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April, 2001
 
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Book Review



Canada and the United States



Gerald D. Nash. The Federal Landscape: An Economic History of the Twentieth-Century West. (The Modern American West.) Tucson: University of Arizona Press. 1999. Pp. xv, 214. Cloth $40.00, paper $17.95.

There was a time when historians of the American West had to begin any historical critique by referencing one of two sources: Frederick Jackson Turner or Hollywood. The reason for such genuflection was an often unspoken, and undocumented, belief that Turner and Hollywood were the primary shapers of Americans' scholarly and vernacular understandings of the western past. The West was, in this guise, a place dominated by rugged individuals who reaffirmed core values of democracy, capitalism, and meritorious success. For those who came of age by the late 1960s, these were defensible assumptions about popular culture—at least for white, middle-class, Protestant Americans—but this celebratory version of the West was already under full-scale assault by that date. For the generations that grew up watching later episodes of Gunsmoke, Bonanza, and Kung Fu, or movies such as Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969), McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), Blazing Saddles (1974), or Unforgiven (1992), popular culture has rendered a far more complicated West, and intellectual debates about frontier vs. region, place vs. process, or rugged individualism vs. federal colony no longer fire the imagination. . . .


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