If all history is a lie agreed upon, it's hard to imagine a 'place' more fraught with misapprehension than the American West.  As even a casual reader of a 'true' history of the West could tell you, the West as we've come to know it through popular culture is a very strange place; it is not so much a place as a crucible of myth, the seat of origin stories that, at best, bear only a remote and oblique relation to what actually happened.  The first and arguably only citizen of this West is a very particular kind of man, a solemn, well-armed and solitary individual for whom violence is the primary, if not exclusive, means of self-actualization. 

For me, as a professor of American literature, deconstructing that myth of 'how the west was won,' especially as it has been rendered in American film, provided the most immediate and telling introduction to the peculiar scheme of interests and obsessions that delineate what it means to be an American.  The intent of this series of works was to touch down at some of the weaker junctures of the mythos of the American West. - Robert Moore