| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Promised Lands: Promotion, Memory, and the Creation of the American West. By David M. Wrobel. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002. xii, 322 pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-7006-1204-1.)

Historians of the American West usually treat accounts by real estate boosters and self-styled pioneers with amused skepticism. Books and pamphlets designed to sell land or spin legends are notoriously unreliable and often boring. David M. Wrobel, however, dares to go where others loathe to tread. He uses those problematic sources to investigate the formation of "regional consciousness" (p. 11) in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century West. Even the most tendentious tracts brimming with ballyhoo and balderdash are useful "as reflections of the purpose of their creators rather than as accurate descriptions of past places and events," Wrobel asserts (p. 4). Booster appeals and pioneer reminiscences were widely distributed and read at the time, so they certainly do merit our attention. Those self-serving, predictable, and almost exclusively white male effusions still convey something genuine about the West's sense of itself and America's sense of the West.

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