Books in the The Lamar Series in Western History series

A groundbreaking history of the rise and decline of the vast and imposing Native American empire. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a Native American empire rose to dominate the fiercely contested lands of the American Southwest, the southern Great Plains, and northern Mexico. This powerful empire, built by the Comanche Indians, eclipsed its various European rivals in military prowess, political prestige, economic power, commercial reach, and cultural influence. Yet, until now, the Comanche empire has gone unrecognized in American history. This compelling and original book uncovers the lost story of the Comanches. It is a story that challenges the idea of indigenous peoples as victims of European expansion and offers a new model for the history of colonial expansion, colonial frontiers, and Native-European relations in North America and elsewhere. Pekka Hmlinen shows in vivid detail how the Comanches built their unique empire and resisted European colonization, and why they fell to defeat in 1875. With extensive knowledge and deep insight, the author brings into clear relief the Comanches' remarkable impact on the trajectory of history. 2009 Winner of the Bancroft Prize in American History ';Cutting-edge revisionist western history. Immensely informative, particularly about activities in the eighteenth century.'Larry McMurtry,The New York Review of Books ';Exhilaratinga pleasure to read. It is a nuanced account of the complex social, cultural, and biological interactions that the acquisition of the horse unleashed in North America, and a brilliant analysis of a Comanche social formation that dominated the Southern Plains.'Richard White, author ofThe Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815

In this fascinating book Monica Rico explores the myth of the American West in the nineteenth century as a place for men to assert their masculinity by "e;roughing it"e; in the wilderness and reveals how this myth played out in a transatlantic context. Rico uncovers the networks of elite men-British and American-who circulated between the West and the metropoles of London and New York.Each chapter tells the story of an individual who, by traveling these transatlantic paths, sought to resolve anxieties about class, gender, and empire in an era of profound economic and social transformation. All of the men Rico discusses-from the well known, including Theodore Roosevelt and Buffalo Bill Cody, to the comparatively obscure, such as English cattle rancher Moreton Frewen-envisioned the American West as a global space into which redemptive narratives of heroic upper-class masculinity could be written.