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the West, region, western U.S., mostly west of the Great Plains and including, by federal government definition, Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. Virtually every part of the United States except the Eastern Seaboard has been “the West” at some point in American history, linked in popular imagination with the last frontier of American settlement. But especially it is that vast stretch of plains, mountains, and deserts...