While the “new” western historians added immensely to our
understanding of development the American West, there are some significant
limitations to their analysis: limiting the discussion of the frontier’s
significance after labeling it a racist concept, isolating western development
from the rest of North America, failing to establish a useful narrative for
discussing western history, and arbitrarily excluding Texas from their
analyses. These gaps in “new” western history offer several opportunities for
developing the “next” or “newer” western history that encompasses the history
of the frontier, the history of the region, the West’s connections to the rest
of the world, and reincorporates Texas into the history of the West.
One of the major metaphors that bind the various threads of
new western history together seems to be that of the conquest of the West, as a
region, by invading groups of settlers from the United States (Limerick,
18). The conquest metaphor is seen in
the movement of settlers, displacement of Indians, and the use of western
mineral, timber, and farming resources (Limerick, 27). “New” western historians use the reclamation
of arid lands using irrigation techniques is a vivid example of American’s
conquest of nature, even if they don’t specifically refer to it as a type of
conquest. William Cronon, George Miles,
and Jay Gitlin carry the conquest metaphor forward in the opening chapter of Under
an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past, but add two new underlying
ideas: connectedness and colonialism.
Cronon, Miles, and Gitlin claim that the key issue that separates their
vision of western history from the “new” western historians and from the
traditional Turnerian frontier thesis is that they “stress the connectedness of
frontier areas more than their isolation.
Western history makes sense only when we see the complex linkages that
tied frontier areas to other parts of the world. One cannot hope to understand colonies
without exploring their empires,” (Cronon, Miles, and Gitlin, 9). Cronon, Miles, and Gitlin hope to gain a
greater understanding of the American West by examining the history of European
colonialism and finding common attributes with America’s westward expansion (Cronon,
Miles, and Gitlin, 9). The twin concepts
of connectedness and colonialism truly separate their proposed “newer” western
history from the traditional and “new” western histories that precede it.
However, the colonial model suggested by Cronon, Miles, and
Gitlin does not work without the base concepts of both a frontier and a region.
However, this is not the divide between “civilization” and “savagery” described
by Frederick Jackson Turner, and assaulted by the “new” western historians
(Pisani, 166). Instead, the frontier
Cronon, Miles, and Gitlin utilizes has two qualities; it is both the border between
nations favored by Patricia Limerick and the multi-cultural zone of interaction
between peoples favored by Terry G. Jordan (Jeffrey, 1062). Cronon, Miles, and Gitlin insist that, “One
should analyze frontier and region not as isolated, alternative ways of viewing
the American past but rather as phrases of a single historical process. We should worry less about trying to define
precisely when a frontier ends and a region begins than about analyzing how the
one moved toward the other,” (Cronon, Miles, and Gitlin, 7). This attitude toward studying the American
West certainly makes more sense in trying to develop a new all-encompassing
historical narrative than abandoning the concept of a frontier entirely, which
many “new” historians try to do (Hurtado, 266), despite the example provided by
Patricia Limerick’s repeated use of the concept in The Legacy of Conquest:
The Unbroken Past of the American West.
Limerick does, however, believe that the frontier should be deemphasized
as a historiographical tool in favor of viewing the West as a region, mostly
because she thinks the Turnerian use of the frontier as a process with an
ending point artificially limits the study of the West (Limerick, 26). Despite the objections of the “new” western
historians to the use of the frontier concept, Cronon, Miles, and Gitlin
believe it allows them to create a narrative that allows them to describe
differences in the development of many different locales (Cronon, Miles, and Gitlin,
7).
Texas is an almost unique issue that should be addressed in
a “newer” western history, as Richard White systematically excludes it from the
“new” western history by only addressing the area to the West of the Missouri
River (Hurtado, 286). No real
justification of specifically excluding Texas is provided, although Albert L.
Hurtado claims that, “few will quibble with White’s geographic delineation,”
(Hurtado, 286). Hurtado’s defense of
White’s and other “new” western historians is questionable given White claimed
that the primary factor was the multiculturalism of the region, not environment
(Hurtado, 287). A quick reading of Ray
Allen Billington’s The Far Western Frontier, 1830-1860 demonstrates that
multiculturalism was a factor in Texas, with Americans, Indians of various
tribes, Mexican settlers and officials, and a few Europeans settling there
(Billington, 15). West Texas even has
arid and semi-arid environments similar to New Mexico, Arizona, and southern
Colorado, which would seem to alleviate any concerns that it was too different
from the rest of the West. The only two
plausible explanations for Texas’ exclusion from the “new” western history are
that it was settled relatively early compared to other western areas or that it
was part of the Confederacy. Neither
explanation makes much sense, especially in light of early American settlements
in California and Oregon. Despite the
connection with the Confederacy, Texas experienced much the same pattern of
settlement as other western areas: illegal migration and trading followed by
intense pressure for open settlement. By
any criteria, Texas should be included in any “newer” western history.
The concept of a “new” western history is frequently
attributed to Patricia Limerick, the grand dame of the field on the
basis of her work Legacy of Conquest, which is important not so much
because of its original research, but because it brings two decades of western
research into gender, environment, race, labor and the twentieth century into
focus and attempts to synthesize it into a coherent whole (Limerick, 30). The detractors of “new” western history like
to point out all of the work done before the 1980s and 1990s when the “new”
western history came into vogue. Michael
Allen writes that western history has had analyses of economic, multicultural,
and environmental issues since at least 1893 (Allen, 1). Others attack “new” western history on
political grounds, saying that it is, “simply an expression of negativism and
disillusion emanating from members of the anti-Vietnam generation,” (Nugent, 7). Despite these criticisms, Limerick’s work
serves as a landmark, simply because it focused a generation of western
historians in a new direction and revitalized their field by acting as a
catalyst.
Hopefully, the work of Cronon, Miles, Gitlin, and the other
contributors to Under an Open Sky will push the “newer” western history
back toward a narrative that can be more easily explained to students and
non-scholars alike. The interconnected
methodology that brings the west back into contact with the rest of American history
is a giant step toward that goal, but it must also be combined with the
admission that not all whites are irretrievably evil despoilers of the
West. This is certainly the impression
that some “new” western writers provide, although others, like Richard White,
demonstrate that the Indians of the Northwest were modifying their environment
for their own use, or adopted some useful tools or cultural traits from
Europeans.
Works Cited
Billington,
Ray Allen. The Far Western Frontier,
1830-1860. New York: Harper & Row, 1962
Cronon, William, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin, eds. Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s
Western Past. New York: W.W. Norton & Company: 1992.
Hurtado, Albert L. “Whose Misfortune? Richard White’s
Ambivalent Region.” Reviews in American History 22, no. 2 (1994): 286-291
Jeffrey, Julie Roy. “In Search of the New American West.” The
Historical Journal 38, no. 4 (1995): 1057-1065.
Limerick, Patricia Nelson. The Legacy of Conquest.
New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1988.
Nugent, Walter. “Western History, New and Not So New.” N.d.
(8 July 2004)
Pisani, Donald J. “The ‘New Western History’ Comes of Age.” Reviews
in American History 21, no. 1 (1993): 166-171.
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