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"Introduction" To European Immigrants In The American West: Community Histories, Frederick C. Luebke

Department of History: Faculty Publications

European immigrants are the forgotten people of the American West. Their stories are not told in the many books, paintings, and movies that have created the mythic West. Immigrants did not easily fit the image of the West as the bastion of unfettered individualism and self-reliance-a region peopled by the free, brave, and pure-battling against the urbanized, industrialized, a,nd economically dominant East. Nor do European immigrants populate the pages of frontier history. Ever since Frederick Jackson Turner opened the field a hundred years ago, general histories of the American frontier have tended to ignore them. Grounded on the Turnerian notion …