Available From UC Press

Shaped by the West is a two-volume primary source reader that rewrites the history of the United States through a western lens. America’s expansion west was the driving force for issues of democracy, politics, race, freedom, and property. William Deverell and Anne F. Hyde provide a nuanced look at the past, balancing topics in society and politics and representing all kinds of westerners—black and white, native and immigrant, male and female, powerful and powerless—from more than twenty states across the West and the shifting frontier.  
 
The sources included reflect the important role of the West in national narratives of American history, beginning with the pre-Columbian era in Volume 1 and taking us to the twenty-first century in Volume 2. Together, these volumes cover first encounters, conquests and revolts, indigenous land removal, slavery and labor, race, ethnicity and gender, trade and diplomacy, industrialization, migration and immigration, and changing landscapes and environments. 

Key Features & Benefits:

• Expertly curated personal letters, government documents, editorials, photos, and never before published materials offer lively, vivid introductions to the tools of history.
• Annotations, captions, and brief essays provide accessible entry points to an extraordinarily wide range of themes—adding context and perspective from leaders in the field.
• Highlights connections between western and national histories to foster critical thinking about America’s diverse past and today’s challenging issues.

William Deverell is Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at USC and Director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. He has published numerous books on the history of California and the American West, including Whitewashed Adobe, A Companion to Los Angeles, and A Companion to California History.
 
Anne F. Hyde is Professor of History at Colorado College. She has published widely in the history of the American West. Her most recent book, Empires, Nations, and Families: A New History of the North American West, 1800–1860, won the Bancroft Prize and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

"William Deverell and Anne Hyde have a keen eye for evocative documents, and their introductions to both chapters and individual primary sources in these volumes are superb. There is simply no other document reader like Shaped by the West. It is an essential learning tool in courses that teach not only the content of western history but also the methods and practices of History as a discipline. I will assign these books as long as they remain in print. If and when they go out of print, I will have to retire."—Susan Lee Johnson, Professor of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison

“These wonderful volumes provide western voices for conversations of national importance in every era, from the origin stories of Native nations, through the arrival of European colonizers and the independence and growth of the United States, and up to the contemporary debates over civil rights, immigration restriction, and water conservation. Provocative primary sources are introduced with expert framing, matching nicely with what is traditionally covered in the chapters of a U.S. survey textbook. As history is increasingly globalized, this wider perspective on U.S. history is more attractive than ever.”—Adam Arenson, Associate Professor of History and Director of the Urban Studies Program, Manhattan College

"With a wide net and razor-sharp eyes, Hyde and Deverell gather together a terrific body of documents to help students grapple with the extraordinary complexity of Western history and with the joys of primary sources. Rather than one West, the documents reveal many Wests, always changing, always struggling over resources, always home to extraordinary and diverse cultures."—Gregory Downs, Professor of History, University of California, Davis

"It is hard to imagine more informed guides to the North American West than Ann Hyde and Bill Deverell. These judicious selections create a montage that reveals the history of the region in all its variety and complexity."—Richard White, Margaret Byrne Professor of American History, Stanford University

"Shaped by the West is the most complete and up-to-date primary source reader on the U.S. West. Deverell and Hyde introduce students to cutting-edge debates in the field and challenge them to connect regional and national histories. Thought-provoking reading questions, stunning images, and diverse primary sources make it an essential text for U.S. survey and western history courses."—Stacey L. Smith, Associate Professor of History, Oregon State University "When selecting readings for our undergraduate students, Western historians are accustomed to making difficult and even painful choices that ultimately fail to satisfy our desires to link the contested Western past to the ongoing consequences of conquest in the Western present. The two-volume reader Anne Hyde and Bill Deverell have re-designed will ease these familiar frustrations with primary sources that compellingly answer and inspire students' provocative questions while sharing introductory essays and source annotations that offer nuance and context. As the authors note, "the West is a troubled place in early twenty-first-century America," and their textbooks equip all of us to address the origins and implications of those troubles squarely in our classrooms."—Katrina Jagodinsky, author of Legal Codes and Talking Trees: Indigenous Women’s Sovereignty in the Sonoran and Puget Sound Borderlands, 1854-1946 and Susan J. Rosowski Associate Professor of History at University of Nebraska Lincoln