New West, True West: Interpreting The Region's History

Abstract

say to my colleague in Chinese studies that I teach western history. Doesn't almost everyone in this department, he complains. history of England, Germany, France, Italy-it is all western history in our courses. Nobody here knows or cares anything about the East. I cut him short to explain that what I mean by the is not Europe, not the whole of western civilization. My is the American West: that fabled land where the restless pioneer moves ever forward, settling one frontier after another; where the American character becomes self-reliant, democratic, and endlessly eager for the new; where we strip off the garments of civilization and don a rude buckskin shirt; where millions of dejected immigrants gather from around the world to be rejuvenated as Americans, sounding together a manly, wild, barbaric yawp of freedom. That is my West: precisely that and nothing more. Oh, my colleague ventures, more perplexed now than cantankerous, you mean 'the West'the frontier, Indians, Clint Eastwood? I nod vaguely and sidle off. It is all so hard to convey over a single, polite glass of academic sherry. For a field that has been around so long, western American history can be frustratingly difficult to pin down. Soon it will be a full century old. Often, with such advanced age comes a clarity of purpose as well as a record of achievement. Not so in this case. The record is impressive enough: the field now has several excellent journals, regularly holds good scholarly conferences, and boasts an immense bibliography that no one could read in a lifetime. But as for clarity of purpose, the field is still groping about in adolescence. It doesn't quite know who it is or what it wants to be when it grows up. What are its boundaries? Where is West and where is not? There is still no settled, mature answer. There is, to be sure, an established body of writing about the history of the West, and usually it would be to such a body that we would turn for resolving what the field of study is or ought to be. In this case, however,