CONQUESTS & CONSEQUENCES: THE AMERICAN WEST from FRONTIER to REGION By HIGHAM, CAROL L., and WILLIAM H. KATERBERG 475 pages, paperback, ISBN: 978-0-88295-270-3 PHOTOGRAPHS, MAPS, SUGGESTED READINGS, INDEX. List Price to be Determined. Retail Price: $44.95 Online Price:$35.96   (instructors only)

Harlan Davidson is proud to offer a bold new approach to a survey history of the American West, a co-publication with the Buffalo Bill Historical Center . . . Conquests and Consequences tells the story of the American West as the meeting of peoples and encounters with new environments. It emphasizes the efforts of Spanish, French, English, and American empires to control the region and impose their way of life on its Native peoples and landscapes, but also shows how empire builders sometimes adapted to the people and lands they encountered. Conquests always had unexpected consequences. This story has a cast of colorful characters, from the Indian warriors and gunslingers made into icons by Western novels and films to miners filled with gold fever, farm families dreaming of owning their own land, suburban tourists at national parks with their children packed in family cars, and legal and illegal immigrants looking for work and a better life. Lavishly illustrated with more than 100 photographs and maps—and certain to be the most accessible and affordable text on the market—Conquests and Consequencesdoes not shy away from controversial questions or the significance and meaning of Western American history. It pits the famous “frontier thesis” of Frederick Jackson Turner against competing ways of understanding the history of the U.S. West—from “borderlands” approaches to the “metropolitan thesis” of Western Canadian Historians, frontiers as zones of racial conflict, and the “New Western History” of the 1980s and 1990s. It encourages readers to consider what these diverse perspectives on the region and its history have to say about the present and future of the American “empire.”