For thousands of years, Great Salt Lake has played a surprisingly central role in the lives of humans and animals throughout the American West and across entire continents. Once a destination for wellness seekers, the lake’s alarming disappearance is already affecting skiing, tourism, and the region’s economic future. As humans continue to divert its waters for agriculture and mine its marshlands for industry, Great Salt Lake could vanish entirely within five years. A refuge for more than ...

**The epic story of the planet’s oldest trees and the making of the modern world“Rich...fascinating.”—The Wall Street Journal**Humans have always revered long-lived trees. But as historian Jared Farmer reveals in Elderflora, our veneration took a modern turn in the eighteenth century, when naturalists embarked on a quest to locate and precisely date the oldest living things on earth. The new science of tree time prompted travelers to visit ancient specimen...

From roots to canopy, a lush, verdant history of the making of California.California now has more trees than at any time since the late Pleistocene. This green landscape, however, is not the work of nature. It’s the work of history. In the years after the Gold Rush, American settlers remade the California landscape, harnessing nature to their vision of the good life. Horticulturists, boosters, and civic reformers began to "improve" the bare, brown countryside, plan...

Gianni Vattimo (1936–2023) was among the most significant Italian philosophers of the last fifty years. A controversial figure both at home and abroad, he sometimes described himself paradoxically as a “nihilist” and as a “communist Catholic.” Despite his provocations—and unusually for an academic philosopher—he served two terms in the European Parliament. For decades, Vattimo was at the forefront of developments in continental philosophy, spanning hermeneutics, postmodernity, and the “ret...

Shrouded in the lore of legendary Indians, Mt. Timpanogos beckons the urban populace of Utah. And yet, no “Indian” legend graced the mount until Mormon settlers conjured it—once they had displaced the local Indians, the Utes, from their actual landmark, Utah Lake. On Zion’s Mount tells the story of this curious shift. It is a quintessentially American story about the fraught process of making oneself “native” in a strange land. But it is also a complex tale of how cultures confer ...

The West, especially the Intermountain states, ranks among the whitest places in America, but this fact obscures the more complicated history of racial diversity in the region. In Making the White Man’s West, author Jason E. Pierce argues that since the time of the Louisiana Purchase, the American West has been a racially contested space. Using a nuanced theory of historical “whiteness,” he examines why and how Anglo-Americans dominated the region for a 120-year period.In ...

Transference of orientalist images and identities to the American landscape and its inhabitants, especially in the West—in other words, portrayal of the West as the “Orient”—has been a common aspect of American cultural history. Place names, such as the Jordan River or Pyramid Lake, offer notable examples, but the imagery and its varied meanings are more widespread and significant. Understanding that range and significance, especially to the western part of the continent, means coming to t...

The Oatman massacre is among the most famous and dramatic captivity stories in the history of the Southwest. In this riveting account, Brian McGinty explores the background, development, and aftermath of the tragedy.Roys Oatman, a dissident Mormon, led his family of nine and a few other families from their homes in Illinois on a journey west, believing a prophecy that they would find the fertile “Land of Bashan” at the confluence of the Gila and Colorado Rivers. On February 18, 185...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A groundbreaking work of science, history, and archaeology that radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus in 1492—from “a remarkably engaging writer” (The New York Times Book Review).Contrary to what so many Americans learn in school, the pre-Columbian Indians were not sparsely settled in a pristine wilderness; rather, there were huge numbers of Indians who actively molded and influenced the lan...

“Gracefully written . . . thoroughly researched . . . America is a banquet prepared by the Indians—who were forgotten when it was time to give thanks at the table.”—St. Paul Pioneer-Express“Well written, imagery-ridden . . . A tale of what was, what became, and what is today regarding the Indian relation to the European civilization that ‘grafted’ itself onto this ‘ancient stem’”—Minneapolis Star TribuneIn Indian Giver...

Each time history repeats itself, so it's said, the price goes up. The twentieth century was a time of runaway growth in human population, consumption, and technology, placing a colossal load on all natural systems, especially earth, air, and water -- the very elements of life. The most urgent questions of the twenty-first century are: where will this growth lead? can it be consolidated or sustained? and what kind of world is our present bequeathing to our future? In his #1 bestseller A Sh...

Roderick Nash’s classic study of changing attitudes toward wilderness during American history, as well as the origins of the environmental and conservation movements, has received wide acclaim since its initial publication in 1967. The Los Angeles Times listed it among the one hundred most influential books published in the last quarter century, Outside Magazine included it in a survey of books that changed our world,” and it has been called the Book of Genesis for envi...