Train culture itself helped integrate communities into the larger, state, and national society in a way that left local autonomy intact. The nice thing about trains is that they bring people and things to your community and take them from your community to the wider world without erasing your actual community. My family and I [...]
More and more Americans, all of them convinced that their side is losing, try to rig the game in their favor. No longer willing to play fair, they want only to win. Born on October 4, 1809 and orphaned at the age of twelve, Robert Cumming Schenck overcame his early difficulties to earn a bachelor’s [...]
The story of the Indian Wars for the American West in Peter Cozzens’s “The Earth Is Weeping” contains the tragic patterns of all human history. This history, like all real history, lives once we awaken memory and see the real contours of what lies before us. One of the compensations for long hours in the [...]
For me, the Teton Range of the American West will always be the best America has to offer: huge spaces, demanding spires, and painful beauty. This past summer, I had the high privilege of traveling into the great American West several times. Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. Frankly, there’s nothing quite like massive, wide-open [...]
One of the perennial problems in nineteenth-century American history was the so-called “Indian Problem.” And, a problem it was. American whites either idealized or demonized the Indians, usually depending on how far one lived from native tribes. The natives—understandably—did everything possible to protect their own hearth and homes, and many American reluctantly respected them for [...]
Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee Prophet and brother of the warrior Tecumseh, was an alcoholic and a failure prior to a profound religious experience in the spring of 1805. The Creator, he claimed, commanded him to preach to all Indians, regardless of tribe. They were to abandon white ways and re-adopt traditional native practices. Under the direction [...]
Mountain men carved paths into the western wilderness, forging the way for American merchants and settlers who also looked to the West for economic sustenance and personal autonomy. In popular and literary mythology, the figure of the mountain man became a symbol of the independence and power of the individual American in the West. White [...]
Despite America’s flawed past, despite the fact that previous generations honored some questionable individuals, our history did not unfold solely within the grid of racism. New England pioneers possessed high ideals of justly ordered freedom, and they carried those ideals west, and in “The Pioneers,” David McCullough is on nothing less than a civilizational mission [...]
Jon Lauck's "The Good Country" is an extraordinary book, a celebration of the good, the true, and the beautiful as well as a revelation of the deepest flaws in American history. One comes away from reading it with immense energy to follow its creatively conservative paths. The Good Country: A History of the American Midwest, [...]
The American frontier has served for centuries as a mythic stage as well as the perfect mirror, offering up a reflection—for good and for ill—of who and what we have been since the arrival of Columbus in 1492. One of my all-time favorite scholars, Don Lutz, had this to say about the symbols that form [...]
At its best, Aaron Copland’s Americana style is one of the great, ingenious, and enduring achievements in music. Its greatness is not diminished by its widespread imitation by lesser talents in movies, television shows, and commercials, where it has served as a ready way to evoke the Far West, small-town life, or other phases of [...]
Yellowstone National Park is something truly special. Everywhere you look, you see an abundance of nature—God’s creation at its most glorious: mountain ranges, vast meadows, deep canyons, pine tree forests, dynamic rivers and waterfalls, boiling and steaming geysers, petrified trees. President Ulysses S. Grant, former general of the Union Army in the American Civil War, [...]
The reliance on religion, family, and tradition in Middle Eastern culture reveals the ephemeral, individualistic entertainment culture of the United States for the Vanity Fair that it is. Being on sabbatical in Jerusalem for two months has brought about two important perspectives shedding light on Middle Eastern culture and therefore on the culture in the [...]
Throughout his political career, Abraham Lincoln connected the maintenance of freedom with the preservation of the free West. If the American West fell, so would American liberty. Richard W. Etulain’s “Abraham Lincoln: A Western Legacy” seeks to show more explicitly Lincoln’s relationship with the West. Abraham Lincoln: A Western Legacy by Richard W. Etulain (198 [...]