Thirty years later it was organized into states and territories and bound into the nation and world by an infrastructure of rails, telegraph wires, and roads and by a racial and ethnic order, with its Indigenous peoples largely dispossessed and confined to reservations.
Unprecedented exploration uncovered the West’s extraordinary resources, beginning with the discovery of gold in California within days of the United States acquiring the territory following the Mexican-American War. As those resources were developed, often by the most modern methods and through modern corporate enterprise, half of the contiguous United States was physically transformed. Continental Reckoning guides the reader through the rippling, multiplying changes wrought in the western half of the country, arguing that these changes should be given equal billing with the Civil War in this crucial transition of national life.
As the West was acquired, integrated into the nation, and made over physically and culturally, the United States shifted onto a course of accelerated economic growth, a racial reordering and redefinition of citizenship, engagement with global revolutions of science and technology, and invigorated involvement with the larger world. The creation of the West and the emergence of modern America were intimately related. Neither can be understood without the other. With masterful prose and a critical eye, West presents a fresh approach to the dawn of the American West, one of the most pivotal periods of American history.
Winner of Columbia University's 2024 Bancroft Prize in American History
Winner of the 2024 Caughey Western History Prize
Winner of the 2024 Spur Award
Named a Best Civil War Book of 2023 by Civil War Monitor
In Continental Reckoning renowned historian Elliott West presents a sweeping narrative of the American West and its vital role in the transformation of the nation. In the 1840s, by which time the United States had expanded to the Pacific, what would become the West was home to numerous vibrant Native cultures and vague claims by other nations. Thirty years later it was organized into states and territories and bound into the nation and world by an infrastructure of rails, telegraph wires, and roads and by a racial and ethnic order, with its Indigenous peoples largely dispossessed and confined to reservations.
Unprecedented exploration uncovered the West’s extraordinary resources, beginning with the discovery of gold in California within days of the United States acquiring the territory following the Mexican-American War. As those resources were developed, often by the most modern methods and through modern corporate enterprise, half of the contiguous United States was physically transformed. Continental Reckoning guides the reader through the rippling, multiplying changes wrought in the western half of the country, arguing that these changes should be given equal billing with the Civil War in this crucial transition of national life.
As the West was acquired, integrated into the nation, and made over physically and culturally, the United States shifted onto a course of accelerated economic growth, a racial reordering and redefinition of citizenship, engagement with global revolutions of science and technology, and invigorated involvement with the larger world. The creation of the West and the emergence of modern America were intimately related. Neither can be understood without the other. With masterful prose and a critical eye, West presents a fresh approach to the dawn of the American West, one of the most pivotal periods of American history.
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Yes, you can access Continental Reckoning by Elliott West in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & North American History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Series Page
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Maps
- Series Editorās Introduction
- Prelude
- Acknowledgments
- Part 1
- 1. The Great Coincidence
- 2. Division and Multiplication
- 3. Letting Blood
- 4. The Horse and the Hammer
- 5. Conquest in Stutter-Step
- 6. Carnal Property
- 7. The Fluid West
- 8. Continental Reckoning
- 9. Civil War and the āIndian Problemā
- Part 2
- 10. Iron Bands and Tongues of Fire
- 11. Connections Real and Imagined
- 12. Maps
- 13. The āScience of Manā and the American Sublime
- 14. The Worldās Convention
- 15. Crew Cultures, Cribs and Schoolhouses, Women on the Fringe
- Part 3
- 16. Cattle and the New America
- 17. Wind, Fever, and Indians Unhorsed
- 18. Breaking the Land
- 19. Domination and Extinction
- 20. When the West Turned Inside Out
- 21. Legal Wrestling, the Land Convulsed
- 22. The Final Undoing
- 23. Creating the West
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- About Elliott West
- Series List
- Illustrations