Both Sides Now: Writing the Edges of the North American West. By Sheila McManus

Abstract

Both Sides Now is a much-needed work on the historiography and history of the North American western borderlands. Writing for scholars and students, McManus deftly distills the most pervasive intellectual influences on the concept of North American western “borderlands” while sustaining an abridged history of the region more as spaces of connection than as zones of stark division. McManus traces how and why borderlands scholars from Canada and the United States (she is silent on borderlands scholars from Mexico or those published in Spanish) initially wrote nationally bounded frameworks history that worked in service of settler-colonialism and Anglo nationalism erasing the Indigenous past. Both Sides Now does not short-shrift these points. McManus directly implicates the now-infamous Turner Thesis, and Herbert Bolton’s previously pathbreaking work on hemispheric borderlands, as handmaids of racist, gendered, nation-centered histories that had shaped the history of North American western borderlands. Women, Indigenous peoples, and non-elite Hispanos were present in Turner’s West and Bolton’s borderlands but primarily as caricatures in the sweep of history in which they played a minor role. Rather than reproduce these dynamics, today’s borderlands scholars, although working in different traditions, reject nation-centered histories even as they are keen to trouble how border enforcement has circumscribed life between the lines.