Book Description
African American women in the West have long been stereotyped as socially and historically marginal, existing in isolation from other women in the West and from their counterparts in the East and South. Quintard Taylor and Shirley Ann Wilson Moore disprove this stereotype, arguing that African American women in the West played active, though sometimes unacknowledged, roles in shaping the political, ideological, and social currents that influenced the United States over the past three centuries. "African American Women Confront the West, 1600-2000" is the first major historical anthology on the topic.

Contributors to this volume explore the life experiences of African American women in the West, the myriad ways in which African American women have influenced the experiences of the diverse peoples of the region, and their legacy in rural and urban communities from Montana to Texas and California to Kansas. The contributors make use of individual and collective biographies, first-person narratives, and interviews that explore what it has meant to be an African American woman, from the era of Spanish colonial rule in eighteenth-century New Mexico into the black power era of the 1960s and 1970s and beyond.

About the Author
Quintard Taylor is Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Professor of American History at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is the author of In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West.    Shirley Ann Wilson Moore is Professor of History at California State University, Sacramento. She is the author of To Place Our Deeds: The African American Community in Richmond, California, 1910-1963.