The "New Western History" Comes of Age

Abstract

This excellent set of essays honors Howard R. Lamar, who is retiring after more than four decades of teaching the history of the American West at Yale University. Of the fifty-seven Ph.D. students he has directed or is directing, twelve contributed to this festschrift. Their articles-like the work of the man they celebrate-exhibit bold perspectives, challenging ideas, interdisciplinary research, and freedom from cant and hyperbole. The collection is as broad in space and time as it is diverse in subject and method, ranging from Alaska to the Appalachians, from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, and from community studies and imperial diplomacy to the environment. It considers Native Americans, race, gender, religion, twentieth-century politics, art, and individual and regional identities, as well as the environmental impact of mining, imperial boundaries as the zone of interplay between rival European nations, a comparison of American, Mexican, and Meti frontier settlements, and the writing and selling of the western past. Howard Lamar responds to these pieces by speculating on the directions western history is likely to take in the future. The opening essay suggests that Cronon, Miles, and Gitlin are not ready to discard all of Frederick Jackson Turner's famous or infamous frontier thesis. They reject the Turnerian assumption that frontiers passed through predictable phases from savagery to civilization, but portraying the West as a distinct region poses dangers of its own. Instead, they call for a study of comparative frontiers, a field that Lamar helped introduce to western historians. Much of western history has always been about ceasing to be westthat is to say, making the long transition from frontier to region. And because the experience of ceasing to be west has happened everywhere, even in the West itself, the icons of the western frontier express the common history not of a particular region but of America itself (pp. 26-27). All frontierswhether in Nova Scotia or southern California shared common features,