Megan Kate Nelson — The Westerners: Myth-Making on the American Frontier
Pulitzer finalist historian reveals the lives erased by frontier mythology — Indigenous peoples, Black Americans, Mexican Americans, and Asian immigrants in the 19th century West.
Why we picked this
The American West you learned about in school was a myth. This Pulitzer finalist tells the real story — and tracks who built the myth and why.
Megan Kate Nelson’s work dismantles the mythology of the American frontier by telling the stories that the mythmakers worked to erase. Her new book recovers the lives of Indigenous peoples, Black Americans, Mexican Americans, and Asian immigrants who shaped the 19th-century West — and then shows how and why so many Americans constructed a frontier mythology that written them out.
Another strong entry in the Oregon Historical Society’s Hatfield Lecture Series. Nelson is a Pulitzer Prize finalist whose narrative history makes academic research feel like page-turning storytelling.