Home lands

The storybook history of the American West is a male dominated narrative of drifters, dreamers, hucksters, and heroes, a tale that relegates women, assuming they appear at all, to the distant background. This book upends this view to remember the West as a place of homes and habitations brought into being by the women who lived there. The authors consider history's long span as they explore the ways in which women encountered and transformed three different archetypal Western landscapes: the Rio Arriba of northern New Mexico, the Front Range of Colorado, and the Puget Sound waterscape. This book, companion volume to the Autry National Center's exhibit, is an aggregate of women's history, the history of the American West, and studies in material culture. While linking each of these places' peoples to one another over hundreds, even thousands, of years, this work reimagines the West as a setting in which home has been created out of differing notions of dwelling and family and differing concepts of property, community, and history.