From wildcatting Texas oilmen to Colorado rock climbers, from hipster capitalists to populist moralizers, westerners have proven themselves to be a highly individualistic breed of American--as much in their politics as in their vocations or lifestyles. This first book on the landscape of the American West's politics looks beyond red state/blue state assumptions to explore how westerners have expanded the boundaries of the political and emerged as a harbinger of America's electoral future.

Representing a wide range of specialties--popular culture, business history, the environment, ethnic history, agriculture, and more--these authors portray a politically heterogeneous region and show how its multiple traditions have strongly shaped the nation's body politic. Viewing politics as more than cyclical electioneering, they draw on historical evidence to portray westerners imaginatively rethinking democratic practice and constantly forging new political publics.

These twelve essays move western political history beyond the usual discussions of elections and parties and the standard issues of water, progressivism, and states' rights. Some explore claims to western authenticity among those associated with western conservatism-not just regional heroes like Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, but farmers and evangelicals as well. Others examine the transformation of the West's minority communities to reveal a liberalism that celebrates diversity and articulates claims for social justice. The final chapters reveal the complexity of contemporary western political culture, challenging longstanding assumptions about such notions as space, nature, and the liberal-conservative divide.

Here then is the paradox of western politics in all its enigmatic glory, with frontier individualism going head-to-head with multiethnic diversity in debates over divergent views of "western authenticity," and wild cards put into play by counterculturists, cyber-libertarians, fiscally conservative gun-toting Democrats, and environmentalists. "The Political Culture of the New West" shows how westerners have expressed themselves within a complex, often contradictory, and constantly changing political culture-and helps explain why no electoral outcome in this part of America can be predicted for certain.

"In recovering the process by which American ranchers achieved their political coming-of-age, Karen Merrill's "Public Lands and Political Meaning breaks new ground. Here the history of ranchlands policy, long oversimplified and even truncated by western and public lands historians, is presented as a complex, nuanced, and interdisciplinary narrative. Merrill forces us to see how inescapable is the reach of the past, as the political choices ranchers and administrators fought over nearly a century ago set the stage for the policy battles that rage today over western grazing rights. Anyone who cares about the fate of our nation's beleaguered public lands should read this book."--Victoria Saker Woeste, author of "The Farmer's Benevolent Trust: Law and Agricultural Cooperation in Industrial America, 1865-1945

"Karen Merrill's "Public Lands and Political Meaning provides a new and refreshing perspective on the ongoing struggles for control over the public's vast acreage in the American West. Merrill's pathbreaking and lucid analysis reveals how the entangling of private property with public lands has given to ranchers, government agents, and now environmentalists a set of powerful but ultimately limited tools to reckon their relations to one another and to the land. With this book, the political history of the public domain moves back to the center of American history."--Louis S. Warren, author of "The Hunter's Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-Century America

"In "Public Lands and Political Meaning, Karen R. Merrill offers a provocative and original analysis of the roots of recent controversies involving ranchers, environmentalists, and government officials in the West.She shows how a seemingly simple question--who owns "the public domain"?--has generated intense and far-reaching debate throughout the twentieth century. Her account of the contested meaning of the vast federal estate sheds new light on the history of the State. This is an important book."--Adam Rome, author of "The Bulldozer in the Countryside and editor of Environmental History