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The ten original essays commissioned for this book focus on historical subjects in the post-World War II American West. The late Gerald Nash, in whose honour the essays were written, made major contributions to the study of modern American and western American history, and his impact on those fields is demonstrated in these essays by several generations of his students and colleagues. Emphasising social and cultural developments, the essays draw on methodologies and topics from comparative history, environmental history, urban history, and political history. The authors write on subjects ranging from women's rights to urban sprawl, from organised religion to tourism, from mining to American Indian culture. An autobiographical essay by Nash himself situates his life's work in the context of two formative experiences: his intellectual development as a German refugee arriving in New York in the late 1930s and his commitment to the study of the American West when he began graduate school. The contributors include Margaret Connell-Szasz, Arthur R Gomez, Donald J Pisani, Marjorie Bell Chambers, Carol Lynn MacGregor, Christopher J Huggard, Roger W Lotchin, and Gene M Gressley, as well as Nash and the volume editors.