A remarkable testament to the enduring culture, power, and myth of the American West This handsome book displays an extraordinary breadth of masterworks dating from the 1790s to the present, including over 140 artists in some 320 beautiful color reproductions. In a variety of media and styles, iconic American artists including Frederic Remington, Thomas Moran, Charles M. Russell, and Georgia O'Keeffe, as well as under-explored artists such as Walter Ufer and Kevin Red Star, address the fascinating topics and themes of Native American culture, American politics, land conservation, and the implications of Manifest Destiny. The historical art featured here helped to shape our perceptions of Native Americans, cowboys, and western landscapes; the recent and contemporary pieces shed a modern light on western cultures and challenge long-held myths and assumptions about the American West. Art of the American West is timed to coincide with the opening of a new expansion to the Tacoma Art Museum, brilliantly designed to house these artworks and to connect with and contribute to the city's culture and history. Lavishly illustrated, the book also includes insightful essays written by some of the most important scholars working with this material today. This privately held collection is published here for the first time. Published in association with the Tacoma Art Museum

A resource for all who teach and study history, this book illuminates the unmistakable centrality of American Indian history to the full sweep of American history. The nineteen essays gathered in this collaboratively produced volume, written by leading scholars in the field of Native American history, reflect the newest directions of the field and are organized to follow the chronological arc of the standard American history survey. Contributors reassess major events, themes, groups of historical actors, and approaches--social, cultural, military, and political--consistently demonstrating how Native American people, and questions of Native American sovereignty, have animated all the ways we consider the nation's past. The uniqueness of Indigenous history, as interwoven more fully in the American story, will challenge students to think in new ways about larger themes in U.S. history, such as settlement and colonization, economic and political power, citizenship and movements for equality, and the fundamental question of what it means to be an American. Contributors are Juliana Barr, Susan Sleeper-Smith, James D. Rice, Sarah M. S. Pearsall, Adam Jortner, Robert J. Miller, Jean M. O'Brien, Paul T. Conrad, Scott Manning Stevens, Jeffrey Ostler, Phillip H. Round, Mindy J. Morgan, John J. Laukaitis, David R. M. Beck, Rosalyn R. LaPier, Jacob Betz, Andrew Needham, Mikal Brotnov Eckstrom, Margaret D. Jacobs, K. Tsianina Lomawaima, and Chris Andersen.