Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion

by Elliott West

Overview

Finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in History

Winner of the 2024 Bancroft Prize in American History

Winner of the 2024 Caughey Western History Prize

Winner of the 2024 Spur Award

Named a Best Civil War Book of 2023 by Civil War Monitor

In Continental Reckoning renowned historian Elliott West presents a sweeping narrative of the American West and its vital role in the transformation of the nation. In the 1840s, by which time the United States had expanded to the Pacific, what would become the West was home to numerous vibrant Native cultures and vague claims by other nations. Thirty years later it was organized into states and territories and bound into the nation and world by an infrastructure of rails, telegraph wires, and roads and by a racial and ethnic order, with its Indigenous peoples largely dispossessed and confined to reservations. Continental Reckoning argues that these changes should be given equal billing with the Civil War in this crucial transition of national life.

As the American West was acquired, integrated into the nation, and made over physically and culturally, the United States shifted onto a course of accelerated economic growth, a racial reordering and redefinition of citizenship, engagement with global revolutions of science and technology, and invigorated involvement with the larger world. The creation of the West and the emergence of modern America were intimately related. Neither can be understood without the other. With masterful prose and a critical eye, Continental Reckoning presents a fresh approach to the dawn of the American West, one of the most pivotal periods of American history.

Elliott West is Alumni Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Arkansas. He is the author of numerous books, including The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story and The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781496243010
Publisher:	Nebraska
Publication date:	07/01/2025
Series:	History of the American West
Pages:	708
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.70(h) x 1.80(d)

About the Author

Elliott West is Alumni Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Arkansas. He is the author of numerous books, including The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story and The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado.

Table of Contents

Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Maps
Series Editor’s Introduction, by Richard Etulain
Prelude: 773,510,680 Acres
Acknowledgments
Part 1. Unsettling America
1. The Great Coincidence
2. Division and Multiplication
3. Letting Blood
4. The Horse and the Hammer
5. Conquest in Stutter-Step
6. Carnal Property
7. The Fluid West
8. Continental Reckoning
9. Civil War and the “Indian Problem”
Part 2. Things Come Together
10. Iron Bands and Tongues of Fire
11. Connections Real and Imagined
12. Maps
13. The “Science of Man” and the American Sublime
14. The World’s Convention
15. Crew Cultures, Cribs and Schoolhouses, Women on the Fringe
Part 3. Worked into Being
16. Cattle and the New America
17. Wind, Fever, and Indians Unhorsed
18. Breaking the Land
19. Domination and Extinction
20. When the West Turned Inside Out
21. Legal Wrestling, the Land Convulsed
22. The Final Undoing
23. Creating the West
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"A comprehensive, lucid, and often surprising history of western settlement in America."—Kirkus Reviews, starred

From the Publisher

★ 2022-11-24
Richly rewarding survey of the history of the frontier West.

“It is always easy to miss the obvious,” writes prolific historian West of what he considers to be its defining characteristic—namely, “its sheer energy and fluidity, movement and change of a degree that set it apart at the time and, arguably, from any time before or since.” As the author shows, the acquisition of the West, from the Texas Revolution to the wresting of the Northwest and Southwest from Britain and Mexico, brought so much territory to the U.S. that, if the same bonanza were to happen today, the nation would extend deep into South America. The American population tripled between 1800 and 1840, and a significant number headed west only to find that, even then, the myths of rugged individualism were thoroughly compromised by a cabal of corporatists and politicians. As he did in The Last Indian War and other books, West writes with an eye to irony and telling details. He notes, for instance, that John Wesley Powell’s groundbreaking classification of Native American nations and languages was but one more instrument of their captivity on reservations. While life for non-Whites was exceedingly difficult, White Americans could readily reinvent themselves. Among the greatest ironies the author uncovers is the fact that by the mid-1880s, ranching was “one of the most corporatized businesses in the nation,” with investment pouring in from the East and Europe. Though the Homestead Act—bitterly opposed by the South—did offer land to individual farmers and “enshrined an agrarian version of the ideal of free labor,” its success was mixed. Of lasting effect, in West’s view, is that where the disunion that led to civil war was furthered by lack of interregional communications, the postwar expansion of railroads, fast ships, and telegraphy created a superpower.

A comprehensive, lucid, and often surprising history of western settlement in America.

Kirkus Reviews