William deBuys

First Impressions: A Reader’s Journey to Iconic Places of the American Southwest tells the story of fifteen iconic sites across Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, and southern Colorado through the eyes of the explorers, missionaries, and travelers who were the first nonnatives to describe them.

Weaving together landscape and memory, this book presents historical photographs of the Río Grande of the American Southwest.

Now, more than thirty years later, this revised and expanded edition provides a long-awaited assessment of the quality of the journey that New Mexican society has traveled in that time—and continues to travel.

"Hal Rothman is both the greatest Western historian of his generation and an H. L. Mencken in cowboy boots."—Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums and Buda’s Wagon

A history of the Salton Sea, which has become a prophetic story of mounting environmental crises that impinge on the water supply of southern California's sixteen million people.