This project charts the emergence of a liberal public sphere in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American West by providing a cultural and literary history of the Overland Monthly. This San Francisco-based bourgeois literary magazine was founded in 1868, with Bret Harte as its editor, and ran until 1935. The magazine published travel narratives, regional and national political analysis, short fiction, poetry, and the early work of such canonical writers as Harte, Mark Twain, Jack London, Henry George, Frank Norris, John Muir, and Willa Cather. The dissertation argues that Western periodical culture is connected with the creation of a classically liberal public, in part because ethnic and regional identification---that is, membership in a public or peoplehood---originates in magazine narratives that normalize white, bourgeois, Eastern American liberal subjectivity. Even more important, though, is the way in which Western regional publicity is shaped by the ideology of civilization. This allows a white, bourgeois public to sustain its dominance over non-white peoples, assert its ownership over "savage" or "wild" spaces, and still operate under the aegis of classical liberalism. The Overland 's cultural location, positioned at the border of domesticity and publicity, means that its narratives of land, history, and expansion politics necessarily incorporated cultural anxieties about masculinity, civilization, and Anglo-American racial dominance. This public sphere offered a discursive space in which citizens---through shared narratives of civilization, whiteness, and liberality---could imagine themselves as first a regional, and then a national, liberal public.