Why has the American Southwest been celebrated as a place of beauty and history even as it was condemned as a place without any past or, indeed, an inhabitable present? The contributors to this volume all address how and why America’s image of the Southwest has evolved. D. W. Meinig once wrote: The Southwest is a distinctive place to the American mind but a somewhat blurred place on American maps. Actually, it has been a somewhat blurred place even to the mind. The Southwest’s physical extremes–urban and rural, tame and wild, ugly and beautiful, polluted and pure–complicate its image, but with the well-researched and thought-provoking contributions of this volume, the region achieves clearer definition. Generous illustrations help to underscore the authors’ points.