Continental Reckoning

Elliott West lays out the main events and developments of the emergence of the American West, situating the birth of the West in the broader narrative of American history between 1848 and 1880.

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Finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in History
Winner of the 2024 Bancroft Prize in American History
Winner of the 2024 Caughey Western History Prize
Winner of the 2024 Spur Award
Named a Best Civil War Book of 2023 by Civil War Monitor

In Continental Reckoning renowned historian Elliott West presents a sweeping narrative of the American West and its vital role in the transformation of the nation. In the 1840s, by which time the United States had expanded to the Pacific, what would become the West was home to numerous vibrant Native cultures and vague claims by other nations. Thirty years later it was organized into states and territories and bound into the nation and world by an infrastructure of rails, telegraph wires, and roads and by a racial and ethnic order, with its Indigenous peoples largely dispossessed and confined to reservations. Continental Reckoning argues that these changes should be given equal billing with the Civil War in this crucial transition of national life.

As the American West was acquired, integrated into the nation, and made over physically and culturally, the United States shifted onto a course of accelerated economic growth, a racial reordering and redefinition of citizenship, engagement with global revolutions of science and technology, and invigorated involvement with the larger world. The creation of the West and the emergence of modern America were intimately related. Neither can be understood without the other. With masterful prose and a critical eye, Continental Reckoning presents a fresh approach to the dawn of the American West, one of the most pivotal periods of American history.