The successful New York author describes the epic journey she undertook in 1923, when she left her East Coast home at the age of fifty-five to travel through the southwestern United States, where she had lived as a child and where she would later retire. Part memoir, part travel narrative, part historical investigation, and part ecological study, T

Although the origins of the western are as old as colonial westward expansion, it was Owen Wister s novel The Virginian, published in 1902, that established most of the now-familiar conventions of the genre. On the heels of the classic western s centennial, this collection of essays both re-examines the text of The Virginian and uses Wister s novel as a lens for studying what the next century of western writing and reading will bring. The contributors address Wister s life and travels, the novel s influence on and handling of gender and race issues, and its illustrations and various...

The story of westering Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been told most notably through photographs of American Indians. Unlike this vast archive, produced primarily by male photographers, which depicted American Indians as either vanishing or domesticated, the lesser-known images by the women featured in Trading Gazes provide new ways of seeing the intersecting histories of colonial expansion and indigenous resistance. Four unconventional women-Jane Gay, who documented land allotment to the Nez Perces; Kate Cory, an artist who lived for years in a Hopi...