Under an Open Sky

The history of the American West is alive with new ideas, new questions, new scholarship. Long defined by popular images of the lone cowboy and the savage Indian, and by Frederick Jackson Turner's concept of the frontier as a source of democracy and social renewal, the field of western history now admits a rich array of subjects, including the experiences of diverse peoples as well as the history of the land itself. A new generation of scholars is reformulating the broader questions also: what was the significance of the frontier in American history?; what are the bases of a western identity; and what themes connect the 20th-century West to its more distant past? The original essays in this volume are reports from the frontier of scholarship on the meaning and direction of western history.