A dozen scholars from several disciplines examine popular perceptions about the West in their quest to interpret the region's geography.

Much has been written about the west—most of it clouded by exaggeration and fabrication. Since 1953, True West magazine has been devoted to celebrating the West’s true colors, giving the men and women who settled there accurate voices, exploring every triumph and tragedy of their time—and exposing every vice and virtue. True Tales and Amazing Legends of the Old West commemorates these unforgettable cowboys, Indians, and city slickers through a mix of classic histories and brand-new narratives, all illustrated with photographs—many reproduced here for the first time—of the people and places that gave rise to America’s Western mythology. With twenty-six stories that blend fact with folklore, this collection abounds with accounts of the famous and the infamous, including Sacagawea, Wild Bill Hickok, Pancho Villa, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Davy Crockett, and Wyatt Earp. Also here are lesser-known figures whose stories were pivotal to shaping the culture of the era, such as European conquistador Francisco Coronado, rancher “Black Billy” Hill, and fearless lawman Orlando “Rube” Robbins. Other tales recount the wide open plains, lawlessness, drama, mayhem, and promise embodied in the Old West. Whether you’re a history buff, an Old West devotee, or simply someone who is fascinated by the characters of America’s early years, these timeless tales and photographs epitomize the legendary spirit of what it meant to settle the West.

Plunge into the wild climate of unknown Alaska in this riveting travel account.

A fully updated and revised edition of the book USA Today called "jim-dandy pop history," by the bestselling, American Book Award–winning author "The most definitive and expansive work on the Lost Cause and the movement to whitewash history." —Mitch Landrieu, former mayor of New Orleans From the author of the national bestseller Lies My Teacher Told Me, a completely updated—and more timely than ever—version of the myth-busting history book that focuses on the inaccuracies, myths, and lies on monuments, statues, national landmarks, and historical sites all across America. In Lies Across America, James W. Loewen continues his mission, begun in the award-winning Lies My Teacher Told Me, of overturning the myths and misinformation that too often pass for American history. This is a one-of-a-kind examination of historic sites all over the country where history is literally written on the landscape, including historical markers, monuments, historic houses, forts, and ships. New changes and updates include: • a town in Louisiana that was the site of a major but now-forgotten enslaved persons' uprising • a totally revised tour of the memory and intentional forgetting of slavery and the Civil War in Richmond, Virginia • the hideout of a gang in Delaware that made money by kidnapping free blacks and selling them into slavery Entertaining and enlightening, Lies Across America also has a serious role to play in contemporary debates about white supremacy and Confederate memorials.

Something has been going badly wrong in America. But what is really happening, why, and what does it mean? Could the US itself now be the greatest threat to the future of the West? What does Joe Biden need to do to get America back on track? In this fascinating account of America today, Patrick Davies, former British Deputy Ambassador to the US, sets out to understand how America, blinded by myths of its own exceptionalism, has failed to tackle serious political, social and economic problems which are exacerbating divisions in its society, poisoning its politics and ultimately fuelling America’s decline. The Great American Delusion asks whether, with global power shifting eastwards, the US can save itself and, with it, the Western world before it’s too late. Patrick Davies worked alongside the Obama and Trump White Houses for five years. He has more than 30 years’ experience of America, its people and its politics.

National Book Award Finalist: A study of national myths, lore, and identity that “will interest all those concerned with American cultural history” (American Political Science Review). Winner of the American Historical Association’s Albert J. Beveridge Award for Best Book in American History In Regeneration Through Violence, the first of his trilogy on the mythology of the American West, historian and cultural critic Richard Slotkin demonstrates how the attitudes and traditions that shape American culture evolved from the social and psychological anxieties of European settlers struggling in a strange new world to claim the land and displace Native Americans. Using the popular literature of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries—including captivity narratives, the Daniel Boone tales, and the writings of Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Melville—Slotkin traces the full development of this myth. “Deserves the careful attention of everyone concerned with the history of American culture or literature. ”—Comparative Literature “Slotkin’s large aim is to understand what kind of national myths emerged from the American frontier experience. . . . [He] discusses at length the newcomers’ search for an understanding of their first years in the New World [and] emphasizes the myths that arose from the experiences of whites with Indians and with the land.” —Western American Literature

The frontier and Western expansionism are so quintessentially a part of American history that the literature of the West and Southwest is in some senses the least regional and the most national literature of all. The frontier--the place where cultures meet and rewrite themselves upon each other's texts--continues to energize writers whose fiction evokes, destroys, and rebuilds the myth in ways that attract popular audiences and critics alike. Sara L. Spurgeon focuses on three writers whose works not only exemplify the kind of engagement with the theme of the frontier that modern authors make, but also show the range of cultural voices that are present in Southwestern literature: Cormac McCarthy, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Ana Castillo. Her central purposes are to consider how the differing versions of the Western "mythic" tales are being recast in a globalized world and to examine the ways in which they challenge and accommodate increasingly fluid and even dangerous racial, cultural, and international borders. In Spurgeon's analysis, the spaces in which the works of these three writers collide offer some sharply differentiated visions but also create new and unsuspected forms, providing the most startling insights. Sometimes beautiful, sometimes tragic, the new myths are the expressions of the larger culture from which they spring, both a projection onto a troubled and troubling past and an insistent, prophetic vision of a shared future