These essays explore the common roots of myth and history. Going back to the earliest Spanish explorers of the Southwest, Weber looks at some of the myths that informed the thought of Coronado and Fray Marcos de Niza. He then discusses the practice of history and the influence on historiography of such respected scholars as Bannon, Bolton, and Turner. Students of that area of southwestern history known as borderlands studies will find the essays collected here reveal the need for interdisciplinary study of the land once contested by Mexico, native Americans, and the United States.

Elegantly assembles the environmental, social, cultural, political, and economic history of the Great Plains in the 19th century.

The West remains unsettled--by cultural habits, intellectual debate, and ecological conditions. In these four essays, which were presented as the 1992 Calvin P. Horn Lectures in Western History and Culture, Donald Worster incisively discusses the role of the natural environment in the making of the West--and often in its unmaking and remaking. His subjects are four linked topics: the legacy of John Wesley Powell to western resource management; the domination of water policy by state, science, and capital since the mid-nineteenth century; the fate of wildlife in the push to settle the West;...

How do Native Americans maintain their identity and culture in a hostile society, and to what end? Tonto's Revenge is a passionate attempt by a leading Native American scholar to reassess the Indian world view and its importance to all Americans. His deeply felt essays project a vision of how Native Americans can recapture the power of their cultural legacies. "What we have witnessed over the last five hundred years," states Rennard Strickland, "is the domination of an ideologically superior world view (that of the Native Americans) by a technologically advanced but spiritually bankrupt...