Book Birthdays celebrate one year of a book’s life in tweets, reviews, and more. This month we’re saying Happy First Book Birthday to Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion (University of Nebraska Press, February 2023) by Elliott West.
About the Book:
In Continental Reckoning renowned historian Elliott West presents a sweeping narrative of the American West and its vital role in the transformation of the nation. In the 1840s, by which time the United States had expanded to the Pacific, what would become the West was home to numerous vibrant Native cultures and vague claims by other nations. Thirty years later it was organized into states and territories and bound into the nation and world by an infrastructure of rails, telegraph wires, and roads and by a racial and ethnic order, with its Indigenous peoples largely dispossessed and confined to reservations.
A Word from the Author:
The year since the publication of Continental Reckoning has been both rewarding and something of an education. The response to the book, which was twenty-five years in the making, has been flattering and gratifying. The audiences at the many presentations I have given have been more than generous in their appreciation, and in particular, they have responded enthusiastically and with more than a bit of surprise to the two main points I hoped to get across: that when the familiar myths are stripped away, the emergence of the West was a fascinating, deeply human story full of unexpected revelations, and that when we see that story for what it really was, we will see how the creation of the West was essential to the making of the modern nation we have known since the turn of the twentieth century.
As for the educational part, I am very much the Luddite, and the past year has taught me how, once again, notable changes in popular culture have passed me by unnoticed. Early on I was invited to come to Montana to talk about the book on a podcast. “Sure,” I said. A free trip to one of my favorite places? Why not? When I signed off (I do take part in emailing), I phoned one of my sons. “What’s a podcast?” I asked him. He sighed and explained.
I have taken part in many of them since then and have enjoyed them thoroughly. The hosts have been smart, well informed and ready with great questions and comments. The big surprise has been the reach of this new technological wrinkle. Friends who have no interest whatsoever in the American West would comment on hearing me on this one or that. The real shocker came when I was on a podcast with Joe Rogan. (I asked the same son if he had ever heard of Rogan. Another sigh.) Rogan, who was a pleasure to work with, is at the top of the podcast heap, with fifteen million subscribers. The responses from around the world made even clearer just how out of touch I am.
Besides the obvious personal benefit, the experience carried me back to Continental Reckoning and what it taught me at the time. One of its prominent themes was how the West was created in part by the coincident revolution in movement, not only of people and things but of information through the telegraph, a modernized press and more. This was one of many examples of how the birth of the West was a vivid testimony of new forces remaking the world and the nation, in this case, ones that were effectively shrinking the world.
As ever, my awareness remains stuck in the past, but the first birthday of Continental Reckoning now reminds me that the events that fascinate me from a century and a half ago, those in the West and elsewhere, have carried us into today, in this case pretty much a straight shot from Western Union through the telephone and television to the global community of the internet and Joe Rogan and company.
We tell our students that the present and the past are ultimately inextricable. I should try harder to follow my own lessons.
Reviews:
“By the final chapter of Continental Reckoning, the reader should pause and realize they have read one of the most important contributions to the American historiography published in the past half-century. Historians of America and the West will recognize that Elliott West, one of the most respected scholars in his field the past 40 years, has accomplished a great deal in his career, but will remember Continental Reckoning as his master work, truly a magnum opus of his highly lauded scholarly career. ” – Stuart Rosebrook, True West Magazine
“Continental Reckoning builds on the last half century of research into the Indian wars and western settlement and places it in the wider context of American expansion. University of Arkansas history professor Elliott West examines the U.S. transcontinental land grab from all angles, including political, military, cultural and environmental. Continental Reckoning is massive and brilliantly constructed, scholarly and literary, meant to be read beyond academic conferences by a public that—in these contentious times—needs to understand America’s past.” – David Luhrssen, Shepard Express
“Don’t let the page count deter you. What you’ll hold is the culmination of 20 years of research and thinking of the American West by Alumni Professor Emeritus at the University of Arkansas, Elliott West. . . . West uses brush strokes small and large to depict his engaging and thought-provoking perspective.” – Tom Carpenter, Roundup Magazine
“Though the Homestead Act—bitterly opposed by the South—did offer land to individual farmers and “enshrined an agrarian version of the ideal of free labor,” its success was mixed. Of lasting effect, in West’s view, is that where the disunion that led to civil war was furthered by lack of interregional communications, the postwar expansion of railroads, fast ships, and telegraphy created a superpower. A comprehensive, lucid, and often surprising history of western settlement in America.” – Kirkus Reviews
“His skill with words causes him to choose unique passages from the eloquent letters available from early travelers. One erudite stagecoach rider compared his journey to the “hot blast of Cyclops’ furnace.” Like a man piecing together a complex jigsaw puzzle in the dark, West eventually reveals a flawless mural of American progress by the book’s end. More than 50 illustrations and photos plus maps and his extensive bibliography and notes complete this important work.” – J. Kemper Campbell, Lincoln Journal Star
A book this massive deserves a massive review. Whatever its faults, they must be set alongside its many and overwhelming virtues. Indeed, Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion, is a model book. Buy it, nurture it, cherish it. Such histories appear only infrequently in our impatient age. – Bradley J. Birzer, Law & Liberty
Interviews:
H-Net Civil War Part 1 and Part 2
CochiseCounty_Travels – Wild West History
The American Buffalo: A Film by Ken Burns
UNP blog 