American West

Tether to the Past: Willa Cather’s “Song of the Lark”

Though land and setting seem rarely featured in Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark, they do comprise an unusual role, one that grows towards the past instead of the future. Cather...

An Alternative to Removal: The Case of the Miami Indians

Jean Baptiste Richardville In 1818, Indian Commissioner Benjamin Parke attempted to treat with the Miamis, Weas, and Delawares but found only frustration. He should have been wielding significant influence. Only three years earlier the United...

What Andrew Jackson’s Critics Get Wrong

Like all human beings, Andrew Jackson certainly had his faults—sometimes spectacular, brutal, and violent ones—but is it just to label him, as one recent critic has, simply as "a slaver, ethnic cleanser, and tyrant"? Sometime in the last several...

Photographing the Lost World of Rural America

Today America is on its third economic upswing, even as the places I visit have continued to fade away... For 23 years I have been driving country roads, photographing the ruins of rural America for a documentary I call...

Gambling and the American Mind

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...

Andrew Jackson’s Duel with John Sevier

To the men of Andrew Jackson’s era, the following or breaking of the rules of dueling signified much about one’s own character and what one thought of his opponent’s character. Once the two men agreed to having been satisfied in the duel, a strong friendship might resume...

Jack Schaefer’s “Shane” and the Mystery of Presence in Absence

Of all genres of writing, one of the most elusive is the Western. It is a genre that always makes its readers aware of a violence ever brooding in the background. Yet, when the form rises...

De-Christianizing America

“This is a Christian nation,” said the Supreme Court in 1892. “America was born a Christian nation,” echoed Woodrow Wilson. Harry Truman affirmed it: “This is a Christian nation.” But in 2009, Barack Hussein Obama begged...

The Lone Ranger and the Nationalist Myth

“Come a time, Kemosabe, when good man must wear mask,” the elderly Tonto tells a young white boy at a Wild West museum in Depression-era San Francisco. And thus in its opening scene The Lone Ranger...

Will the Real America Please Stand Up?

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 skies, seemingly endless seas of grass, groves of aspens and firs, and the snow-capped Rocky Mountains to...

American Flags, Ideology and the King’s Curse

In Monty Python’s comic diner skit every dish came with Spam, either a little or a lot. Is America the same with ideology? Does Ideological America touch everything and corrupt everything it touches, and can it...

Finding and Losing Train Culture

My family and I are in the process of moving to a small town in northwest Ohio called Fostoria. We are here for practical reasons—it is the town closest to where I work that has a...

Reflections on the New “Western History” of the 1990s

Huddled in a room at the Columbian Exposition in 1893, a group of academics listened to the last of several presenters, Frederick Jackson Turner, read his paper, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” “The existence of...

The Middle Ground: Historical Intermixing of Cultures

In the preface to his new book, Warpaths, historian Ian K. Steele lists the two reigning paradigms concerning American Indian history over the past century, both two-dimensional. First, from the...