Following "The Middle Ground"

Abstract

HE great historian, writes Paul Ricoeur in Time and Narrative, is the one who succeeds in rendering acceptable a new way of following history. These words, which seem at first to have the whiff of an odd translation, came to mind more than once as I contemplated writing the final contribution to this Forum on The Middle Ground. They came to mind particularly as I thought about what kind of dent, if any, or what manner of meander, had been dug into Richard White's way of following history by the new research featured here: Heidi Bohaker's work on kinship and identity in the eastern Great Lakes and Brett Rushforth's piece on slavery and the Fox Wars. Ricoeur's words invite scholars, I think, to ponder again some of the resilient force coiled within White's act of narrative configuration, as others have occasionally done, mainly in fruitful musing on the middle ground as metaphor. It has long tantalized me that Kerwin Lee Klein's Frontiers of Historical Imagination, the most sustained, philosophically grounded treatment of narrative configuration dealing specifically with nativeEuropean encounters in North America, covers works published during the course of a century ending in 1990. An earlier work of White's, The Roots ofDependency, appears briefly in Klein's study as an impressive, yet stark, piece of Wallersteinian frontier history, already out of step, however, with an ethnographic imagination that had transcended tragedy some time before.' What a difference a year makes.