Review of The Mythic West in Twentieth-Century America

Authors

Brian W. Dippie, University of Victoria, B. C.

Date of this Version

1988

Document Type

Article

Comments

Published in Great Plains Quarterly WINTER 1988. Copyright 1988 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska—Lincoln.

Abstract

Robert G. Athearn's The Mythic West in Twentieth-Century America is the capstone to a distinguished career in Western history. It is also a considerable departure from his other work. Athearn began with frontier military history, wrote extensively on railroads and the history of the High Country Empire, and delved into the exodus of blacks into Kansas at the end of the 1870s. His West, the Plains, began one tier of states west of the Mississippi and stopped one short of the Pacific.