Creating The American West Av Derek R. Everett

<p>Boundaries—lines imposed on the landscape—shape our lives, dictating everything from which candidates we vote for to what schools our children attend to the communities with which we identify. In <em>Creating the American West</em>, historian Derek R. Everett examines the function of these internal lines in American history generally and in the West in particular. Drawing lines to create states in the trans-Mississippi West, he points out, imposed a specific form of political organization that made the West truly American.</p><p>Everett examines how settlers lobbied for boundaries and how politicians imposed them. He examines the origins of boundary-making in the United States from the colonial era through the Louisiana Purchase. Case studies then explore the ethnic, sectional, political, and economic angles of boundaries. Everett first examines the boundaries between Arkansas and its neighboring Native cultures, and the pseudo war between Missouri and Iowa. He then trac