This link has been bookmarked by 20 people . It was first bookmarked on 20 Nov 2009, by emily parker.
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15 Aug 12
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01 Dec 09
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ation of a strong federal government and an industrial and co
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ters, but c
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Until
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Until the War of 1812, Indian peoples east of the Mississippi had been formidable opponents of American expansion. They were not only skilled fighters, but could call on European imperial allies. But Indians were warriors, not professional soldiers. They had to feed their families and could not remain in the field all year. The professional soldiers they faced suffered from neither of these liabilities. The soldiers might lose battles, but they did not lose wars. American advantages in numbers, equipment, and logistics were too formidable. Americans’ tactics were too ruthless. The pressures they put on Indians were relentless.
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Until
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Until
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Until t
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Until t
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23 Nov 09
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Americans had been conquering land and dispossessing its prior inhabitants long before they reached the West, but both the pace and processes of conquest — military, political, economic and technological -- changed in important ways following the Civil War. As a result, the West evolved differently from lands east of the Missouri River.
-
Americans had been conquering land and dispossessing its prior inhabitants long before they reached the West, but both the pace and processes of conquest — military, political, economic and technological -- changed in important ways following the Civil War. As a result, the West evolved differently from lands east of the Missouri River.
-
-
-
The modern American West is not the product of the arrival at the Pacific of a steadily moving frontier but is instead the result of transformative events and new processes
-
-
-
Civil War, which brought it into being, and World War II, which utterly transformed it
-
Civil War, which brought it into being, and World War II, which utterly transformed it
-
Civil War, which brought it into being, and World War II, which utterly transformed it
-
The modern American West is not the product of the arrival at the Pacific of a steadily moving frontier but is instead the result of transformative events and new processes.
-
-
-
West is a
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The present Ame -
nt American West is a creation of history rather than geography. There has never been
-
The modern American West is not the product of the arrival at the Pacific of a steadily moving frontier but is instead the result of transformative events and new processes.
-
To a remarkable degree, the modern West is the product of two wars – the Civil War, which brought it into being, and World War II, which utterly transformed it.
-
Before it became the American West, the region west of the Missouri had for centuries been Indian country and a contested and uncontrolled borderland between empires.
-
Americans had been conquering land and dispossessing its prior inhabitants long before they reached the West, but both the pace and processes of conquest — military, political, economic and technological -- changed in important ways following the Civil War.
-
Before the Civil War there had been two parallel expansions -- a northern expansion based on free labor and a southern expansion based on slave labor.
-
Terms like Manifest Destiny disguise the deep tensions and divisions over westward expansion that surfaced again and again in the controversies over the admission of Missouri as a state, the annexation of Texas, and the organization of Kansas as a territory.
-
There was a second political consequence of the Civil War in the West, and that was the expansion of federal power
-
After Reconstruction, most of the American army was stationed in the West. The federal government controlled most of the West’s lands and an important, if not particularly efficient, bureaucracy disposed of them.
-
Federal power, in turn, was linked to a distinctive pattern of development.
-
Areas newly settled by non-Indians thus were unevenly integrated into regional or national economies, and politics often reflected these connections — or the lack of them.
-
The great flood of migration brought commercial farmers who came in on railroads and depended upon them to get their crops to market.
-
There was no equivalent to these conditions in the settlement that took place further east.
-
The first was that after the Civil War, Indian peoples were badly outmatched.
-
Until the War of 1812, Indian peoples east of the Mississippi had been formidable opponents of American expansion.
-
Americans’ tactics were too ruthless. The pressures they put on Indians were relentless.
-
The United States, had, of course, claimed virtually this entire region since the Mexican War, but most of it had remained Indian Country beyond practical control by the United States and only marginally connected with national or international markets.
-
he West that had emerged from this rapid conquest and occupation by non-Indians was by the twentieth century a hardscrabble place.
-
By the time the Depression hit in the 1930s, large parts of the West were already staggering under low commodity prices.
-
a Western infrastructure that while of little use in the 1930s, would prove critical to Western development during and after World War II.
-
The Depression shifted public resources westward, but World War II moved them in that direction on a f
-
he Dep
-
massive and enduring scale. The excess hydroelectric power developed during the Depression now provided electricity for factories and aluminum mills, as well as the new atomic works at Hanford, Washington.
-
As was the case in the wake of the Civil War, during World War II the government subsidized large corporations such as Boeing, Kaiser, and Lockheed that became critical to the Western economy.
-
Workers, including those who had taken part in the first large-scale African American migration from the South to Northern industrial cities, came west to work in relatively high-paying jobs in these factories.
-
The West’s population increased roughly three times as quickly as the population of the country as a whole. Much of this growth was on the Pacific Coast and most of it was urban.
-
That expansion was not even, of course, but the old extractive economy was no longer at the core of the West.
-
In popular culture, the West is seen as dichromatic – with whites and Indians.
-
What is perhaps most striking about such a broad overview of the West during the last century and a half is that a region defined in the popular mind by icons of individualism –
-
-
-
The arguments for defining the modern West as that section of the United States west of the Missouri River or, more narrowly, west of the ninety-eighth meridian, are historical, as are the arguments for pronouncing this region different from the Wests that preceded it.
-
The modern American West is not the product of the arrival at the Pacific of a steadily moving frontier but is instead the result of transformative events and new processes.
-
-
-
he Civil War, which brought it into being, and World War II, which utterly transformed it.
-
the Civil War, which brought it into being, and World War II, which utterly transformed it.
-
he Civil War, which brought it into being, and World War II, which utterly transformed it.
-
he region west of the Missouri had for centuries been Indian country and a contested and uncontrolled borderland between empires.
-
gestation
-
Civil War
-
As a result, the West evolved differently from lands east of the Missouri River.
-
a northern expansion based on free labor and a southern expansion based on slave labor.
-
Manifest Destiny
-
controversies over the admission of Missouri as a state, the annexation of Texas, and the organization of Kansas as a territory.
-
unitary expansion
-
expansion of federal power
-
Before the Civil War, the federal government was quite weak
-
“Yankee Leviathan”
-
– a powerful federal government
-
he combination of a strong federal government and an industrial and commercial society had, in turn, further consequences
-
Indian peoples east of the Mississippi had been formidable opponents of American expansion
-
he United States, had, of course, claimed virtually this entire region since the Mexican War, but most of it had remained Indian Country beyond practical control by the United States and only marginally connected with national or international markets.
-
The Depression shifted public resources westward, but World War II moved them in that direction on a far more massive and enduring scale.
-
he West’s population increased roughly three times as quickly as the population of the country as a whole. Much of this growth was on the Pacific Coast and most of it was urban.
Westerners feared the boom and growth would end following the war, but with the onset of the Cold War, continued federal support for the new aerospace industry as well as the maintenance of military bases spurred further growth. That expansion was not even, of course, but the old extractive economy was no longer at the core of the West -
liberal
-
trong federal role in the economy
-
-
-
<!-- right --> 
Born Modern: An Overview of the West
by Richard White
Margaret Byrne Professor of American History, Stanford University
Horace Greeley letter to R.L. Sanderson, New York, 15 November 1871 (GLC00608)
The present American West is a creation of history rather than geography. There has never been a single West; American Wests come and go. At various times places now considered as thoroughly eastern as western Pennsylvania, western New York, or West Virginia have been the West, and over the course of the nineteenth century the term itself proceeded steadily westward. The arguments for defining the modern West as that section of the United States west of the Missouri River or, more narrowly, west of the ninety-eighth meridian, are historical, as are the arguments for pronouncing this region different from the Wests that preceded it. The modern American West is not the product of the arrival at the Pacific of a steadily moving frontier but is instead the result of transformative events and new processes.
To a remarkable degree, the modern West is the product of two wars – the Civil War, which brought it into being, and World War II, which utterly transformed it. -
To a remarkable degree, the modern West is the product of two wars – the Civil War, which brought it into being, and World War II, which utterly transformed it.
-
As a result, the West evolved differently from lands east of the Missouri River
-
-
-
Before the Civil War there had been two parallel expansions -- a northern expansion based on free labor and a southern expansion based on slave labor.
-
Before the Civil War there had been two parallel expansions -- a northern expansion based on free labor and a southern expansion based on slave labor.
-
Before the Civil War there had been two parallel expansions -- a northern expansion based on free labor and a southern expansion based on slave labor.
-
Terms like Manifest Destiny disguise the deep tensions and divisions over westward expansion that surfaced again and again in the controversies over the admission of Missouri as a state, the annexation of Texas, and the organization of Kansas as a territory.
-
-
-
To a remarkable degree, the modern West is the product of two wars – the Civil War, which brought it into being, and World War II, which utterly transformed it.
-
To a remarkable degree, the modern West is the product of two wars – the Civil War, which brought it into being, and World War II, which utterly transformed it.
-
The modern American West is not the product of the arrival at the Pacific of a steadily moving frontier but is instead the result of transformative events and new processes.
-
There was a second political consequence of the Civil War in the West, and that was the expansion of federal power.
-
During the late nineteenth century, the West was the kindergarten of the American state, a place where federal government nurtured its power and produced its bureaucracies.
-
In the West, settlement tended to follow, rather than precede, connections to national and international markets. This was true in California with the Gold Rush and mineral rushes elsewhere, but it was most true after the Civil War when the railroads funded and subsidized by federal, state, and eventually local governments penetrated the region.
-
The great flood of migration brought commercial farmers who came in on railroads and depended upon them to get their crops to market.
-
American advantages in numbers, equipment, and logistics were too formidable. Americans’ tactics were too ruthless. The pressures they put on Indians were relentless.
-
The United States, had, of course, claimed virtually this entire region since the Mexican War, but most of it had remained Indian Country beyond practical control by the United States and only marginally connected with national or international markets.
-
The New Deal gained immense popularity in the West not only because New Deal policies brought some immediate relief from the Depression but because so many New Deal projects — particularly the dams on Western rivers — built up a Western infrastructure that while of little use in the 1930s, would prove critical to Western development during and after World War II.
-
The Depression shifted public resources westward, but World War II moved them in that direction on a far more massive and enduring scale.
-
The excess hydroelectric power developed during the Depression now provided electricity for factories and aluminum mills, as well as the new atomic works at Hanford, Washington. The West gained a disproportionate share of military bases and government funding.
-
-
-
To a remarkable degree, the modern West is the product of two wars – the Civil War, which brought it into being, and World War II, which utterly transformed it.
-
Before it became the American West, the region west of the Missouri had for centuries been Indian country and a contested and uncontrolled borderland between empires. Between 1865 and 1869, it underwent a gestation, and a large chunk of it was reborn as a child of the Civil War. By the time this West reached adulthood, it would be fully under American control.
-
Its identity was more than the result of conquest. Americans had been conquering land and dispossessing its prior inhabitants long before they reached the West, but both the pace and processes of conquest — military, political, economic and technological -- changed in important ways following the Civil War. As a result, the West evolved differently from lands east of the Missouri River.
-
Before the Civil War there had been two parallel expansions -- a northern expansion based on free labor and a southern expansion based on slave labor.
-
The Civil War replaced this dual expansion with a unitary expansion. There would be no equivalent of the Mason-Dixon line or the Ohio River in the West. The West is one of the many places that the South lost and lost badly.
-
There was a second political consequence of the Civil War in the West, and that was the expansion of federal power. Before the Civil War, the federal government was quite weak. The Civil War created, in Richard Bensel’s nice phrase, a “Yankee Leviathan” – a powerful federal government.
-
During the late nineteenth century, the West was the kindergarten of the American state, a place where federal government nurtured its power and produced its bureaucracies.
-
Westerners, more than inhabitants of any other section, depended on the presence of the federal government.
-
n the West, settlement tended to follow, rather than precede, connections to national and international markets. This was true in California with the Gold Rush and mineral rushes elsewhere, but it was most true after the Civil War when the railroads funded and subsidized by federal, state, and eventually local governments penetrated the region. “Population,” in Richard Overton’s words, “followed the rails.” Except for Mormons, Anglo-American settlement of the West really had no pre-market or even weak market phase.
-
The combination of a strong federal government and an industrial and commercial society had, in turn, further consequences. The first was that after the Civil War, Indian peoples were badly outmatched. They faced a modern army, shaped by the Civil War, able to move quickly due to the new railroad network, and equipped with ever more powerful weapons
-
Until the War of 1812, Indian peoples east of the Mississippi had been formidable opponents of American expansion. They were not only skilled fighters, but could call on European imperial allies. But Indians were warriors, not professional soldiers. They had to feed their families and could not remain in the field all year. The professional soldiers they faced suffered from neither of these liabilities. The soldiers might lose battles, but they did not lose wars. American advantages in numbers, equipment, and logistics were too formidable. Americans’ tactics were too ruthless. The pressures they put on Indians were relentless.
-
In hindsight, parts of this rapid expansion now seem a mistake. Large areas were repeatedly deserted during nineteenth-century droughts, and large sections of the Great Plains and the interior basins and plateaus saw their populations peak around 1920.
-
Its economy was based on extractive industries such as mining, fishing, and logging or on agriculture and ranching. San Francisco, gradually Los Angeles, and to a lesser extent Seattle developed some manufacturing, but by and large the West produced raw materials and semi-finished goods.
-
n many parts of the West men heavily outnumbered women
-
t saw itself as the hewer of wood and carrier of water for the East and as exploited by Eastern capital and corporations. The New Deal gained immense popularity in the West not only because New Deal policies brought some immediate relief from the Depression but because so many New Deal projects — particularly the dams on Western rivers — built up a Western infrastructure that while of little use in the 1930s, would prove critical to Western development during and after World War II.
-
The Depression shifted public resources westward, but World War II moved them in that direction on a far more massive and enduring scale. The excess hydroelectric power developed during the Depression now provided electricity for factories and aluminum mills, as well as the new atomic works at Hanford, Washington. The West gained a disproportionate share of military bases and government funding. Virtually overnight, the West acquired a shipbuilding industry, and its infant aircraft industry expanded enormously.
-
The West’s population increased roughly three times as quickly as the population of the country as a whole. Much of this growth was on the Pacific Coast and most of it was urban.
Westerners feared the boom and growth would end following the war, but with the onset of the Cold War, continued federal support for the new aerospace industry as well as the maintenance of military bases spurred further growth. -
Politically, the West remained more liberal and more supportive of a strong federal role in the economy into the 1960s, but gradually this changed, and the region grew steadily more conservative as the century went on.
-
-
22 Nov 09
-
The modern American West is not the product of the arrival at the Pacific of a steadily moving frontier but is instead the result of transformative events and new processes
-
The modern American West is not the product of the arrival at the Pacific of a steadily moving frontier but is instead the result of transformative events and new processes.
-
The modern American West is not the product of the arrival at the Pacific of a steadily moving frontier but is instead the result of transformative events and new processes.
-
Manifest Destiny
-
-
-
The modern American West is not the product of the arrival at the Pacific of a steadily moving frontier but is instead the result of transformative events and new processes.
-
The modern American West is not the product of the arrival at the Pacific of a steadily moving frontier but is instead the result of transformative events and new processes.
-
The modern American West is not the product of the arrival at the Pacific of a steadily moving frontier but is instead the result of transformative events and new processes.
-
The modern American West is not the product of the arrival at the Pacific of a steadily moving frontier but is instead the result of transformative events and new processes.
-
There has never been a single West; American Wests come and go
-
-
21 Nov 09
-
The present American West is a creation of history rather than geography. There has never been a single West; American Wests come and go.
-
To a remarkable degree, the modern West is the product of two wars – the Civil War, which brought it into being, and World War II, which utterly transformed it.
-
Before it became the American West, the region west of the Missouri had for centuries been Indian country and a contested and uncontrolled borderland between empires. Between 1865 and 1869, it underwent a gestation, and a large chunk of it was reborn as a child of the Civil War.
-
Before the Civil War there had been two parallel expansions -- a northern expansion based on free labor and a southern expansion based on slave labor. Terms like Manifest Destiny disguise the deep tensions and divisions over westward expansion that surfaced again and again in the controversies over the admission of Missouri as a state, the annexation of Texas, and the organization of Kansas as a territory. The Civil War replaced this dual expansion with a unitary expansion
-
There was a second political consequence of the Civil War in the West, and that was the expansion of federal power. Before the Civil War, the federal government was quite weak. The Civil War created, in Richard Bensel’s nice phrase, a “Yankee Leviathan” – a powerful federal government. And although the power of this state diminished unevenly following the war, it remained strongest in the South during Reconstruction --and afterwards was strongest in the West.
-
fter Reconstruction, most of the American army was stationed in the West. The federal government controlled most of the West’s lands and an important, if not particularly efficient, bureaucracy disposed of them.
-
Federal power, in turn, was linked to a distinctive pattern of development. The backcountry or frontier of the early nineteenth century initially had weak and uneven connections with national or international markets. Market connections depended on rivers and eventually canals. Areas newly settled by non-Indians thus were unevenly integrated into regional or national economies, and politics often reflected these connections — or the lack of them.
In the West, settlement tended to follow, rather than precede, connections to national and international markets. This was true in California with the Gold Rush and mineral rushes elsewhere, but it was most true after the Civil War when the railroads funded and subsidized by federal, state, and eventually local governments penetrated the region. -
The great flood of migration brought commercial farmers who came in on railroads and depended upon them to get their crops to market. This was settlement by a mature commercial and increasingly industrial society, and from the beginning of the period, the West was a place of large and powerful corporations.
-
The combination of a strong federal government and an industrial and commercial society had, in turn, further consequences. The first was that after the Civil War, Indian peoples were badly outmatched. They faced a modern army, shaped by the Civil War, able to move quickly due to the new railroad network, and equipped with ever more powerful weapons.
-
The results of the forces unleashed by the Civil War and the growth of a modern industrial society were, in hindsight, astonishing.
-
The West that had emerged from this rapid conquest and occupation by non-Indians was by the twentieth century a hardscrabble place. Its economy was based on extractive industries such as mining, fishing, and logging or on agriculture and ranching.
-
In many parts of the West men heavily outnumbered women, and immigration from China, and later Japan and Mexico led to a racialization of work and demonization of the Chinese and Japanese.
-
By the time the Depression hit in the 1930s, large parts of the West were already staggering under low commodity prices. This only increased the region’s sense of resentment. I
-
The New Deal gained immense popularity in the West not only because New Deal policies brought some immediate relief from the Depression but because so many New Deal projects — particularly the dams on Western rivers — built up a Western infrastructure that while of little use in the 1930s, would prove critical to Western development during and after World War II.
-
he excess hydroelectric power developed during the Depression now provided electricity for factories and aluminum mills, as well as the new atomic works at Hanford, Washington.
-
Workers, including those who had taken part in the first large-scale African American migration from the South to Northern industrial cities, came west to work in relatively high-paying jobs in these factories.
-
he West’s population increased roughly three times as quickly as the population of the country as a whole. Much of this growth was on the Pacific Coast and most of it was urban.
-
n reality, the West was more diverse than that, with large-scale immigration from Asia, Mexico, and later other places in Latin America, as well as Europe and Canada.
-
-
-
There has never been a single West; American Wests come and go
-
The modern American West is not the product of the arrival at the Pacific of a steadily moving frontier but is instead the result of transformative events and new processes
-
the Civil War
-
the modern West is the product of two wars
-
World War II
-
Americans had been conquering land and dispossessing its prior inhabitants long before they reached the West, but both the pace and processes of conquest — military, political, economic and technological -- changed in important ways following the Civil War
-
Before the Civil War there had been two parallel expansions -- a northern expansion based on free labor and a southern expansion based on slave labor
-
Manifest Destiny disguise the deep tensions
-
The Civil War replaced this dual expansion with a unitary expansion.
-
expansion of federal power
-
During the late nineteenth century, the West was the kindergarten of the American state, a place where federal government nurtured its power and produced its bureaucracies
-
Areas newly settled by non-Indians thus were unevenly integrated into regional or national economies, and politics often reflected these connections — or the lack of them
-
connections to national and international markets
-
the railroads funded and subsidized by federal, state, and eventually local governments penetrated the region
-
“Population,” in Richard Overton’s words, “followed the rails.”
-
flood of migration brought commercial farmers who came in on railroads and depended upon them to get their crops to market
-
the West was a place of large and powerful corporation
-
strong federal government and an industrial and commercial society
-
American advantages in numbers, equipment, and logistics were too formidable
-
he results of the forces unleashed by the Civil War and the growth of a modern industrial society were, in hindsight, astonishing
-
The West that had emerged from this rapid conquest and occupation by non-Indians was by the twentieth century a hardscrabble place. Its economy was based on extractive industries such as mining, fishing, and logging or on agriculture and ranching
-
It saw itself as the hewer of wood and carrier of water for the East and as exploited by Eastern capital and corporations
-
The New Deal gained immense popularity in the West not only because New Deal policies brought some immediate relief from the Depression but because so many New Deal projects — particularly the dams on Western rivers — built up a Western infrastructure that while of little use in the 1930s, would prove critical to Western development during and after World War II
-
West gained a disproportionate share of military bases and government funding.
-
uring World War II the government subsidized large corporations such as Boeing, Kaiser, and Lockheed that became critical to the Western economy.
-
west to work in relatively high-paying jobs in these factories.
-
Westerners feared the boom and growth would end following the war, but with the onset of the Cold War, continued federal support for the new aerospace industry as well as the maintenance of military bases spurred further growth
-
he child of government and large corporations.
-
modern section of the country. The West, as defined here, was born modern.
-
-
-
a creation of history rather than geography.
-
the result of transformative events and new processes.
-
-
20 Nov 09
-
The present American West is a creation of history rather than geography
-
The modern American West is not the product of the arrival at the Pacific of a steadily moving frontier but is instead the result of transformative events and new processes.
-
By the time this West reached adulthood, it would be fully under American control
-
As a result, the West evolved differently from lands east of the Missouri River.
-
Terms like Manifest Destiny disguise the deep tensions and divisions over westward expansion that surfaced again and again in the controversies over the admission of Missouri as a state, the annexation of Texas, and the organization of Kansas as a territory.
-
The West is one of the many places that the South lost and lost badly.
-
and that was the expansion of federal power
-
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