The American Southwest has been variously celebrated as a place of enormous beauty with a sense of deep historical roots and condemned as a place without any past or, indeed, an inhabitable present. The extremes of southwestern life modern and traditional, urban and rural, tame and wild, ugly and beautiful, polluted and pure - pervade the region. How America has come to view the Southwest and its distinctive images - and why it has formed these views - is the subject of this intriguing interdisciplinary book.