This fresh collection of essays honors the life and work of Professor Dean McBride. Revolving around the theme of polity in ancient Israel, this festschrift addresses many aspects of ancient Israelite society, organization, and political affairs. The 15 contributors discuss themes such as "justice," "self-definition," "ethnicity," "constitutionalism," "reform," and "community," as understood over the course of time in the books of Moses, the Prophets, and the Writings.

This text is a magisterial account of John Wesley Powell, the great American explorer and environmental pioneer. It tells the true story of undaunted courage in the American West.

Convention has it that Irish immigrants in the nineteenth century confined themselves mainly to industrial cities of the East and Midwest. The truth is that Irish Catholics went everywhere in America and often had as much of a presence in the West as in the East. In Beyond the American Pale, David M. Emmons examines this multifaceted experience of westering Irish and, in doing so, offers a fresh and discerning account of America's westward expansion. "Irish in the West" is not a historical contradiction, but it is — and was — a historical problem. Irish Catholics were not supposed to be in the West—that was where Protestant Americans went to reinvent themselves. For many of the same reasons that the spread of southern slavery was thought to profane the West, a Catholic presence there was thought to contradict it — to contradict America's Protestant individualism and freedom. The Catholic Irish were condemned as the clannish, backward remnants of an old cultural world that Americans self-consciously sought to leave behind. The sons and daughters of Erin were not assimilated, and because they were not assimilable, they should be kept beyond the American pale. As Emmons amply demonstrates, however, western reality was far more complicated. Irish Catholicism may have outraged Protestant-inspired American republicanism, but Irish Catholics were a necessary component of America's equally Protestant-inspired foray into industrial capitalism. They were also necessary to the successive conquests of the "frontier," wherever it might be found. It was the Irish who helped build the railroads, dig the hard rocks, man the army posts, and do the other arduous, dangerous, and unattractive toiling required by an industrializing society. With vigor and panache, Emmons describes how the West was not so much won as continually contested and reshaped. He probes the self-fulfilling mythology of the American West, along with the far different mythology of the Irish pioneers. The product of three decades of research and thought, Beyond the American Pale is a masterful yet accessible recasting of American history, the culminating work of a singular thinker willing to take a wholly new perspective on the past.

"No one has done before what Athearn has done in this volume. He has utilized company records and a variety of other sources to write a very attractive and readable, but scholarly account of the impact of the Union Pacific and its branch line son the country it served from the 1860s to the 1890s. . . . Everyone from railroad buffs to Western history scholars will like the book."--Choice. "This highly readable book is an excellent history of the heart-breaking efforts to build the Union Pacific into a viable enterprise before the end of the nineteenth century. . . . Throughout this attractive reprint edition, Athearn provides insights and fresh perspectives not only on the Union Pacific but on other railroads in the West and their significance in frontier America."--David Dary, Overland Journal. "A superb contribution by a master historian, Union Pacific Country is a model chapter in the epic story of how the American West was penetrated, settled, and developed with the aid of steam and iron. The research is massive; the writing style is inviting; the photographs, maps, and documents are helpful; and the story is compelling."--Journal of the West. The Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad: Rebel of the Rockies by Robert G. Athearn is also available.

The West, especially the Intermountain states, ranks among the whitest places in America, but this fact obscures the more complicated history of racial diversity in the region. In Making the White Man’s West, author Jason E. Pierce argues that since the time of the Louisiana Purchase, the American West has been a racially contested space. Using a nuanced theory of historical “whiteness,” he examines why and how Anglo-Americans dominated the region for a 120-year period. In the early nineteenth century, critics like Zebulon Pike and Washington Irving viewed the West as a “dumping ground” for free blacks and Native Americans, a place where they could be segregated from the white communities east of the Mississippi River. But as immigrant populations and industrialization took hold in the East, white Americans began to view the West as a “refuge for real whites.” The West had the most diverse population in the nation with substantial numbers of American Indians, Hispanics, and Asians, but Anglo-Americans could control these mostly disenfranchised peoples and enjoy the privileges of power while celebrating their presence as providing a unique regional character. From this came the belief in a White Man’s West, a place ideally suited for “real” Americans in the face of changing world. The first comprehensive study to examine the construction of white racial identity in the West, Making the White Man’s West shows how these two visions of the West—as a racially diverse holding cell and a white refuge—shaped the history of the region and influenced a variety of contemporary social issues in the West today.