Recommended Resources
Development of the West
The books, articles, films, and websites in this section will enhance the materials included on our website for this era of American history. Many of the books are by the historians whose essays and lectures you have read and listened to here and offer in-depth studies of the topics that have caught your interest. The websites and other resources open new ways to explore American history and take advantage of new interpretations and new technologies to enhance classroom or at-home learning.
Lears, T. J. Jackson, ed. American Victorians and Virgin Nature. Boston: Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum, 2002.
Bain, David Haward. Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad. New York: Viking Press, 1999.
Brucken, Carolyn, and Virginia Scharff. Home Lands: How Women Made the West. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.
Ambrose, Stephen E. Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863–1869. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000.
Sandweiss, Martha A. Print the Legend: Photography and the American West. New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2002.
Fraser, Mary Ann. Ten Mile Day and the Building of the Transcontinental Railroad. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1993.
Limerick, Patricia Nelson. The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1987.
Montoya, Maria E. Translating Property: The Maxwell Land Grant and the Conflict over Land in the American West, 1840 to 1920. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002.
Irwin, Mary Ann, and James F. Brooks, eds. Women and Gender in the American West. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004.
White, Richard. “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991.
Recommended Resources from Other Sub-Eras
McPherson, James M. Into the West: From Reconstruction to the Final Days of the American Frontier. New York: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2006.
Stiles, T. J. Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War. New York: Knopf, 2002.
De Leon, Arnoldo. Racial Frontiers: Africans, Chinese, and Mexicans in Western America, 1848–1890. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002.
Delbanco, Andrew. The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Morris, Edmund. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 1979.