The Forgotten Founders
Rethinking the History of the Old West
Book - 2002
For most Americans, the Wild West popularized in movies and pulp novels - a land of intrepid traders and explorers, warlike natives, and trigger-happy gunslingers - has become the true history of the region. The story of the West's development is a singular chapter of history, but not, according to former Secretary of the Interior and native westerner Stewart L. Udall, for the reasons filmmakers and novelists would have us believe. In The Forgotten Founders, Udall draws on extensive research and his vast knowledge of and experience in the American West to make a compelling case that the key players in western settlement were the sturdy families who travelled great distances across forbidding terrain to establish communities there. He offers an illuminating and wide-ranging overview of western history and those who have written about it, challenging conventional wisdom on subjects ranging from Manifest Destiny to the importance of Eastern capitalists to the role of religion in westward settlement. Udall argues that the overblown and ahistorical emphasis on a wild west has warped our sense of the past. For the mythical Wild West, Udall substitutes a compelling description of an O
Publisher:
Washington, D.C. : Island Press ; Covelo, Calif. : Shearwater Books, c2002
ISBN:
9781559638937
1559638931
1559638931
Characteristics:
xxvii, 237 p. : ill., maps ; 23 cm
Call Number:
978 UDA


Opinion
From Library Staff
The history of the American West has become a mythology of gunslingers, gold, and hostile natives. Udall redirects the limelight toward the figures he believes played the biggest role in shaping the West: migrant families.
From the critics

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