Samuel Western covered the northern Rocky Mountain region for the Economist for twenty-five years, and also taught economic history at the University of Wyoming. He is the author of Pushed Off the Mountain, Sold Down the River: Wyoming's Search For Its Soul.
Request Academic Copy
Please copy the ISBN for submitting review copy form
Description
Acknowledgments Preface Introduction 1. A Reckoning in August 2. The Poison Seed 3. Yield and Pounds Do Not a Community Make: The Case for Stewardship Agriculture 4. Cities of the Plains: The Cost of Demonizing Anything Urban 5. Dismantling the Cult of Commodity Prosperity: Breaking the Cycle of Victimhood and Resentment Epilogue Notes Index
An underappreciated driver of our country's political problems is Middle America's hard rightward turn. Western illustrates how the Dakota states abandoned their governmental priorities and how they can change their fortune.""-Ross Benes, author of Rural Rebellion: How Nebraska Became a Republican Stronghold""Samuel Western upends our assumptions about the territories that received statehood in 1889. He suggests that rather than individual political entities, the new states constituted a region with a common-and distinctly progressive-political culture. Since the region is among the most conservative today, Western dares its residents to find a new path by embracing this history. For others, he reveals the mutability of political loyalties even as our own become increasingly fixed.""-Catherine McNicol Stock, author of Nuclear Country: The Origins of the Rural New Right