These fourteen original essays tell how a sense of place emerged among residents of various regions and how a sense of those places was developed by people outside of them. All of the essays address the larger issue of the centrality of place in determining social and cultural forms and individual and collective identities. Some focus on race and culture as the primary influences on regional consciousness while others emphasize environmental and economic factors or the influence of literature. Some even examine western regionalism in areas that lie beyond the West as it has traditionally been conceived. Each of the contributors believes that where a people live helps determine what they are, and they write not only about the many wests within the larger West, but also about the constant state of flux in which regionalism exists.
Many books speak of the West as a place, but few others deal with the West's different places.
Many Wests presents a vision of the West that reflects both the common heritage and unique character of each major subregion, building on the revisionist impulse of the last decade to help redirect New Western History toward an appreciation of regional diversity and integrate scholarship in the regional subfields. Breaks new ground in the study of the American West. The toughest job in western studies today is deciding just what the West is and how its maddeningly diverse parts stand alone yet fit together. Besides cutting-edge scholarship, this book offers a multidimensional view of the West and regionalism.