We Are All New Western Historians Now

Abstract

It is now almost fifteen years since the Western announced itself to the world with the publication of Patricia Nelson Limerick's Legacy of Conquest: Unbroken Past of the American West (1987) and the Trails: Toward a New Western symposium in Santa Fe. By attacking many of the assumptions underlying the United States's best-known work of history-Frederick Jackson Turner's The Significance of the Frontier in American History-the New Western Historians helped return the American West, which only a generation before had carried more than a vague hint of antiquarianism about it, to the mainstream of historical scholarship. This dramatic shift in fortunes received a boost not only from the press attention that Legacy of Conquest and the Trails conference garnered and from the powerful prose of Limerick and her fellow members of New Western History's so-called Gang of Four-William Cronon, Richard White, and Donald Worster-but from larger national trends as well. To a United States grappling with a sense of ecological limits and with a multicultural future in which Asian Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans would play increasingly prominent parts, the American West suddenly seemed to offer a potent new version of that age-old historical objective: the usable past. As Western history successfully re-asserted its place in the academy in the 1990s, however, the central debates sparked by the New Western History began to die down. Once-heated discussions as to whether the west was best understood as a process (read: frontier) or a place (read: region) burned themselves out, the participants apparently having concluded that their exchanges had reached the point of diminishing returns. In place of writing manifestos, historians of the American West returned to producing mono-