Hine and Faragher deserve kudos for this revised edition of their book The American West (1973). It is well written, amply illustrated, and liberally sprinkled with thought-provoking quotations from historians as well as from men and women who made the West. The book includes balanced treatments of women and race and ethnicity, reflecting recent western scholarship. In addition, an entire chapter is devoted to ecological problems and conservation efforts in the West. To their credit, the authors include a chapter on the urban frontier and a final chapter that deals with social and economic issues facing the modern West. Their handling of standard western topics such as the fur trade, mining, the myth of the West, and the open range cowboy is creditable. Notes, illustrations, and select bibliographies at the end of each chapter complement this highly readable and informative book. It should please western aficionados and prove useful to undergraduate courses in western history. Complements but does not supersede Richard White's "It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own" (CH, Jun'92). All levels. L. B. Gimelli; Eastern Michigan University

Hine is professor emeritus of history at the University of California, Riverside and Irvine; Faragher is a professor of American history at Yale University. Both are distinguished experts in the fields of the westward movement and western regional history. In their superbly written work, they have synthesized the traditional and revisionist approaches to the West. They recognize the importance of successive waves of westward expansion in populating and developing the land. Yet, they also portray the West as a series of regions that were neither empty nor "uncivilized" before the arrival of Europeans and, later, Americans. They describe with insight and compassion the variety of peoples who inhabited these regions; the inevitable conflict with settlers and a government that wavered between contempt and misguided compassion is shown as both tragic and, occasionally, oddly heroic. They have done a masterful job of bringing a sense of fairness and perspective to a region and a saga that remain part of our national mythology. --Jay Freeman

In a stirring and enlightening reexamination of the American West, Yale history professor Faragher (Women and Men on the Overland Trail) and Hine (Second Sight), a University of California professor emeritus of history, gauge the impact of key trends and events--the American Revolution, the multiethnic Gold Rush, the 1867 purchase of Russian America (dubbed Alaska, an Aleut word meaning "the big land"), the U.S.-Mexican War, the New Deal, etc.--in shaping the West's socioeconomic development. The American West of legend, brimming with ruggedly individualistic cowboys, intrepid pioneers and gunslingers, scarcely exists in this myth-shattering history. The real West was and continues to be a land of immigrants and of conflicting and melding cultures. "Manifest destiny," the authors maintain, was not a deeply held folk belief: rather, it was the deliberate creation of political propagandists determined to unyoke the policy of westward expansion from the growing sectional controversy over slavery in the 1830s and '40s. As the book moves from the West of the past to the present, the authors show how the region has become the nation's economic, political and cultural pacesetter: Hollywood became the capital of the U.S. "culture industry"; aerospace and defense industries soared; Silicon Valley booted up; Western states absorbed mass migrations from Mexico, Central America and Asia. A substantial revision and update of standard history, this gripping, wonderfully accessible populist saga deserves a place on the shelf alongside the works of Howard Zinn, William Appleman Williams and Ronald Takaki. 233 illus. (many from Yale's treasure-house, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library). (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved