The American West in 2000: Essays in Honor of Gerald D. Nash

by Etulain, Richard W.; Szasz, Ferenc Morton

• ISBN13: 9780826329431
• ISBN10: 0826329438
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-03-01
• Publisher: Univ of New Mexico Pr

Summary

The ten original essays commissioned for this book focus on historical subjects in the post-World War II American West. The late Gerald Nash, in whose honour the essays were written, made major contributions to the study of modern American and western American history, and his impact on those fields is demonstrated in these essays by several generations of his students and colleagues. Emphasising social and cultural developments, the essays draw on methodologies and topics from comparative history, environmental history, urban history, and political history. The authors write on subjects ranging from women's rights to urban sprawl, from organised religion to tourism, from mining to American Indian culture. An autobiographical essay by Nash himself situates his life's work in the context of two formative experiences: his intellectual development as a German refugee arriving in New York in the late 1930s and his commitment to the study of the American West when he began graduate school. The contributors include Margaret Connell-Szasz, Arthur R Gómez, Donald J Pisani, Marjorie Bell Chambers, Carol Lynn MacGregor, Christopher J Huggard, Roger W Lotchin, and Gene M Gressley, as well as Nash and the volume editors.

Table of Contents

Preface	vii
Richard W. Etulain
Introduction	1	(5)
Ferenc M. Szasz
Autobiography: Roads to the West	6	(11)
Gerald D. Nash
The Cultural Renaissance in Native American and Celtic Worlds, 1940--2000	17	(18)
Margaret Connell-Szasz
Will the Circle Be Unbroken?: Tourism and the National Park System in the Twenty-First-Century West	35	(17)
Arthur R. Gomez
The Bureau of Reclamation and the West, 1945--2000	52	(17)
Donald J. Pisani
Activist Women in the West and Their Fight for Political Equity, 1960--2000	69	(16)
Marjorie Bell Chambers
The Cultural Life of Boise, Idaho, 1950--2000	85	(20)
Carol Lynn MacGregor
``Squeezing Out the Profits'': Mining and the Environment in the U.S. West, 1945--2000	105	(22)
Christopher J. Huggard
Organized Religion and the Search for Community in the Modern American West	127	(16)
Ferenc M. Szasz
Angels and Apples: The Late-Twentieth-Century Western City, Urban Sprawl, and the Illusion of Urban Exceptionalism	143	(21)
Roger W. Lotchin
The American West, the World, and the Twenty-First-Century	164	(22)
Gene M. Gressley
Gerald D. Nash and the Twentieth-Century American West	186	(13)
Richard W. Etulain
Contributors	199	(3)
Index	202