Richard W. Etulain

Bio: Richard W. Etulain is an academic researcher from University of New Mexico. The author has contributed to research in topics: Frontier & Cultural history. The author has an hindex of 10, co-authored 43 publications receiving 292 citations. Previous affiliations of Richard W. Etulain include Texas Christian University & Idaho State University.

The American West: A Twentieth-Century History

Abstract: The mystique of the Wild West perpetuated by Buffalo Bill, Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour, John Wayne, and the Marlboro Man has hindered the serious study of the real region west of the ninety-eighth meridian. Michael P. Malone and Richard W. Etulain move beyond myth and beyond the influential frontier thesis advanced by Frederick Jackson Turner to write about the American West as it has actually developed in the twentieth century. In vivid detail they describe a region too richly varied and dynamic to be contained by the imagination. Extending into the 1980s, The American West: A Twentieth-Century History is the first comprehensive survey of the modern West to appear in many years. Malone and Etulain discuss economic, political, social, and cultural developments in the West from the turn of the century to the onset of the Great Depression, when the region was still in a colonial relationship to the urban, industrial Northeast and upper Midwest; from 1930 to the end of World War II, when the West was transformed by New Deal programs and by even greater federal spending in military installations; and from 1945 to the present, when the West experienced rapid changes in demographics and a series of trendsetting lifestyles. Unique to this history are chapters about the rich cultural heritage of the modern West and about the lives of men, women, and children of various ethnic groups. Detailed bibliographical essays are included.

Re-imagining the Modern American West: A Century of Fiction, History, and Art

Abstract: From the Mississippi west to the Pacific, from border to border north and south, here is the first thorough overview of novelists, historians, and artists of the modern American West. Examining a full century of cultural-intellectual forces at work, a leading authority on the twentieth-century West brings his formidable talents to bear in this pioneering study. Richard W. Etulain divides his book into three major sections. He begins with the period from the 1890s to the 1920s, when artists and authors were inventing an idealized frontier--especially one depicting initial contacts and conflicts with new landscapes and new peoples. The second section covers the regionalists, who focused on regional (mostly geographical) characteristics that shaped distinctively "western" traits of character and institutions. The book concludes with a discussion of the postregional West from World War II to the ?90s, a period when novelists, historians, and artists stressed ethnicity, gender, and a new environmentalism as powerful forces in the formation of modern western society and culture. Etulain casts a wide net in his new study. He discusses novelists from Jack London to John Steinbeck and on to Joan Didion. He covers historians from Frederick Jackson Turner to Earl Pomeroy and Patricia Nelson Limerick, and artists from Frederic Remington and Charles Russell to Georgia O?Keeffe and R. C. Gorman. The author places emphasis on women painters and authors such as Mary Hallock Foote, Mary Austin, Willa Cather, and Judith Baca. He also stresses important works of ethnic writers including Leslie Marmon Silko, Rudolfo Anaya, and Amy Tan. An intriguing survey of tendencies and trends and a well-defined profile of influences and outgrowths, this book will be valuable to students and scholars of western culture and history, American studies, and related disciplines. General readers will appreciate the book's balanced structure and spirited writing style. All readers, whatever their level of interest, will discover the major cultural inventions of the American West over the past one hundred years.

Annual Bibliography of Studies in Western American Literature

Abstract: W hat London seems to be suggesting, then, in “T o Build a Fire,” is not any kind of animalistic return for man to a presymbolic state of existence in order to survive; on the contrary, he seems to strongly imply that animals survive through instinct; men of limited mental capacity fail; and that human beings who exercise good judgment, tempered with emotional insights are the human beings who win out over a hostile environment. J a m e s K . B o w e n , Southern Oregon College

Does the Frontier Experience Make America Exceptional

Abstract: Foreword Preface A Note for Students PART I: INTRODUCTION The Frontier and American Exceptionalism PART II: SOME CURRENT QUESTIONS How was the Idea of the 'Frontier' Born? F.J.Turner How has the Idea of the Frontier Shaped our Imagination? R.White Whose Frontier is it? G.Riley Is the Frontier Idea Still Valid for the Twenty-first Century? M.Ridge Will Region Replace Frontier? D.Worster How Should we Interpret the Frontier/West? P.N.Limerick, M.P.Malone, G.Thompson & E.West Making Connections Suggestions for Further Reading

The Land before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860.

Abstract: To discover how women constructed their own mythology of the West, Kolodny examines the evidence of three generations of women's writing about the frontier. She finds that, although the American frontiersman imagined the wilderness as virgin land, an unspoiled Eve to be taken, the pioneer woman at his side dreamed more modestly of a garden to be cultivated. Both intellectual and cultural history, this volume continues Kolodny's study of frontier mythology begun in The Lay of the Land .

Population change and rural society

Abstract: This book uses a comprehensive perspective to examine dynamic relationships between contemporary population change and rural society along four dimensions: rural society as a cultural and demographic entity; rural economic life and its continued restructuring; rural territory as a contested natural environment; and rural society as a repository of poverty and economic privilege. Because the work that follows focuses on nonmetropolitan demographic change, it seems fitting that this introductory chapter explore the changing nature of rurality as both cultural conception and official definition.

Discourse and desalination: Potential impacts of proposed climate change adaptation interventions in the Arizona–Sonora border region

Abstract: The specter of climate change threatens fresh water resources along the U.S.–Mexico border. Water managers and planners on both sides of the border are promoting desalination—the conversion of seawater or brackish groundwater to fresh water—as an adaptation response that can help meet growing water demands and buffer against the negative impacts of climate change on regional water supplies. However, the uneven distribution of costs and benefits of this expensive, energy-intensive technology is likely to exacerbate existing social inequalities in the border zone. In this paper, we examine the discourses employed in the construction of the climate problem and proposed solutions. We focus our analysis on a proposed Arizona–Sonora binational desalination project and use insights from risk and hazards literature to analyze how, why, and to what effect desalination is emerging as a preferred climate change adaptation response. Our risk analysis shows that while desalination technology can reduce some vulnerabilities (e.g., future water supply), it can also introduce new vulnerabilities by compounding the water-energy nexus, increasing greenhouse gas emissions, inducing urban growth, producing brine discharge and chemical pollutants, shifting geopolitical relations of water security, and increasing water prices. Additionally, a high-tech and path-dependent response will likely result in increased reliance on technical expertise, less opportunity for participatory decision-making and reduced flexibility. The paper concludes by proposing alternative adaptation responses that can offer greater flexibility, are less path dependent, incorporate social learning, and target the poorest and most vulnerable members of the community. These alternatives can build greater adaptive capacity and ensure equity.

Save Our Republic: Battling John Birch in California's Conservative Cradle

Abstract: OF DISSERTATION SAVE OUR REPUBLIC: BATTLING JOHN BIRCH IN CALIFORNIA’S CONSERVATIVE CRADLE Previous accounts of the development of the New American Right have demonstrated the popularity and resonance of the ideology in Southern California. However, these studies have not shown how contention surrounded conservatism’s ascendancy even in regions where it found eager disciples. “Save Our Republic” uses one conservative Southern California community as a vehicle to better understand the foundations of a wider movement and argues the growth of conservatism was not nearly as smooth as earlier studies have suggested. Santa Barbara, California, experienced a much more contentious introduction to the same conservative elements and exemplifies the larger ideological clash that occurred nationwide during the late 1950s and early 1960s between “establishment,” moderate Republicans and the party’s right flank. In California’s cradle of conservatism, the ideology’s birth was not an easy one. Santa Barbara should have provided a bonanza of support for the John Birch Society, a staunchly anticommunist organization founded in 1958 by retired businessman Robert H.W. Welch. Instead, its presence there in the early 1960s divided the city and inspired the sort of suspicion that ultimately hobbled the group’s reputation nationally. Rather than thriving in the city, the JBS impaled itself in a series of self-inflicted wounds that only worsened the effect these characterizations had on the group’s national reputation. Disseminated to a nationwide audience by local newspaper publisher Thomas M. Storke, who declared his intention to banish the organization from the city, the events that occurred in Santa Barbara throughout 1961 alerted other cities of the potential disruption the JBS could inspire in their communities. The JBS would forever bear the battle scars it earned in Santa Barbara. “Save Our Republic” argues the events in Santa Barbara exemplify the more pronounced political battle that was occurring throughout the nation in the 1960s as conservatives grappled to determine the bounds of their ideology. The threat from the right that caused so much handwringing in the halls of conservative power had an equally unsettling effect in the city’s parlors, churches, schoolhouses and newsrooms.