Continental Reckoning : The American West in the Age of Expansion

Finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in HistoryWinner of the 2024 Bancroft Prize in American HistoryWinner of the 2024 Caughey Western History PrizeWinner of the 2024 Spur AwardNamed a Best Civil War Book of 2023 by Civil War Monitor In Continental Reckoning renowned historian Elliott West presents a sweeping narrative of the American West and its vital role in the transformation of the nation.In the 1840s, by which time the United States had expanded to the Pacific, what would become the West was home to numerous vibrant Native cultures and vague claims by other nations.Thirty years later it was organized into states and territories and bound into the nation and world by an infrastructure of rails, telegraph wires, and roads and by a racial and ethnic order, with its Indigenous peoples largely dispossessed and confined to reservations.Continental Reckoning argues that these changes should be given equal billing with the Civil War in this crucial transition of national life. As the Ame