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Abstract: Getting lost in the New West is easy because nobody seems to know where or even what it is. Even after years of scholarly study, western historian Donald Worster confided in his ironically titled “New West, True West” that “I could not put my finger on the map and say, ‘There is the West’” (143). Perhaps a map is not the best place to start. The Center of the American West’s promisingly titled Atlas of the New West (1997) is full of colorful maps that codify everything from dams, roads, and Native American reservations— but remains elusive in defining what binds them together into a cohesive whole (18). For Frederick Jackson Turner the West was less a place than a process of nation-building, but for the New ... Read More PubDate: 2023-05-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In the 1970s the Department of Radiology at Oregon Health and Science University produced a training video for transluminal angioplasty (Dotter). In addition to showing how to open up a blocked blood vessel with a small, flexible plastic tube, the training video also displayed lofty shots of Mount Hood paired with the rousing sounds of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The “Battle Hymn of the Republic” gives the wilderness shown in the training video an almost religious significance, “at a time when the force of religion seemed vitiated by the new scientism on the one hand and social conflict on the other, wilderness acquired special significance as a resuscitator of faith” (Nash 157). For the University of Oregon ... Read More PubDate: 2023-05-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: For the seven US states of the Colorado River Basin, 2022 was to be the year for centennial celebrations of the Colorado River Compact, the multistate legal agreement that changed the West. Instead, as low river flows threatened water supplies for homes, farms, and power production, historical reflections were overridden by discussions of the increasingly urgent environmental and management challenges the Compact caused. Indeed, calls to renegotiate the Compact demonstrate the dire circumstances.An innovative document drafted and negotiated between January and November 1922, the Colorado River Compact, crafted to achieve solutions for its time, marked a turning point for the region. Most immediately the end goal ... Read More PubDate: 2023-05-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Beef. It’s what’s for dinner. Even those outside the area of western American literature know this to be true (in a cultural-ideological sense), as it has been the well-used slogan of the National Livestock and Meat Board for thirty years. But nothing about beef’s ascendance in the United States—and especially in the West—was a foregone conclusion. Rather, it was a concerted effort undertaken by various land interests, capitalist groups, government subsidies, and geographic particularities that made such a thing possible. And, as you are reading this review in Western American Literature and may be interested in such agricultural history, you likely already know that the historical record is laid out clearly in ... Read More PubDate: 2023-05-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Originally published in 1930 and 1931, Osage luminary John Joseph Mathews authored a series of columns entitled “Our Osage Hills,” which appeared in the Pawhuska Daily Journal-Capital. These reflections, compiled and presented by editor Michael Snyder, now serve as compelling historical sources and literary precursors to Mathews’s future works, such as his seminal 1934 novel Sundown. Largely centered on the ecology of his beloved Blackjacks and Osage Hills located in what is now Osage county, Oklahoma, Mathews offers a romantic vision of his nation’s lands alongside a persistent call for environmental conservation. Editor Michael Snyder supplements these primary examples of Indigenous authorship with his own ... Read More PubDate: 2023-05-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Montana novelist Thomas Savage, a gay man heterosexually married, threw his overtly gay novel manuscript into the Atlantic (ca. 1964) when his literary agent advised him it couldn’t be published let alone widely read. As we all know by now, his character, repressed gay Phil Burbank (The Power of the Dog), who contains strands of Savage, meets a painful death as he tries to come out again. In his friend Annie Proulx’s best-known short story, “Broke-back Mountain,” Ennis angrily asks his lover, “This happen a other people' What the hell do they do'” and Jack responds, “It don’t happen in Wyoming and if it does I don’t know what they do, maybe go to Denver.” As you might remember, a year after this short story was ... Read More PubDate: 2023-05-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In El feliz ingenio neomexicano: Felipe M. Chacón and Poesía y prosa editors and translators Anna M. Nogar and A. Gabriel Meléndez recover the written works of noted neomexicano author, publisher, and journalist Felipe M. Chacón. Chacón, a member of the esteemed New Mexican Chacón family, carved out a historical presence during New Mexico’s Territorial Period and the early years of New Mexico’s statehood through his contributions as a journalist, including his time as editor at Spanish-language newspapers like La Voz del Pueblo. A recent addition to the Pasó Por Aquí series published by the University of New Mexico Press, which has spearheaded efforts to recover New Mexico’s unrecognized literary heritage, the book ... Read More PubDate: 2023-05-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Tracy Daugherty fictionalizes the friendship between well-known historical literary figures Willa Cather and Elizabeth “Elsie” Shepley Sergeant in 148 Charles Street, a title lifted from Barbara Rotundo’s 1971 article in American Heritage by the same name. An author with an impressive background in writing biographies and novels, surprisingly Daugherty seems to miss the mark in his characterization of these two women and offers sloppy use of real-life content to create his fictional narrative that flounders in its search for a higher purpose.Daugherty opens with acknowledgments that first thank Roger Angell “who was always very kind to me, if (I think) a little irritated at my callowness” (ix). He adds, “we never ... Read More PubDate: 2023-05-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In the twelve essays that make up Gregory Smoak’s Western Lands, Western Voices: Essays on Public History in the American West, the University of Utah’s American West Center comes into view as the contested center of a fifty-year battle to define and expand the parameters of public history.In one sense the volume is a rich, polyvocal institutional history of the center, and a loving tribute to its founders’ vision. In another sense, though, the volume is an extended meditation on the most pressing questions that animate the field of public history. What sorts of tensions arise when historians, Richard White asks, enter the public sphere' How do we resist the popular urge to instrumentalize history, to make it speak ... Read More PubDate: 2023-05-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: What in the West could be more iconic than a jackalope, that mythical creature with the body of a rabbit and the horns of a deer' It’s about time someone wrote a book about jackalopes, and Michael Branch delivers a thoughtful, entertaining read. Unlike Disney’s carefully curated talking mice or superhuman coyotes, the jackalope is a homegrown critter, small-town, tall tale, stitched together by shade-tree taxidermists, among other predominately rural characters sketched out with heart and humor by Branch. Readers will find an entertaining mix of storytelling, wide-ranging and careful natural and cultural history, including a beautifully illustrated sixteen-page section of jackalope art, photographs, paintings, and ... Read More PubDate: 2023-05-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Scholars at the intersections of western American literature and history, women’s literature, animal studies, gun culture, environmental studies, and World’s Fair history have long awaited an accessible, well-annotated reissue of On the Plains and Among the Peaks for use in research and the classroom. The book traces Martha Maxwell’s life as the “Colorado Huntress” and taxidermist, famous for natural history installations placing animals in their reconstructed environments—a revelation for the age—and most significantly displayed at the Philadelphia International Centennial Exposition of 1876.There are many additional reasons to take another look at the primary text, originally published in 1878–79. Two of them are ... Read More PubDate: 2023-05-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: All too often really fine poets are overlooked. This is the regrettable case for Barbara Schmitz, a Nebraska poet whose work, despite its wide-publication, has rarely been reviewed or regarded—as it so richly deserves to be—outside the boundaries of her home state. There is no accounting for that quandary other than, perhaps, the fact that American letters has so many poets and focuses are often exclusive and parochial—as arising from schools or creative writing programs or famed cliques. Indeed, Schmitz’s work may be marginalized for no other reason than her coming from a small town in northeast Nebraska.However, Schmitz’s poems are not particularly regional or provincial. Rather, universality attends her work ... Read More PubDate: 2023-05-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Cordelia E. Barrera draws from Chicana and Indigenous cultural theory, critical regionalism, genre studies, decolonialism, ecocriticism, and critiques of capitalism to develop an informed and innovative reexamination of the Borderlands. Spanning ideology and embodiment, The Haunted Southwest reads contemporary fiction, film, lived experience, and performance to “re-situate the histories and ruling mythologies of cultures and people . . . whose stories, and thus memories, have been effectively silenced by official doctrines and policies” (xviii). Much like William Faulkner described the US South’s past as “never dead—it’s not even past,” Barrera delineates a Southwest whose past is “not dead, but reshaped, revised ... Read More PubDate: 2023-05-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: October 11–14, 2023Beaded Wallet made by Tribal elder, Madelyn Punkin (Shoshone-Bannock) @1990. Courtesy of owner Randy’L Teton and the family of Madelyn PunkinThe Western Literature Association is excited to announce that our 2023 conference will be held at the Shoshone–Bannock Hotel and Casino, situated near Pocatello, Idaho, on the Fort Hall Reservation, home of the Shoshone and Bannock Tribes. The Shoshone–Bannock Tribes live on the largest land base reservation in the state of Idaho and are one of the five Tribes of Idaho. They are well known for their museum quality beading and brain-tanned hides, for being the Home of Indian Relays (traditional horse races), and for being designated as the first Purple Heart ... Read More PubDate: 2023-05-19T00:00:00-05:00
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