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West, edited by Emily Dale and Carolyn L. White, moves beyond attempting to reach a mutually agreeable definition of “what the West is” by instead utilizing landscape, historical archaeology, and Indigenous perspectives to gather investigations of placemaking in the American West. Using “space” and “place” is a valuable approach to tackling research on the monumental scale of the American West, despite an unfortunate switch in their definitions in Chapter 1 (which can hopefully be corrected in future printings). However, the editors’ laudable intention is reflected in the topical, geographical, and career diversity of the chapters.

The volume is organized into three sections. Chapters 2 through 4 explore ways of defining the American West in time and space. In Chapter 2, Lotte Govaerts reviews (a) the mythologizing of the American frontier into a myth of “the West” by Frederick Jackson Turner and popular media …