This book tells the story of the American West as the meeting of peoples and encounters with new environments. It emphasises the efforts of the Spanish, French, English and American empires to control the region and impose their ways of life on its Native peoples and landscapes, but also shows how empire builders sometimes adapted to the peoples and lands they encountered, how conquests always had unexpected consequences. The story has a cast of colourful characters, from the Indian warriors and gunslingers made into icons by Western novels and films to miners filled with gold fever, farm families dreaming of owning their own land, suburban tourists packed into cars at national parks, and the constant stream of immigrants, legal and illegal, looking for work and a better life. Lavishly illustrated with over 100 photographs and maps - and certainly the most accessible and affordable U.S. West survey on the market - the book does not shy away from controversial questions or the significance and meaning of Western American history. Pitting the famous ‘frontier thesis’ of Frederick Jackson Turner against competing ways of understanding the history of the U.S. West - from ‘bor-derlands’ approaches to the ‘metropolitan thesis’ of Western Canadian Historians, frontiers as zones of racial conflict, and the ‘New Western History’ of the 1980s and 1990s - this is a text that encourages readers to consider what these diverse perspectives on the region and its history have to say about the present and future of the American West.