Episode 191: Rewriting the West: Megan Kate Nelson and the Myths We Still Believe
Episode 191: Rewriting the West: Megan Kate Nelson and the Myths We Still Believe
In this episode of Reckoning with Jason Herbert, I’m joined by historian Megan Kate Nelson to talk about her new book The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier—and why the frontier myth refuses to die.
We dig into the stories of seven people who lived the West in real time—Indigenous women, Black frontiersmen, Chinese migrants, and white settlers—and how their lives complicate the familiar narrative of pioneers and progress.
Along the way, we explore:
The origins of the frontier myth and why it still shapes American identity
Figures like Sacagawea and Jim Beckwourth—and the messy, human realities behind the legends
Why cities like Denver were central to the making of the West
How race, gender, and power determined who got written into history—and who didn’t
What these stories reveal about land, belonging, and conflict in America today
This is a conversation about myth, memory, and the stories we choose to tell—and the ones we’ve ignored for far too long.
If you think you know the West, this episode might change your mind.
Megan Kate Nelson is a historian, cocktail enthusiast, Pulitzer Prize finalist, and the author of five books.
Her forthcoming book, The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier tells two richly detailed and interwoven stories.
The first reveals the captivating lives of women and men moving through the American West — Indigenous peoples, Black Americans, Mexican Americans, and Canadian and Asian immigrants—in the nineteenth century.
The second tracks the attempts of many Americans to remove these westerners from history, through a frontier myth that lionized individualism and conquest and celebrated white settlers traveling west in search of prosperity.
The Westerners is one of LitHub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2026!
Megan is also the author of The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West, which was a 2021 Pulitzer Prize finalist in History, and Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America, winner of the 2023 Spur Award for Historical Non-Fiction, as well as Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American CIvil War, and Trembling Earth: A Cultural History of the Okefenokee Swamp.
A fellow of the prestigious Society of American Historians, Megan is also a regular guest on radio shows and TV documentaries about U.S. Western history and popular culture. She has recently become a podcast host, interviewing book authors as part of the “Historians and their Histories” podcast for the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Megan also writes about the Civil War, the U.S. West, and American culture for The New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, Slate, and TIME.
Before leaving academia to write full-time in 2014, Megan taught U.S. history and American Studies at Texas Tech University, Cal State Fullerton, Harvard, and Brown. She earned her BA magna cum laude in History and Literature from Harvard University and her PhD in American Studies from the University of Iowa.
Born and raised in Colorado, Megan now lives in Boston with her husband and two cats.