The conquest of the West represents a quintessential period in US history. In the American imagination the West is populated with cowboys, outlaws, and rugged individuals. In fact, the American West historically has been a site of intense economic concentration, relentless environmental degradation, continuous government intervention, and ruthless racism. In these ways, the American West does in fact quintessentially represent American racial capitalism and American settler colonialist democracy.
Furthering Readings
Suggested Readings at the end of the video: Louis Warren, God's Red Son, The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America. Philip Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places. Nick Estes, Our History is the Future: Standing Rock vs the Dakota Pipeline and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. Joshua Reid, The Sea is My Country: The Maritime World of the Makahs.
On the Theory of Racial Capitalism: Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. See also, Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth.
Radical works on prisons and policing also intensively explore the relationship between capitalism and race. Two I recommend: Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. See also, Geographies of Racial Capitalism with Ruth Wilson Gilmore, [ Ссылка ]
On Jefferson and landed democracy: Drew McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America
On how the West exemplified resource intensive industrialization: Andrew Isenberg, Mining California: An Ecological History. David Igler, Industrial Cowboys: Miller and Lux and the Transformation of the Far West
On the rise and fall of the Comanche and other Native nations in the American West: Pekka Hämäläinen, Comanche Empire. Ned Blackhawk, Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empire in the Early American West. Elliot West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado
On the genocide of the Native Americans and settler colonial democracy: Brendan Lindsay, Murder State: California's Native American Genocide, 1846-1873. Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873
On corruption, greed, and corporatization in the West: Richard White, It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A New History of the American West. Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America
On Conquest as a Quintessential form of American Growth: Patricia Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West
On Nativism in the 19th Century: John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925
On the treatment of racialized others in the West: Richard Steven Street, Beasts of the Field: A Narrative History of California Farmworkers, 1769-1913. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped Citizenship and Labor. Beth Lew-Williams, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America. Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California. Roger Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion
On Herrenvolk Republicanism: David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class
On the politics of land and anti-monopoly: Tamara Venit-Shelton, A Squatter's Republic: Land and the Politics of Monopoly in California, 1850-1900
On the relationship between rivers and capitalism in the West: Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West. Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water. Daniel McCool, River Republic: The Fall and Rise of America's Rivers.
On the importance of the frontier in American politics and mythology: David Wrobel, The End of American Exceptionalism: Frontier Anxiety from the Old West to the New Deal
On the importance of the West to the development of American empire and governance: Bruce Cumings, Dominion from Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power. Grey Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin
On the development and growth of the American immigration regime: Roger Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants Since 1882. Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America
On the role of wars against Native Americans in developing American identity: Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860
The Truth About the Conquest of the American West
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