This three-volume set includes A Companion to the American West, A Companion to California History, and A Companion to Los Angeles.
A Companion to the American West is a rigorous, illuminating introduction to the history of the American West. Twenty-five essays by expert scholars synthesize the best and most provocative work in the field. Combining a comprehensive overview with historiography, the Companion covers such topics as industrialism, women, Native Americans, exploration, religion, politics, and art. The essays are lively, well written, and suited to the student, scholar, and all interested readers of the history of the American West.
A Companion to California History is an innovative, thorough introduction to the history and culture of California. Written by both senior scholars and new voices in the field, the essays range widely across perspectives, including political, social, economic, and environmental history. The volume's unique structure pairs and groups essays that are similar in approach and conception so they work both as individual pieces and also as companions to each other throughout the text.
A Companion to Los Angeles is a unique study of America's second largest city, and the first Companion devoted to a single metropolis. The volume consists of 25 essays, each an original contribution by a writer or scholar, which collectively assess the best and most important work to date on the complex history of Los Angeles. Instead of organizing the essays around discrete, time-specific events, the editors focus on critical themes and broad multi-disciplinary topics which span different periods and generations, including demography, social unrest, politics, popular culture, architecture, and urban studies. Together, the contributions constitute a lively and informed introduction to a history as fascinating as it is complex.
About the Author: William Deverell is Professor of History at the University of Southern California and Director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. He is a historian of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century American West. His recent publications include Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past (2004). He has also co-edited Land of Sunshine: An Environmental History of Metropolitan Los Angeles (2005), Metropolis in the Making: Los Angeles in the 1920s (2001), and The West in the History of the Nation (2000).
David Igler is Associate Professor of History at University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Industrial Cowboys: Miller & Lux and the Transformation of the Far West, 1850-1920 (2001) and co-editor (with Clark Davis) of The Human Tradition in California (2002). He has published articles in the numerous history journals, including the American Historical Review, the Pacific Historical Review, Environmental History, and the Journal of Urban History.
Greg Hise is Professor of History at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He studies the economies, architecture, and planning of United States cities. He is the author of Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis (1997), co-author of Eden by Design: The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region (2000), and co-editor of Land of Sunshine: An Environmental History of Metropolitan Los Angeles (2005), and Rethinking Los Angeles (1996).
