Publishers Weekly
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Scharff (Home Lands), a scholar of the American West at the University of New Mexico, collects 11 essays that cover the regions west of the Mississippi during the Civil War, the antebellum era, Reconstruction, and beyond. In what is arguably the most interesting essay, Jonathan Earle shows how the Civil War was foreshadowed by the intra-state hostilities of "bleeding Kansas" (1855-9), the scene of "guerilla-style, retributive, house-to-house warfare" between pro-slavery forces and abolitionists, ultimately led by John Brown. Yet as Adam Arenson shows, within a decade of the Civil War's close, Manifest Destiny made the West a kind of "safety valve," helping the country forget the war's brutality and the divisiveness of Reconstruction. Maria Montoya addresses how certain ethnic groups in the Southwest were subject to peonage even after the passage of the 13th Amendment. Several essays deal with white violence against Native Americans during the Civil War, which, argues Durwood Ball, "escalated to a violent pitch unseen since the War of 1812." Though it hardly covers military history, this is a wide-ranging, valuable addition to the literature on the American West that reveals the truly continental nature of one of America's most defining struggles. Illus. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Choice
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

Editor Scharff and a dozen other experts have made a signal contribution to the understanding of some central themes in US history. Written as a companion volume to the Autry Center's exhibition on the Civil War and the West, the book uses material items on display as lenses to look anew at major themes. Among these are the collision between Jefferson's vision of the US as an "empire of liberty" (for free white men) and the realities of slavery, racism, the displacement and destruction of the sovereignty and culture of Indigenous peoples, how the visions of free and slave-holding states of such "empires" actually began in "Bleeding Kansas," and ways in which the Civil War merged into the Indian Wars, even before its end. These and other themes converged and contended, referencing artifacts, tools, laws, and so on that much enlarge the understanding of US mainstream, Indigenous, and immigrant cultures. An important model for a new, broader use of material objects in understanding the country's past. Summing Up: Recommended. For general readers as well as college students and professional scholars. --Douglas Steeples, formerly, Mercer University