Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.3 | The History Cooperative

Devil's Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century West. By Hal K. Rothman. (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1998. xiv, 434 pp. $34.95, isbn 0-7006-0910-5.)

Everyone who studies the contemporary American West acknowledges the influence of tourism on the region's history, landscape, economies, and social relations. Until recently, Earl Pomeroy's In Search of the Golden West (1957) was the only book-length study that gave the subject an overarching historical treatment, arguing that tourism was not epiphenomenal or trivial, but essential, especially to the white settlement and building of California. Hal K. Rothman's Devil's Bargains attempts to extend and surpass Pomeroy's work, turning detailed attention to the entire twentieth century and taking in much of the trans-Mississippi West. An ambitious book, Devil's Bargains stretches across subregions and sorts out periods, defining western tourism's characteristic motives, styles, and achievements and trying to assess its impact. Rothman has combined wide reading in the growing list of books and articles, dissertations, and memoirs with archival digging and oral historical work of his own. . . .

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