The American West

ITD Summer Institute,  2006

Schedule    Presentations    Field Trips

As defined by the Census Bureau, the western United States includes 13 states: Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming.

Other scholars define the West as the 22 states west of the Mississippi.

• "The West is the United States west of the ninety-eighth meridian, a line passing through the eastern Dakotas down the Great Plains through central Texas. ...[The West] includes the entirety of that tier of states embracing the ninety-eight meridian, including their eastern portions, since state boundaries do not coincide with geographic boundaries and since it makes no sense to speak only of the western and less populous portions of those states, states that are truly a part of the West."-- M. Malone and R. Etulain, The American West .
• "The American West is that contiguous section of the continent west of the Missouri River acquired by the United States beginning with the Lousiana Purchase of 1803; continuing through the acquisition of Texas, the Oregon Territory, and the Mexican Cession in the 1840s; and ending with the 1854 Gadsen Purchase of the lands between the Gila River and the present Mexican boundary"-- Richard White, It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own.
• "...The West, which stretches from around the ninety-eight meridian to the Pacific, and from the forty-ninth parallel to the Mexican border, is actually half a dozen subregions as different from one another as the Olympic rain forest if from Utah's slickrock country, or Seattle from Santa Fe."Wallace Stegner, Where the Bluebeard Sings to the Lemonade Springs .
• "The West is a semi-desert with a desert heart."--Walter Prescott Web
• "[The West] is a region with flexible borders at the Pacific and at the hundredth meridian, where
  rainfall drops below the twenty inches a year needed to sustain irrigated agriculture." --Patricia Limerick, Something in the Soil.
• "The West...begins with the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. So defined, the West would become, along with the North and the South, one of the three great geographical regions of the...United States."--Donald Worster, "New West, True West" 

Patricia Nelson Limerick, one of the leading "new Western" historians  admits that the West is not "a unit of homogeneity and internal consistency," but that much of the territory shares common characteristics. We will use her list of characteristics which defines the West as a region as the units of study:

1. The West contains the bulk of the land still under federal control--and is a case study in how the U.S. conducts conquest.
2. The West is characterized by long involvement with the commercial, intentional mythologizing of the region as a place of escape and adventure. The population of the country is shifting to this region.
3. In the West are the majority of American Indian reservations and Indian people.
4. The West is part of the Pacific Rim and shares a border with Mexico--much of the West was once under the sovereignty of Mexico.
5. The West has a particularly dramatic and long-term involvement with boom/bust economies of extractive industries.
6. The West is arid and semi-arid--which has inspired many campaigns to "normalize" this landscape.
7. The West is the nation's dumping ground--for people (Japanese Relocation Camps), for waste (Nuclear Test Sites).

Recommended Readings:

• Albert Hurtado, "Romancing the West in the Twentieth Century: The Politics of History in a Contested Region" (2001)
• Joseph Taylor, III. "The Many Lives of the New West"  (2004)

Internet Resources:

• WestWeb is a topically-organized website about the study of the American West created and maintained by a born-and-bred Westerner, Catherine Lavender, of the Department of History, College of Staten Island, The City University of New York.
• From Washington State University is a web site on the Multicultural American West.
• Institute for the Study of the American West includes the Gene Autry Museum.
• The Amon Carter Museum has a current exhibit on photographs in the 20th century West.
• The Arizona Fine Art Library posts a number of links to sites for 20th Southwestern Art.
• The Bill Lane Center for the Study of the North American West is at Stanford.
• Women Artists of the American West focuses on 20th century artists.
• The Center of the American West is at Boulder, Colorado.
• From Harper's Weekly are their archives on the American West