[sans titre]

 OHQ vol. 116, no. 3 often, in contrast, looked persistently inward while searching for a distinctively American frontier, a place like nowhere else on earth” (p. 85). Wrobel places this shift at the precise momentwhenAmericansbeganto perceive the American frontier as closed.Thus,travelers like John Muir, Jack London, and Theodore Roosevelt sought “new frontiers of adventure well beyond the geographic borders of their newly frontierless nation” (p. 86). Where Wrobel argues that London was a culturally sensitive traveller, one who acted more as a “cultural ambassador than as an agent of empire,” he notes the “imperial tone” characteristic of Roosevelt’s writing (p. 91, 99). Yet Wrobel’s keen analysis links Roosevelt’s accounts of his travels in Africa with his earlier writings about theAmericanWest to show how Roosevelt connected these as like “frontiers.” Wrobel also smartly develops Americans’ growing concern with modernity. If Roosevelt seemed preoccupied with its possible emasculating effects, Wrobel shows that automotive travel writers shared at least some of his anxieties. Setting out to chronicle the West’s “automotive frontiers,” some writers expressed their disappointment in a region they perceived as“despoiled by modernity”(p. 115–116). Because modernity seemed to act as an“acid”that threatened to erode regional difference and distinctiveness of theWest,Wrobel argues, some writers sought out “untouched” landscapes for their travels. Not surprisingly, writers identified the American Southwest and its inhabitants as retaining “authenticity ” in the face of encroaching sameness and directed readers to visit the region before it succumbed. Yet, as Wrobel shows, such pessimism transformed in the Depression era, as travel writers like Ernie Pyle took to theWest to “paint the landscapes of other people’s lives. . . . and sometimes just the landscapes themselves” (p.139–140).For Pyle and others,“theWest was still very much alive and culturally vibrant”(p. 138). To further illustrate the impulse of travel writers to demonstrate America’s “regional richness,”Wrobel points effectively to the Federal Writers’ Project’s American Guide Series, which produced a series of travel guides that provided “cultural inventories” of the places they described and, in the process, confirmed the distinctiveness and continued vibrancy of the American West (p. 122–23). In challenging historians to rethink their “assumptions about how the West was presented to America and to the world,” Wrobel makes important contributions to the historiography of the American West (p. 14). Readers will also appreciate his careful reconsideration of travel writing produced in this period. Wrobel not only uses this material to make a persuasive case that travel writers often viewed the West as an alternately global and distinctivelyAmerican space,he also redirects readers’ attention to this often overlooked and perhaps misunderstood literature. Jennifer Thigpen Washington State University WHEN MONEY GREW ON TREES: A.B. HAMMOND AND THE AGE OF THE TIMER BARON by Greg Gordon University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2014. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography,index. 505 pages. $29.95 cloth. This carefully crafted biography of Northwest timber king A. B. Hammond is a fascinating case study of the commodification of the vast timber resources of the Pacific Northwest and northern California.The author,Greg Gordon, has skillfully used the career of timber baron Hammond to reveal how the business methods of industrial capitalism combined with new technologies and questionable land acquisition strategies created an efficient and profitable means of converting virgin, old growth forests into highly marketable products. In 1864, Hammond began his long career in the  Reviews timber industry in New Brunswick, Canada, as a teenage logger.Seeking a more prosperous future, he quickly moved on to the gold fields of Montana.Hammond soon found his future not in mining but in mercantile, banking, and timber endeavors. Over a twenty-year period he became one of the leading businessmen and power brokers of Montana. In the 1890s, seeking ever-larger fields of opportunity, he began focusing his business interests on the vast timber resources of Oregon and northern California. Using questionable and often blatantly fraudulent methods,he and his partners acquired vast stands of timber on the public domain.Over the next thirty years,to his great profit,Hammond applied his capital and business acumen to vertically integrate every aspect of the lumber business from...

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.