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Focusing on twenty-first century Western films, including all major releases since the turn of the century, the essays in this volume cover a broad range of aesthetic and thematic aspects explored in these films, including gender and race. As diverse contributors focus on the individual subgenres of the traditional Western (the gunfighter, the Cavalry vs. Native American conflict, the role of women in Westerns, etc.), they share an understanding of the twenty-first century Western may be understood as a genre in itself. They argue that the films discussed here reimagine certain aspects of the more conventional Western and often reverse the ideology contained within them while employing certain forms and clichés that have become synonymous internationally with Westerns. The result is a contemporary sensibility that might be referred to as the postmodern Western.
In 1893 Frederick Jackson Turner famously argued that the generational process of meeting and conquering the supposedly uncivilized western frontier is what forged American identity. In the late twentieth century, "new western" historians dissected the mythologized western histories that Turner and others had long used to embody American triumph and progress. While Turner's frontier is no more, the West continues to present America with challenging processes to wrestle, navigate, and overcome. The North American West in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Brenden W. Rensink, takes stories of the late twentieth-century "modern West" and carefully pulls them toward the present--explicitly tracing continuity with or unexpected divergence from trajectories established in the 1980s and 1990s. Considering a broad range of topics, including environment, Indigenous peoples, geography, migration, and politics, these essays straddle multiple modern frontiers, not least of which is the temporal frontier between our unsettled past and uncertain future. These forays into the twenty-first-century West will inspire more scholars to pull histories to the present and by doing so reinsert scholarly findings into contemporary public awareness.
This edited volume takes stories from the "modern West" of the late twentieth century and carefully pulls them toward the present--explicitly tracing continuity with and unexpected divergence from trajectories established in the 1980s and 1990s.
"A leading western specialist argues that the history of the American West did not end in the year 1900 and was shaped as much by events and innovations in the twentieth century, in a study that describes a modern West." -- annotation from Book Index with Reviews.
To most people living in the West, the Louisiana Purchase made little difference: the United States was just another imperial overlord to be assessed and manipulated. This was not, as Empires, Nations, and Families makes clear, virgin wilderness discovered by virtuous Anglo entrepreneurs. Rather, the United States was a newcomer in a place already complicated by vying empires. This book documents the broad family associations that crossed national and ethnic lines and that, along with the river systems of the trans-Mississippi West, formed the basis for a global trade in furs that had operated for hundreds of years before the land became part of the United States. ø Empires, Nations, and Families shows how the world of river and maritime trade effectively shifted political power away from military and diplomatic circles into the hands of local people. Tracing family stories from the Canadian North to the Spanish and Mexican borderlands and from the Pacific Coast to the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, Anne F. Hyde?s narrative moves from the earliest years of the Indian trade to the Mexican War and the gold rush era. Her work reveals how, in the 1850s, immigrants to these newest regions of the United States violently wrested control from Native and other powers, and how conquest and competing demands for land and resources brought about a volatile frontier culture?not at all the peace and prosperity that the new power had promised.
What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. In this work the author analyzes a unique collection of data from twenty countries, ranging as far back as the eighteenth century, to uncover key economic and social patterns. His findings transform debate and set the agenda for the next generation of thought about wealth and inequality. He shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid inequalities on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx. But we have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought in the optimistic decades following World War II. The main driver of inequality--the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth--today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values if political action is not taken. But economic trends are not acts of God. Political action has curbed dangerous inequalities in the past, the author says, and may do so again. This original work reorients our understanding of economic history and confronts us with sobering lessons for today.
In 1893 Frederick Jackson Turner famously argued that the generational process of meeting and conquering the supposedly uncivilized western frontier is what forged American identity. In the late twentieth century, “new western” historians dissected the mythologized western histories that Turner and others had long used to embody American triumph and progress. While Turner’s frontier is no more, the West continues to present America with challenging processes to wrestle, navigate, and overcome. The North American West in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Brenden W. Rensink, takes stories of the late twentieth-century “modern West” and carefully pulls them toward the present—explicitly tracing continuity with or unexpected divergence from trajectories established in the 1980s and 1990s. Considering a broad range of topics, including environment, Indigenous peoples, geography, migration, and politics, these essays straddle multiple modern frontiers, not least of which is the temporal frontier between our unsettled past and uncertain future. These forays into the twenty-first-century West will inspire more scholars to pull histories to the present and by doing so reinsert scholarly findings into contemporary public awareness.
Winner, 2019 Spur Award for Best Historical Nonfiction Book, sponsored by Western Writers of America In Native but Foreign, historian Brenden W. Rensink presents an innovative comparison of indigenous peoples who traversed North American borders in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, examining Crees and Chippewas, who crossed the border from Canada into Montana, and Yaquis from Mexico who migrated into Arizona. The resulting history questions how opposing national borders affect and react differently to Native identity and offers new insights into what it has meant to be “indigenous” or an “immigrant.” Rensink’s findings counter a prevailing theme in histories of the American West—namely, that the East was the center that dictated policy to the western periphery. On the contrary, Rensink employs experiences of the Yaquis, Crees, and Chippewas to depict Arizona and Montana as an active and mercurial blend of local political, economic, and social interests pushing back against and even reshaping broader federal policy. Rensink argues that as immediate forces in the borderlands molded the formation of federal policy, these Native groups moved from being categorized as political refugees to being cast as illegal immigrants, subject to deportation or segregation; in both cases, this legal transition was turbulent. Despite continued staunch opposition, Crees, Chippewas, and Yaquis gained legal and permanent settlements in the United States and successfully broke free of imposed transnational identities. Accompanying the thought-provoking text, a vast guide to archival sources across states, provinces, and countries is included to aid future scholarship. Native but Foreign is an essential work for scholars of immigration, indigenous peoples, and borderlands studies.
While federal action on immigration faces an uncertain future, states, cities and suburban municipalities craft their own responses to immigration. Twenty-First-Century Gateways, focuses on the fastest-growing immigrant populations in metropolitan areas with previously low levels of immigration—places such as Atlanta, Austin, Charlotte, Dallas-Fort Worth, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Phoenix, Portland, Sacramento, and Washington, D.C. These places are typical of the newest, largest immigrant gateways to America, characterized by post-WWII growth, recent burgeoning immigrant populations, and predominantly suburban settlement. More immigrants, both legal and undocumented, arrived in the United States during the 1990s than in any other decade on record. That growth has continued more slowly since the Great Recession; nonetheless the U.S. immigrant population has doubled since 1990. Many immigrants continued to move into traditional urban centers such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, but burgeoning numbers were attracted by the economic and housing opportunities of fast-growing metropolitan areas and their largely suburban settings. The pace of change in this new geography of immigration has presented many local areas with challenges—social, fiscal, and political. Edited by Audrey Singer, Susan W. Hardwick, and Caroline B. Brettell, Twenty-First-Century Gateways provides in-depth, comparative analysis of immigration trends and local policy responses in America's newest gateways. The case examples by a group of leading multidisciplinary immigration scholars explore the challenges of integrating newcomers in the specific gateways, as well as their impact on suburban infrastructure such as housing, transportation, schools, health care, economic development, and public safety. The changes and trends dissected in this book present a critically important understanding of the reshaping of the United States today and the future impact of