It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A New History of the American West

by Richard White and White

Book Overview

Drawing on a recent flowering of scholarship on the western environment, western gender relations, minority history, and urban and labor history, as well as on more traditional western sources, It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own is about the creation of the region rather than the vanishing of the frontier.

Richard White tells how the various parts of the West-its distinct environments, its metropolitan areas and vast hinterlands,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0806125675
• ISBN13: 9780806125671
• Release Date: September 1993
• Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
• Length: 668 Pages
• Weight: 2.51 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.9" x 10.0"

Customer Reviews

THE Authority on the WEST

If you are a historian, this book should definitely be on your shelf. It is packed full of New Western History ideals. Despite its topical form, the book still allows for a firm grasp of the chronology. White has woven a single volume that integrates, with fludity and detail, the most critical social, economic, racial, gender, and political issues of the West. Fastidiously researched. A spectacular introduction to New Western History for the aspiring or seasoned historian.

Whoopee Ti Yi Yo, Git Along, Little Dogies

Richard White work reexamines the American Western History much in the same format as Patty Limerick has. Rather than seeing the United States movement across the continent as a political/military or even industrial happening it strives to write a history of the "place" known as the American West. In doing so, the author's comprehensive history chronicles in 634 pages European arrival in the American West to the modern era 1980s. The author's work reminds me of that geography theme- human and environmental interaction. He points to how the Spain's introduction of the horse altered life for the plains Indians. (21) Later in chapter five he addresses how various geological surveys and the changed what was know of the west. (135) He illustrates the challenges that the settles experienced in the face of 164-degree changes over the course of one year in the severe Montana climate. (229) No history on the American west would be complete with some time devoted to the railroad as White does on page 247 in the chapter entitled "the West and the World Economy." Yet Whites perspective is that of economics rather than merely industrial expansion and conquest. In doing so the railroads were not the subject history revolved around yet one part of the economic transformation occurring in the American West. Interesting and perhaps obvious to a historian of the West appears on page 142 when the author states that the catalyst for most of the legal changes to the land system stems from the 1862 Homestead, Pacific Railroad Grant, and Morrill Acts passed by Congress during the Civil War. Perhaps the author could have better stated that it was the war and the resulting absence of Southern representation that enabled this long debated westward movement legislation to clear the gridlock of antebellum politics. White in the spirit of Limerick and other "New Western Historians" does an excellent job of illustration a multicultural, multiethnic, multi-political, and gender rich history of the land west of Missouri. At numerous occasions, he interjects the diversity of the American West throughout its history. Examples of this are the section on Red Cloud and his white-Indian culture, (105) the portrayal of Mexican-American migration during the war years, (504) the birth of Kearney's Workingmen's Party centered around nativist attitudes of the late nineteenth century, (334) and most memorable melting pot that was the California Gold Rush. (189) It was interesting to see how White's work influenced a later work - Susan Lee Johnson's Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (2000) which focused entirely on such issues over one period of Western History and did it so well it garnished a Bancroft Prize."The Imagined West" is White's final chapter and in it, the author demystifies and explains how the History of West has taken on a sort of folklore quality. Naturally, the fictional efforts of Buffalo Bill (614) and Owen Wister (621) are attribute

It's all our misfortune ...

Recently, movements such as the Sagebrush Rebellion in Nevada have sprung up in the West pitting ranchers, mining companies, and developers against federal government agencies in charge of managing the land. It's been a long held myth that the government agencies, especially the Forest Service and BLM, have enacted rules to hasten the end of these economic interests in the Western US. This is one of the first books to accurately dispel many western myths such as the lone individual expressing a lifestyle of freedom, land and neighbors be damned! Read this book and learn before automatically siding with groups whose sole motivation is greed at any cost to our precious land, land that will take centuries to recouperate if left alone. These "interests" hide their motives behind "noble" state rights issues, insisting that American taxpayers turn over to state politicians (who receive the bulk of their campaign funds from these special interests) what's left of western wilderness so cattle can graze, ranchers can grow surplus crops such as alfalfa, foreign mining companies can rape the land and pay a pittance to the US Treasury, and developers can hasten the destruction of what's left of our western lands. We need more books like this one to combat the misinformation these special interests spread. Remember that in the end all american taxpayers pony up the money for these groups either through ridiculously low grazing and mining fees to subsidized water systems. This is big business, not mom and pop operations nor is it the Marboro man riding into the sunset. And after reading this book, read Cadillac Desert (Marc Reisner) to better understand how these special interest groups are threatening our beloved west.