American Western History

A collection of stories capturing what it means to be a cowboy.

This thoughtful examination of a century of travel writing about the American West overturns a variety of popular and academic stereotypes. Looking at both European and American travelers' accounts of the West, from de Tocqueville's Democracy in America to William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways, David Wrobel offers a counternarrative to the nation's romantic entanglement with its Western past and suggests the importance of some long-overlooked authors, lively and perceptive witnesses to our history who deserve new attention.

By his longtime friend and a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, the definitive biography of Larry McMurtry, the legendary author and screenwriter of Lonesome Dove, The Last Picture Show, and Brokeback Mountain, who transformed our vision of the West. Before Larry McMurtry became one of the...

TEXAS EMPIRE MATT BRAUN Jack Jordan, an Indian fighter turned trailblazer and cattleman, is willing to risk it all for a spread of Texas land in the uncharted Llano Estacado—and for the adventure of a lifetime. Already a legend before turning thirty years old, Jordan's greatest quest still...

Deployed to posts from the Missouri River to the Pacific in 1848, the United States Army undertook an old mission on frontiers new to the United States: occupying the Western territories; suppressing American Indian resistance; keeping the peace among feuding Indians, Hispanics, and Anglos; and consolidating United States sovereignty in the region.

Considering the suspicions, jealousies, bigotry, and crass opportunism inherent whenever one power occupies another, Golden Ghetto: How the Americans and French Fell in and out of Love During the Cold War pieces together an improbable tale of how fear and skepticism were crushed by trust and friendship.