| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Outside America: Race, Ethnicity, and the Role of the American West in National Belonging. By Dan Moos. (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2005. xii, 260 pp. Cloth, $65.00, ISBN 1-58465-506-2. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 1-58465-507-0.)

After an unfortunate start—the word "American" is misspelled on the title page—this book settles into a groove, and Dan Moos makes some useful points illustrating his overarching theme that marginalized groups found ways of including themselves within a frontier mythology that assumed definitive form by the end of the nineteenth century. Moos challenges the prevailing orthodoxy that, because this mythology was white, masculine, and triumphalist, it can be of no interest to historians intent on presenting a real West that was at once diverse and, shorn of theatrics, profoundly ordinary. What if the myth appealed to those it excluded as a means of winning a place within American society? What if their response to the pioneer narrative was, as a recent census promotion would have it, "Count me in!"? Figures who have been getting a strenuous workout of late—notably Theodore Roosevelt and William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody—establish the basic frontier myth. Three case studies follow: on African Americans, Mormons, and American Indians.

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