ABSTRACT
Perhaps the most unsatisfactory element of American history as we customarily find it structured and presented is the treatment historians accord the nation’s Western history. Both the Continental West of the forty-eight contiguous states and the Pacific Oceanic West of Alaska, Hawaii, and beyond are conspicuously shortshrifted or, at times, overlooked altogether. This holds true especially for histories of the twentieth century, even more particularly for the half century since Japan’s capitulation ending the Second World War.
