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Introduction to Western Studies
and Research Resources:
A Reading List to Get You Started


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This is by no means an exhaustive listing of what has been published in Western history, or even of the good stuff available; however, it is a good place to start. For a more complete listing, I would recommend going through the Western Historical Quarterly's listings of what has been published, reading the Annual Bibliography of the Western Literature Association, and looking at the bibliographies provided in Patricia Limerick's Legacy of Conquest and Clyde Milner et al.'s Oxford History of the American West. To get you started, here's a reading list:

A couple of the important surveys of Western History: I recommend Clyde A. Milner II, et al., eds., The Oxford History of the American West; Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest; Ray Allen Billington and Martin Ridge, Westward Expansion (5th edition); Richard White, "It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own": A New History of the American West; Robert Hine and Edwin Bingham's The American West; and the two D.C. Heath readers which address the West, Sucheng Chan, et al., eds., Peoples of Color in the American West, and Clyde Milner, ed., Major Problems in the History of the American West.

Then I would read two of the important defining works of Western Studies: Frederick Jackson Turner's "Frontier Thesis" (try to get the new edition that John Mack Faragher edited and annotated), and Walter Prescott Webb's The Great Plains.

The rest is a straight listing of good books to read:

Edward Abbey, The Monkey-Wrench Gang and Desert Solitaire.
Oscar Zeta Acosta, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo and The Revolt of the Cockroach People.
Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fight in Heaven and Reservation Blues.
Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me Ultima and The Legend of La Llorona.
Susan Armitage and Elizabeth Jameson, eds., The Women's West.
Leonard Arrington and Davis Bitton, The Mormon Experience.
Robert Athearn, The Mythic West.
Rick Bass, Oil Notes, The Watch, Winter, and The Nine-Mile Wolves.
Ray Allen Billington, The Far Western Frontier.
Mary Clearman Blew, All But the Waltz.
Herbert Eugene Bolton, Rim of Christendom.
Hal Borland, When Legends Die.
Richard Maxwell Brown, No Duty to Retreat.
James M. Cain, Past All Dishonor and The Postman Always Rings Twice.
Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia and Ecotopia Emerging.
Albert Camarillo, Chicanos in a Changing Society.
Sucheng Chan, Bittersweet Soil.
Denise Chavez, Last of the Menu Girls.
Frank Chin, Donald Duk.
Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Track of the Cat and The Ox-Bow Incident.
Douglas Coupland, Generation X.
William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin, eds., Under an Open Sky.
Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism.
Cletus Daniel, Bitter Harvest.
William DeBuys, Enchantment and Exploitation.
Rick DeMarinis, The Year of the Zinc Penny.
Sarah Deutsch, No Separate Refuge.
Brian Dippie, The Vanishing American.
E.L. Doctorow, Welcome to Hard Times.
Ivan Doig, This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind.
Michael Dorris, Yellow Raft in Blue Water.
Richard Drinnon, Facing West.
David James Duncan, The River Why and The Brothers K..
Robert Dykstra, Cattle Towns.
David Emmons, The Butte Irish.
Richard Etulain, Writing Western History (ed.)
Louise Erdrich, Tracks, Beet Queen, Love Medicine, and The Bingo Palace.
John Mack Faragher, Women and Men on the Overland Trail.
Gilbert Fite, The Farmers' Frontier.
Loretta Fowler, Shared Symbols, Contested Meanings.
Richard Ford, Rock Springs and Wildlife.
Mark Foster, Henry Kaiser.
Stephen Fox, The American Conservation Movement.
Judith Freeman, The Chinchilla Farm.
Mario Garcia, Desert Immigrants.
Molly Gloss, Jump-off Creek.
William Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire, and The West of the Imagination.
Marion Goldman, Gold Diggers and Silver Miners.
Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment.
James Gregory, American Exodus.
A. B. Guthrie, The Big Sky and The Way West.
Samuel Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency.
LeRoy Hafen, Handcarts to Zion.
Janet Campbell Hale, The Jailing of Cecilia Capture.
Jim Harrison, Legends of the Fall and Dalva.
William Least Heat-Moon, Prairyerth.
John Hicks, The Populist Revolt.
Linda Hogan, Mean Spirit.
J. S. Holliday, The World Rushed In.
Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny.
Pamela Houston, Cowboys Are My Weakness.
Norris Hundley, The Great Thirst.
Albert Hurtado, Indian Survival on the California Frontier.
Paul Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army.
Peter Iverson, Carlos Montezuma.
Joan Jensen, Promise to the Land.
Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., Now That the Buffalo's Gone.
Jack Kerouac, On The Road.
Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion.
Barbara Kingsolver, Homeland and Animal Dreams.
Maxine Hong Kingston, China Men and The Woman Warrior.
William Kittredge, A Hole in the Sky.
Annette Kolodny, The Land Before Her.
Howard Lamar, Dakota Territory and The Far Southwest.
Robert Larson, New Mexico Populism.
Stephen Leonard and Thomas Noel, Denver: From Mining Camp to Metropolis.
Craig Lesley, River Song, Winterkill, and The Sky Fisherman.
Susan Lowell, Ganado Red.
Richard Lowitt, The New Deal in the West.
Patricia Nelson Limerick, ed., Trails Toward a New Western History.
Cormac MacCarthy, Blood Meridian and All The Pretty Horses.
Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It, and Other Stories and Young Men and Fire.
Clarence Major, Painted Turtle: Woman With Guitar.
Michael Malone, Battle for Butte.
Ralph Mann, After the Gold Rush.
Paula Mitchell Marks, And Die in the West and Precious Dust.
Larry McMurtry, Horseman, Pass By, The Last Picture Show, and Leaving Cheyenne.
Anthony McGinnis, Counting Coup and Cutting Horses.
Dierdre McNamer, Rima in the Weeds.
Carey McWilliams, North From Mexico and Factories in the Field.
Donald Meinig, Southwest.
David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas.
N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn and The Way to Rainy Mountain.
Walter Mosley, Devil in a Blue Dress.
Sandra Myres, Western Women and the Frontier Experience.
Gary Nabhan, Desert Smells Like Rain, Enduring Seeds, and Gathering the Desert.
Peter Nabokov, Native American Testimony (ed.)
Gerald Nash, American West in the Twentieth Century and American West Transformed.
Roderick Nash, Wilderness in the American Mind (3rd. edition).
John Nichols, The Milagro Beanfield War.
Vera Norwood, The Desert is No Lady (ed.), and Made From This Earth.
John Okada, No-No Boy.
Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters.
Donald Parman, Navajos and the New Deal.
Peggy Pascoe, Relations of Rescue.
Rodman Paul, Mining Frontiers of the Far West.
Levi S. Peterson, The Back Slider.
George Phillips, Chiefs and Challengers and Indians and Intruders.
Earl Pomeroy, Territories and the United States and In Search of the Golden West.
Joseph Porter, Paper Medicine Man.
Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father.
Glenda Riley, Women and Indians on the Frontier.
William Robbins, Hard Times in Paradise.
Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping.
Vicki Ruiz, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives.
Vicki Ruiz and Lillian Schlissel, eds., Western Women, Their Lands, Their Lives.
Danny Santiago, Famous All Over Town.
David Seals, Powwow Highway.
Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony and Almanac of the Dead.
Richard Slotkin, Fatal Environment and Gunfighter Nation.
Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land.
Tom Spanbauer, The Man Who Fell in Love With the Moon.
Edward Spicer, Cycles of Conquest.
Kevin Starr, America and the California Dream.
Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, and Collected Short Stories.
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath.
Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore.
Amy Tan, Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God's Wife.
John Thompson, Closing the Frontier.
Douglas Unger, Leaving the Land.
John Unruh, The Plains Across.
Robert Utley, The Indian Frontier and The Lance and the Shield.
Sylvia Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties.
John Walton, Western Times and Water Wars.
David Weber, The Mexican Frontier.
James Welch, Fool's Crow, The Indian Lawyer, and Winter in the Blood.
Elliott West, Growing Up With the Country.
Richard White, Roots of Dependency, Land Use, Environment, and Social Change, The Middle Ground, and The Organic Machine.
Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell and Refuge.
Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire, Dust Bowl, and Under Western Skies.
Michael Williams, Americans and Their Forests.
Mark Wyman, Hard Rock Epic.
Hisaye Yamamoto, Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories.
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