Beyond the Last Frontier: Toward a New Approach to Western American History

Abstract

n a recent address to the Western History Association, Howard Lamar, of Yale University, noted the remarkable progress made over the past quarter-century in advancing the scholarship of western history. Traditional frontier topics have been treated with impressive new conceptualizations and methodologies; and long-neglected social, ethnic, female, and twentieth-century subjects are now being addressed fully and with greater sophistication. Indeed there is, as Lamar put it, to celebrate.1 Yet most of us who labor in western studies still bear the onus, as heavy as it was twenty-five years ago, of working in a field that is deemed by many to be intellectually barren and cluttered with trivia. Our own Walter Prescott Webb said as much three decades ago; and a number of our colleagues say so today. Many historians still confuse the West as a defunct frontier process with the West as a geographical region of the United States, and this garbled terminology serves to hinder serious study of the region's modern past and to nudge western history toward antiquarianism. Several leading universities of the West have deemphasized the study of their own region, as if to say that it has no significant history, or at least that its history is less relevant than, say, that of old Byzantium or of Central Asia.2 In demonstrating their cosmopolitanism these universities default their responsibility as cultural leaders of their own communities and puzzle citizens who harbor the quaint notion that their homeland has a significant history.