Making a Modern U.S. West: The Contested Terrain of a Region and Its Borders, 1898–1940

A much-anticipated volume in Richard Etulain's History of the American West series at the University of Nebraska Press, Sarah Deutsch's Making a Modern U.S. West offers a critical examination of racial formation, citizenship, and borders in the American West during the first four decades of the twentieth century. Racial formation as a national project depended on the American West in a variety of ways. This weighty volume pulls examples from the edges of multiple borders and borderlands across time and space to complicate the making of the modern West as one of power, exclusion, and violence.The book is organized in four parts chronologically by decade, with three chapters per part. Part 1, "Demarcating," details the significant federal presence in the American West through large-scale irrigation projects and conservation initiatives such as national forests and national parks. With the sharpening of national borders and transient transnational labor forces working for transnational mining corporations in particular, Deutsch traces the power of the state and shifting racial and national categories in the creation of the modern West. Deutsch dedicates one chapter to the all-Black town of Boley, founded in 1903 on the allotment of Abigail Barnett, the seven-year-old daughter of Muscogee Creeks and African Creeks, in Muscogee (Creek) Nation, Indian Territory, to discuss the complexity of land, town formation, tribal sovereignty, and contested racial categories at the crossroads of the South and the West.Parts 2, "Agitating," and 3 "Speculating," continue the story in the 1910s and 1920s. Part 2 examines the Mexican Revolution and cross-border investments and labor, the First World War, and women's suffrage gains in most western states before 1920. Part 3 follows the rise of a modern democracy during the 1920s through state-endorsed speculation in oil, land, and tourism, as seen in the Osage murders in Pawhuska, the Pueblos and the Bursum bill fight in New Mexico, and tourism throughout the West from the national parks to Route 66 to Hollywood.Part 4, "Mobilizing," discusses the mass deportations of Mexicans and Mexican Americans and the rise of the border patrol, labor and political movements, and the New Deal. In her examination of the Indian Reorganization Act, Deutsch shows the complexity of a figure like John Collier as commissioner of Indian Affairs, promoting the restoration of Tribal governance on one hand and the misguided and traumatic handling of stock reduction among Diné women on the other.Masterfully told, Deutsch's history constructs a modern West by pulling together seemingly disparate stories of race, violence, and power in a comprehensive and compelling narrative. The depth of detail is useful. At the same time, the book took many years to bring to fruition, and some of the terminology should be updated. For example, Deutsch uses the term Five Civilized Tribes rather than Five Tribes to discuss the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee, and Seminole Nations and their forced resettlement in Indian Territory. In a sensitive retelling of the Tulsa Race Massacre, it is unfortunate that Deutsch uses the older term riot rather than today's preferred term massacre, in the spirit of social justice and accuracy. In addition, maps would enhance the discussion of region and borders in this fascinating and comprehensive study.