2. Empires and enclaves

Columbus discovered an Old World in 1492. Steep population declines reduced Indian numbers by more than 90 percent in the following four centuries. European maps of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries claimed to have carved up most of North America, but ‘Empires and enclaves’ shows that control over North American lands remained hotly contested during this time. Well into the eighteenth century, the vast majority of North American Indians had not become the subordinates of European colonizers and in most places there were no European settlements yet. The first contacts between European and Indians are described along with seventeenth-century English settlements in New England, the Spanish conquest in New Mexico, and the alternative approaches of the French.

1. The view from Cahokia

‘The view from Cahokia’ describes a dynamic and diverse “prehistory” defined by peoples in motion, societies in flux, cultures entangling, powers competing, and realms shifting—all with important implications for the colonial trajectories that followed. Some 120 great earthen mounds at Cahokia in the Mississippi valley, spread across five square miles, had been built by ad 1100. Between ten and twenty thousand people lived in Cahokia at its peak in the twelfth century. Cahokians drew their subsistence from a combination of hunting, fishing, gathering, and the cultivation of maize, beans, and squash. The rise and fall of Cahokia is explained and the precolonial history of the migratory Indians described.

Introduction: American Wests

‘Introduction: American Wests’ shows that the confusion of legend and fact, of myth and history, makes it hard to disentangle the stories we have told about the development of the American West from our understanding of what really happened. This VSI explains how the gap between projections and reality has shaped the development of the West and confounded our interpretations of its history. This history of the American West expands the chronology, enlarges the geography, complicates the casting, and pluralizes the subject to show that across the centuries, the movements of peoples and the minglings of cultures have shaped the history of sharp confrontations and murky convergences.

8. The view from Hollywood

‘The view from Hollywood’ begins with the “Westerns” that dominated American cinema for much of the twentieth century and that influenced popular understandings of the western past. It goes on to describe Los Angeles, the most ethnically diverse metropolis in America; the 1965 Watts riot; and the violence of 1992. Across the centuries, migrations and minglings of peoples have triggered struggles that have torn families and societies apart. Yet, there are examples of episodes of concord, from colonial frontiers to multiethnic neighborhoods in the modern American West, which provide evidence of barriers breached and accords reached, of people overcoming their differences instead of being overcome by them, of heterogeneity made hopeful.

6. The watering of the West

‘The watering of the West’ describes the 1902 Reclamation Act (or Newlands Act) that established a National Bureau of Reclamation charged with constructing dams and irrigation projects in the western United States to reclaim the region from arid nature, open new lands for farmers, and restore the American dream for generations to come. The watering of the West required belief in new “scientific” propositions—many dubious—and entailed assigning added responsibilities to experts, often employed by the federal government, who took charge over not only the manipulation of western waters, but also the management of western lands and the regulation of other natural resources. This made westerners ever more dependent on federal stewardship and federal expenditures—and ever more resentful of federal oversight.

4. Taking the farther West

By the time the last Indian removals from the First West were being carried out in the early nineteenth century, the demands of Americans for lands farther west, within and beyond the borders of the Louisiana Purchase, were creating conflicts with existing occupants and rival claimants. Over time, these claims displaced prior arrangements between fur traders and Indians. They also led to war between the United States and Mexico. ‘Taking the farther West’ describes this United States expansion, the war with Mexico, and the subsequent discovery of gold in California, which precipitated an unprecedented number of people heading to the western end of the continent. The Gold Rush had devastating consequences for the native Californian Indians.

3. Making the first American West

‘Making the first American West’ outlines the “First West”, a vast territory beyond the Appalachian Mountains that remained the focus of intense rivalries between French, Spanish, and British empire-builders in the decades before and after the Revolution. Their expansionist schemes were entangled with the counter-colonial aspirations and determined occupations of diverse Indian inhabitants. In the wake of the Louisiana Purchase, which gave the United States a farther West, and the War of 1812, which brought a further withdrawal of imperial rivals, Indians' options narrowed. By the 1820s, the inclusive relations that had characterized the lands between the Appalachians and the Mississippi had largely given way to exclusive American occupations.

5. The whitening of the West

“What is the true significance of the word ‘white’?” asked Pablo de la Guerra, a delegate to the convention charged with writing a constitution for a new state of California, in 1849. The shifting definitions of who was white and what that meant affected not only the privileges of citizenship, but also where individuals lived and worked, what they were paid, and with whom they associated. ‘The whitening of the West’ shows how the reconstruction of this West as American entailed the remaking of race relations, the establishment of the federal government's supremacy, and the consolidation of an industrial capitalist order. The whitening of the West incited intense debate, fierce resistance, and bloody combat.

7. The worldly West

The 1965 Immigration Reform Act dramatically changed the pattern of immigration into the United States and particularly into the western states that bordered the Pacific or Mexico. These post-1965 flows significantly altered the national origins of the region's population. Along with the twentieth-century transformations wrought by global wars and globalized commerce, the new immigration amplified the connections between the West and the world. ‘The worldly West’ explains that like the growing import of the national government in the West's affairs, the international presence generated resentments and efforts at restriction of immigration. Yet, in the second and third quarters of the twentieth century, the region's fate was increasingly defined by federal interventions and entwined with international developments.