"It's your misfortune and none of my own" : a history of the American West
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
"It's your misfortune and none of my own" : a history of the American West
University of Oklahoma Press, c1991
1st ed
- Other Title
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History of the American West
New history of the American West
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Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
This book embodies the theme that, as succeeding groups have occupied the American West and shaped the land, they have done so without regard for present inhabitants. Like the cowboy herding the dogies, they have cared little about the cost their activities imposed on others; what has mattered is the immediate benefit they have derived from their transformation of the land. Drawing on a recent flowering of scholarship on the western environment, western gender relations, minority history, and urban and labour history, as well as on more traditional western sources, "It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own" is about the creation of the region rather than the vanishing of the frontier. Richard White tells how the various parts of the West - its distinct environments, its metropolitan areas and vast hinterlands, the various ethnic and racial groups and classes - are held together by a series of historical relationships that developed over time. A common dependence on the federal government and common roots in a largely extractive and service-based economy were formative influences on Western states and territories.
A dual labour system based on race and the existence of minority groups with distinctive legal status have helped further define the region. Patterns of political participation and political organization have proved enduring. Together, these relationships among people, and between people and place, have made the west a historical creation and a distinctive region. In the American imagination the West still embodies possibilities inherent in the vastness and beauty of the place itself. But, Richard White explains, the possibilities many imagined for themselves have yielded to the possibilities seized by others. Many who thought themselves cowboys have, in the end, turned out to be dogies.
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