The States Of America: The West: Volume One

Alaska, Arizona, California & Colorado

The Histories of Alaska, Arizona, California & Colorado In One Collected Volume

From the midnight sun of the Arctic Circle to the sun-scorched deserts of the Southwest, from fog-wrapped Pacific shores to the soaring peaks of the Rockies, the American West has always been a place where geography shapes destiny. In this compelling volume, Daniel Hardy traces the dramatic histories of four states that embody the western experience in all its complexity and contradiction.

Through vivid storytelling and meticulous research, Hardy reveals how Alaska, Arizona, California, and Colorado transformed from Indigenous homelands into American territories through waves of sudden, explosive change. Gold rushes and oil booms, water wars and railroad expansion, federal intervention and individual ambition—these forces collided to create states unlike anywhere else in the nation. Here are stories of breathtaking natural beauty and environmental destruction, of millionaires made overnight and communities abandoned just as quickly, of cultures destroyed and new societies built on their ruins.

Hardy examines the threads that bind these diverse states together: their struggles over scarce water resources, their complicated relationships with the federal government, their legacies of Indigenous displacement, and their enduring promise as places of reinvention and second chances. The result is an essential portrait of the West that moves beyond mythology to reveal the real forces—geological, political, economic, and human—that created the region Americans still imagine as the land of possibility.

The States Of America: The West: Volume One offers an indispensable guide to understanding how the American West became what it is today.