It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own

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"It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own" is also a Western novel by Stephen Bly (ISBN 0-89107-797-9).
Front cover of "It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own", 1993 edition.
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Front cover of "It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own", 1993 edition.

"It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own": A New History of the American West is a history of the American West. The book's title comes from the lyrics to the traditional cowboy ballad Git Along Little Dogies. The 684 page history was written by Richard White and first published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 1991. It covers the history of the West from the Spanish conquest in the 1500s to the presidency of Ronald Reagan.

The book is a notable example of an approach sometimes called the "New Western History", which tells the story of the American West as the history of all the people in the region rather than the story of the expanding frontier of the United States. ([1]). White's departure from the traditional interpretation of the American West—embodied in Frederick Jackson Turner's influential Frontier Thesis—is reflected in the fact that White never uses the word "frontier" in his book. ([2])

The book received the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum's Western Heritage Award for non-ficiton books in 1992. White is McClelland Professor of History at the University of Washington.

[edit] Chapters

I. The Origins of the West
1. The Seeds of the West
2. Empires and Indians
II. The Federal Government and the Nineteenth-Century West
3. The Conquest of the West
4. The Federal Government and the Indians
5. Exploring the Land
6. Distributing the Land
7. Territorial Government
III. Transformation and Development
8. The Transformation of Western Society: Migration
9. Transforming the Land
10. The West and the World Economy
11. The Economic Structure of the West
12. New Communities and the Western Social Order
13. Social Conflict
14. Western Politics
IV. The Bureaucratic Revolution in the West
15. At the Centers of Power
16. On the Peripheris of Power
V. Transforming the West
17. The Depression
18. War II and Its Aftermath: Reshaping the West

[edit] Editions

[edit] External links