![]() Hine and John Mack Faragher’s The American West or Richard White’s “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”. ![]() Despite the book’s ambitious subtitle, it is not a textbook-style synthetic history like Robert V. Brands’ sweeping new overview Dreams of El Dorado: A History of the American West tackles familiar shibboleths but wears its revisionism lightly and never becomes pedantic. Most of all, though, people don’t always want to remember the West as it was. now stands behind a century and a half of pulp fiction, Wild West shows, and Hollywood hoopla that layered on their own distortions. The hucksters who hawked it played faster and looser with facts than later historians were allowed. They are rarely the same, in part, because the West was sold before it was settled. Sooner or later – and it’s usually sooner – introductory histories of the American West have to grapple with the difference between the West that nineteenth-century Americans experienced and the West folks today remember. ![]()
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