Igler uses the rags-to-riches rise of two immigrant butchers to explore a series of issues including California's water and land politics and the impact of population and economic growth on the state's environment.

Historians have challenged much of what Turner advanced in 1890. His "composite nationality" ignores important and persisting sources of division in American society; the democracy he saw advancing across the West ignores the very undemocratic power asserted by railroads, speculators, and banks. But more than a hundred years later, Turner's thesis is still debated.

Nash traces American beliefs about nature and wilderness from their European and Biblically-based beginnings through the mid-20th century. The book is strongest in tracing the role of romanticism and transcendentalism in pushing American attitudes toward the conservationism of the 20th century.

This award-winning book offers a fresh take on the farmers' movement of the late-19th century. Differing from other studies that have tended to treat Populists as either unrealistically utopian or hopelessly nostalgic, Postel's book suggests that the Populists offered a realistic and modern approach to politics and government.

White travels from the European explorers of the 16th century to the last decades of the 20th in this sweeping exploration of the West. In analyzing the 19th-century American West, White argues that "the federal government shaped the West" and the West itself served as the kindergarten of the American state."