| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Dan Moos. Outside America: Race, Ethnicity, and the Role of the American West in National Belonging. (Reencounters with Colonialism: New Perspectives on the Americas.) Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, for Dartmouth College Press. 2006. Pp. xii, 260. Cloth $65.00, paper $24.95.
Dan Moos's excellent first book examines the ways in which western Americans who were excluded from the national mythology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries nonetheless attempted to turn that mythology to their own account. Moos's work is positioned as a corrective to the New Western History, which seeks to debunk the heroic narrative of westward expansion by recovering the diversity of western Americans' experiences. By contrast, Moos argues that the very Americans whom New Western Historians have seen as challenging the hegemonic narrative of the West were themselves intent on tapping the power of that narrative. Moos's complex reading, by illustrating that "certain culturally segregated Americans embraced the terms of a national narrative that was fundamentally oppressive to them" (p. 5), should deepen our understanding of western ideology, which, Moos demonstrates, was at once more compulsory and more capacious than has previously been assumed.	1
After an opening chapter that calls on the emblematic figures of Theodore Roosevelt, William F. Cody, and Frederick Jackson Turner to map the frontier ideology of progressive individualism and imperialist expansion, Moos reveals the ways in which western mythology was simultaneously belied and fortified by those ostensibly outside its purview. Thus the following chapter on African American novelist and filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, who accepted Turner's frontier hypothesis in order to claim the West as a place that "offers unique opportunities for African Americans" (p. 53), demonstrates how cultural outsiders sought empowerment through the very narrative that disempowered them.	. . .

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