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Racial and religious groups have played a key role in shaping the American West, yet scholars have for the most part ignored how race and religion have influenced regional identity. In this collection, eleven contributors explore the intersections of race, religion, and region to show how they transformed the West. From the Punjabi Mexican Americans of California to the European American shamans of Arizona to the Mexican Chinese of the borderlands, historical meanings of race in the American West are complex and are further complicated by religious identities.

This book moves beyond familiar stereotypes to achieve a more nuanced understanding of race while also showing how ethnicity formed in conjunction with religious and regional identity. The chapters demonstrate how religion shaped cultural encounters, contributed to the construction of racial identities, and served as a motivating factor in the lives of historical actors. The opening chapters document how religion fostered community in Los Angeles in the first half of the twentieth century. The second section examines how physical encounters—such as those involving Chinese immigrants, Hermanos Penitentes, and Pueblo dancers—shaped religious and racial encounters in the West. The final essays investigate racial and religious identity among the Latter-day Saints and southern California Muslims. As these contributions clearly show, race, religion, and region are as critical as gender, sexuality, and class in understanding the melting pot that is the West. By depicting the West as a unique site for understanding race and religion, they open a new window on how we view all of America.

In Real Places, Grady Clay presents the American landscape in a completely fresh and untypical way. Rather than look at locations, he studies constructed, imaginative sites. Clay explores the fascination of "Fall Color Country," or "Lover's Lane." What draws people to these "generic" landscapes and keeps them coming back literally and figuratively time and time again? Real Places catalogs and describes a unique cross-section of America, emphasizing the beauty and intrigue of these hidden gems. Heavily illustrated with maps and photographs depicting the everyday as well as the bizarre, Clay's entertaining Baedeker allows us to see in a new way what has always been "right before our eyes."

"This book provides a language for the architecture of everyday life."—Ross Miller, Chicago Tribune

"Spirited observations and capsule histories."—Suzanne Stephens, New York Times Book Review

"Compelling. . . . Included here are many nuggets of insight and illumination."—Brad Knickerbocker, Christian Science Monitor

"An amusing and touching book about the reality we Americans have captured in our language."—Boston Sunday Globe

In Reflecting a Prairie Town Drake Hokanson takes a prolonged look at a common place in an uncommon fashion. He presents Peterson, Iowa, through a singular combination of words and images, a remarkable synthesis of history, geography, direct observation, climatology, botany, oral history, archaeology, agricultural science, literature, geology, photography, and even a bit of astronomy. This vernacular landscape study is lavishly illustrated with photographs taken by the author, including stunning panoramic views.

The fundamental truth of experience on this continent has always lain in the challenges and opportunities of space. Place mattered because we were so few before the immensity of the land. But place at the same time rooted us in that immensity. Even now our appreciation for place is not quite dead; locked in our urban environments we continue to crave a “view,” be it of mountains, forests, or prairies. These “views” crop up unexpectedly as photographic murals in office buildings or posters in dentists' offices. It is to this stifled sense of the importance of place that Hokanson speaks; he invites us to remember and to be revitalized.

The magic of Reflecting a Prairie Town is the revelation that Peterson, Iowa, is a small town that is also uncannily large. In capturing the essence of this one place Hokanson helps us to understand our own worlds better—he asks the simple questions many of us would like to ask were we given the opportunity. To enter this book is to come back to a place we have never really seen before.

This wide-ranging collection of essays is intended to provoke both thought and action. The pieces collected here explore a variety of issues facing the American West—disappearing Native American languages, deteriorating air quality, suburban sprawl, species loss, grassland degradation, and many others—and suggest steps toward “healing.” More than “dealing with” or “solving,” according to the editors, healing addresses not just symptoms but their underlying causes, offering not just a temporary cure but a permanent one.

The signs of illness and trauma can seem omnipresent in today’s West: land and soil disrupted from mining, overgrazing, logging, and farming; wildlife habitat reduced and fragmented; native societies disturbed and threatened; open space diminished by cities and suburbs; wilderness destroyed by roads and recreation-seekers. But as these essays suggest, the “treatment program” for healing the West has many healthful side effects. Engaging in the kinds of projects suggested by contributors is therapeutic not only for the environment but for participants as well. Restoration, repair, and recovery can counter symptoms of despair with concentrated doses of promise and possibility.

The more “lesions” the West has, this book suggests, the more opportunities there are for westerners to revive and ultimately cure the ailing patient they have helped to create. The very idea of restoring the West to health, contributors and editors contend, unleashes our imaginations, sharpens our minds, and gives meaning to the ways we choose to live our lives. At the same time, acknowledging the profound difficulties of the work that lies ahead immunizes us against our own arrogance as we set about the task of healing the West.

A photographic diary of a small Midwestern farm and the family who’ve made it their home

In Roshara Journal, father-and-son team Jerry and Steve Apps share the monthly happenings at their family’s farm in central Wisconsin. Featuring Steve’s stunning photos and fifty years of Jerry’s journal entries, Roshara Journal captures the changes—both from month to month and over the decades—on the landscape and farmstead.

The Apps family has owned Roshara since 1966. There they nurture a prairie restoration and pine plantation, maintain a large garden that feeds three generations, observe wildlife species by the dozens, and support a population of endangered butterflies. In documenting life on this piece of land, Jerry and Steve remind us how, despite the pace and challenges of modern life, the seasons continue to influence our lives in ways large and small. Jerry explains that his journal entries become much more than mere observations: "It seems that when I write about something—a bur oak tree, for example—that old tree becomes a part of me. . . . Writing takes me to a place that goes beyond observation and understanding, a place filled with feeling and meaning."

In the tradition of Bernd Heinrich in Maine, Barry Lopez in the Canadian Arctic, and Aldo Leopold just an hour down the road in Baraboo, Jerry and Steve Apps combine observation, experience, and reflection to tell a profound story about one place in the world.