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Introduction & Overview of Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water by Marc Reisner

This Study Guide consists of approximately 41 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Cadillac Desert.
This section contains 283 words
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Purchase our Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water Study Guide

Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water Introduction

Historians of the West have typically focused on events that opened the great landscape of the American Desert to settlers. Such events included the Lewis and Clark Expedition, wars with the Indians of the Great Plains, and the Homestead Act of 1862. New historians of the American West have been employing a political environmentalism to develop an environmental history, which has led to a number of revisionist approaches to American West narratives.

Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert is such a revisionist history. His focus on the creation of infrastructure to support Western settlement exposes a history, not of rugged individualism and romantic cowboys, but of the construction of a heavily subsidized and tremendously expensive "hydraulic society," founded on and maintained by the greed and competitiveness that is behind the American Dream. Reisner examines the West's ecologically dangerous, and ultimately harmful, dependence on dams and aqueducts, as Americans pursue the ideal...
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This section contains 283 words
(approx. 1 page at 300 words per page)
Purchase our Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water Study Guide
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Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water from BookRags and Gale's For Students Series. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.
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