Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Economic and Business History
Episode: Elliott West, "Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)
Description: In Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion (U Nebraska Press, 2023) renowned historian Elliott West presents a sweeping narrative of the American West and its vital role in the transformation of the nation. In the 1840s, by which time the United States had expanded to the Pacific, what would become the West was home to numerous vibrant Native cultures and vague claims by other nations. Thirty years later it was organized into states and territories and bound into the nation and world by an infrastructure of rails, telegraph wires, and roads and by a racial and et...