Synopses & Reviews
The American West has long played a role in our consciousness as a place apart, a site of perpetual optimism and romanticism. In Imagining the Big Open a wide range of scholars deftly examine our projections upon and uses of the New West—a projection that not only includes how we imagine the West but how we use Western places. Addressing the history, popular culture, geography, and public policy of the region the contributors unravel our collective psyche where SUVs and REI cards exist in symbiosis with the wilderness movement and Sierra Club memberships.
Review
"Imagining the Big Open skillfully dissects the warring notions that threaten to rip apart the places and products that define the New West."—Western Historical Quarterly
About the Author
Elaine Bapis is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Utah and teaches at Westminster College of Salt Lake City.
Thomas Harvey is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Utah and a news editor of government and education at the Salt Lake Tribune.
Liza Nicholas lives, writes, and teaches in Bozeman, Montana. Her first book, Culture and the Cowboy State: The Making of Westerners, is forthcoming.
Table of Contents
Regional unifier or social catspaw? A social and cultural historical geography of salmon recovery / Joseph E. Taylor III -- "Way out west...ghost towns, gray wolves, territorial prisons & more!": celebrating the wolf in the new west / Karen Jones -- Narratives of place and power: laying claim to Devils Tower / Wendy Rex-Atzet -- Patagonia, Gary Snyder, and the "magic" of wilderness / Michael Lundblad -- Urban climbers in the wilderness: Mounts Hood, Rainier, and Shasta and the history of popular mountaineering / Gordon Sayre -- Fishing the hatch: new west romanticism and fly-fishing in the high country / Ken Owens -- Reinventing Red Lodge: the making of a new western landscape, 1884-2000 / Meredith Wiltsie and William Wyckoff -- Yellowcake to Singletrack: culture, community, and identity in Moab, Utah / Michael A. Amundson -- From "last of the old west" to first of the new west: tourism and transformation in Jackson Hole, Wyoming / Lawrence Culver -- Buffalo chips or computer chips? the battle over the future of the Great Plains / Amanda Rees -- Reno's silver legacy: gambling on the past in the urban new west / Alicia Barber -- Contesting Boot Hill: the saga of metaphorical Dodge City / Robert R. Dykstra and Jo Ann Manfra -- Scripting the west: Robert Redford's persona and film / Elaine M. Bapis -- 1-800-SUNDANCE: identity, nature, and play in the west / Liza Nicholas -- The Sundance Kid and Sundance: the west as nature / Thomas J. Harvey.