"Sarah Deutsch has written possibly the most important survey of modern U.S. western history in a couple of decades."—Alicia M. Dewey, Southwestern Historical Quarterly
"Deutsch's work is of great importance to students of the American West and in fields such as labor, race relations, gender, and economic history."—J. M. Starling, Choice
"This book offers a major revision of Western history that takes place well into the 20th Century. It should be required reading that will surprise anyone enamored of a mythic West."—Abraham Hoffman, Roundup Magazine
“Authoritative and empathetic, Sarah Deutsch limns an exclusionary modern West created for white men by white men. In her clear-eyed revision, that West still offered room to challenge division—strong and resourceful women and activists demanding a different, democratic West.”—Anne Hyde, author of Empires, Nations, and Families: A History of the North American West, 1800–1860, a Pulitzer Prize finalist
“Epic and breathtaking in scope, Making a Modern U.S. West captures the volatile struggles over land, rights, and democracy. Deutsch vividly reveals how Native peoples and ordinary migrants from around the globe fought for their opportunities and for their aspirations in a world riven by the federal government’s tipping the scales in labor wars, speculative capitalism, and racial exclusion.”—Nayan Shah, author of Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality, and the Law in the North American West
“A startlingly original and compelling account of a period in which Anglo Americans tried and largely failed to create a ‘white man’s West’ in a land of conflicts, coalitions, and contradictions.”—Richard White, author of California Exposures: Envisioning Myth and History
“Few interpreters have been willing to tackle the whole unruly mess of the early twentieth-century U.S. West. Sarah Deutsch has done it, producing a rousing history that thinks across boundaries of landscape and nation, race and nativity, gender and sexuality, insurgence and intransigence, and corporate greed and worker protest. . . . Making a Modern U.S. West is a wonder.”—Susan Lee Johnson, Harry Reid Endowed Chair for the History of the Intermountain West at the University of Nevada–Las Vegas
“A sophisticated, well-theorized new history of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century West. This is an amazing book in its ambition, depth, and erudition. It will be a lasting contribution to the field from someone with a profound commitment to addressing difference, diversity, and inequality across gender, race, class, and region.”—Katherine A. Benton-Cohen, author of Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and Its Legacy
