U of A Historian Elliott West to Give Kennedy Lecture on New History of the American West

University of Arkansas

Elliott West, Alumni Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus

The U of A Department of History and the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History will host a free public lecture from U of A historian Elliott West as part of the endowed Kennedy Lecture Series. The talk will be at 6 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 16, at the Pryor Center, located at 1 E. Center St. on the Fayetteville Town Square.

West's lecture is titled "Continental Reckoning: The American West and Modern America," and is drawn from his newest book, Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion, which was published in February 2023 by the University of Nebraska Press. 

Based on years of intensive research, Continental Reckoning is a monumental re-telling of America's expansion westward from the 1840s to the end of the 19th century. It argues for a new understanding of the importance of the American West in U.S. history through a sweeping narrative that begins with the so-called Great Coincidence in early 1848, when gold was discovered in California barely a week before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ceded California and the Southwest to the United States.

As West explains, these events launched dramatic new waves of migration and settlement westward and transformed the United States in ways often overshadowed by the emerging Civil War in the east. West untangles numerous events and trends, considering the impact of expansion on the Civil War and Reconstruction, on the growth of the national economy, and on the lives of Native American and Hispanic inhabitants and of settlers from the East impacted by the "fundamental restructuring" of Western spaces. The book also considers the West as a subject of myth, separating fact from fiction and emphasizing the "collective testimony-compelling, inspirational, horrifying, funny, bizarre of what it was like to live through one of the more telling chapters of our common past."

The lecture is free and open to the public. Copies of Continental Reckoning will be available for purchase courtesy of Pearl's Books.

West is a long-time faculty member at the U of A and retired in 2022 as Alumni Distinguished Professor of History emeritus. He is the author of nine scholarly books and nearly 90 articles and essays on the history of the American West. He has won numerous prizes for his research, including the Caughey Prize from the Western Historical Association, the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians and the Ray Allen Billington Prize from the Organization of American Historians. As a professor at the U of A, West has also been nationally recognized for his teaching and has won the SEC Faculty Achievement Award and Arkansas Professor of the Year recognition from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. He was also named a finalist for the Robert Foster Cherry Award for outstanding classroom teacher in the nation.

The Kennedy Lecture series was created by generous donations from faculty, alumni and friends of the Department of History to honor the memory of the late Thomas "Tom" C. Kennedy, who was a faculty member in history from 1967-2003 and passed away in 2017.