Nineteenth-Century American West Research Articles

Diana L. Ahmad. The Opium Debate and Chinese Exclusion Laws in the Nineteenth-Century American West. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2007.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewDiana L. Ahmad. The Opium Debate and Chinese Exclusion Laws in the Nineteenth-Century American West. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2007.Guenter RisseGuenter RisseUniversity of California, San Francisco and University of Washington, Seattle Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs Volume 22, Number 1Fall 2007 A journal of the Alcohol and Drugs History Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/SHAD22010087 Views: 39Total views on this site © 2007 by The Alcohol and Drugs History Society. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Opium Debate and Chinese Exclusion Laws in the Nineteenth-Century American West by Diana Ahmad

The Opium Debate and Chinese Exclusion Laws in the Nineteenth-Century American West by Diana Ahmad

A Companion to the American West

Notes on Contribuors. Introduction. (William Deverell). Part I: Thinking Through the American West. 1. The Making of the First American West and the Unmaking of Other Realms. (Steven Aron). 2. Thinking West. (Elliott West). Part II: Conquest and Its Patterns. The Nineteenth Century. 3. Passion and Imagination in the Exploration of the American West. (James P. Ronda). 4. Environment and the Nineteenth-Century West or, Process Encounters Place. (Andrew C. Isenberg). 5. Engineering the Elephant: Industrialism and Environment in the Greater West. (David Igler). 6. Mining and the Nineteenth Century American West. (Malcolm J. Rohrbough). 7. Law and the Confluence of Legal Cultures. (Sarah Barringer Gordon). 8. Native Americans in the Nineteenth-Century American West. (David Rich Lewis). 9. Western Violence.(Michael A. Bellesiles). 10. Bringing It All Back Home: Rethinking the History of Women and the 19th Century West. (Elizabeth Jameson). 11. Empire and Liberty: Contradictions and Conflicts in Nineteenth Century Western Political History. (Jeffrey Ostler). Part III: Exceptionalism or Regionalism? The Twentieth-Century American West. 12. African Americans in the Twentieth-Century West. (Douglas Flamming). 13. The West and Workers, 1870-1930. (James Gregory). 14. Societies to Match the Scenery: Twentieth Century Environmental History. (Dan Flores). 15. Where to Draw the Line? The Pacific, Place, and the U.S. West. (Chris Friday). 16. Religion and the American West. (Philip Goff). 17. Transients and Stickers: The Problem of Community in the American West. (Anne Hyde). 18. American Indians in the Twentieth Century. (Peter Iverson). 19. The New Deal's West. (Karen Merrill). 20. Art, Ideology, and the West. (Douglas R. Nickel). 21. The West Plays West: Western Tourism and the Landscape of Leisure. (Marguerite Shaffer). 22. Hispanics and Latinos. (Ramon A. Gutierrez). 23. City Lights: Urban History in the West. (Robert O. Self). 24. Politics and the Twentieth Century West. (William Deverell). 25. The Literary West and the Twentieth Century. (David M. Wrobel). Bibliography. Index

Distant Horizon: Documents from the Nineteenth-Century American West ed. by Gary Noy

b o o k R e v ie w s 2 2 3 Distant Horizon: Documents from the Nineteenth-Century American West. Edited by Gary Noy. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. 467 pages, $22.00. Reviewed by Karen English San José State University Distant Horizon is an anthology of nineteenth-century documents, remi­ niscences, and accounts concerning the American West. While the texts are works dating predominantly from the last half of the nineteenth century, there are a few twentieth-century commentaries as well. Noy groups the texts the­ matically into eleven chapters ranging from “Westerners of Color” to “The Railroad in the American West.” Clearly conceived as a reader for a classroom, the anthology has a minimum of editorial material. Short thematic introduc­ tions begin each chapter, and sporadic general comments preface or follow some texts. For example, in his introduction to Walt Whitman’s “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” Noy explains in italics, “In selected stanzas of this poem Whitman embodies the driving impetus of westward expansionist thought" (12). The volume ends with a particularly useful chapter-by-chapter bibliography of sources and a brief index. The great strength of this anthology lies in the variety of the texts chosen for inclusion. Teachers ofhigh school and introductory college courses will ben­ efit from the gathering ofso many writers from such diverse backgrounds. Many of the documents that are included provide valuable texts for cultural studies as well. For example, a partial text of the Homestead Act of 1862 illuminates the chapter on “Farmers and Townsfolk”; and excerpts of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo strengthen the chapter on “Soldiers in the American West.” Combined with newspaper accounts and autobiographical reminiscences, these documents help round out the historical record for classroom study. The great strength of this anthology is related to its weakness as a collec­ tion. Because Noy emphasizes a range of texts, he is forced into the editorial position of relying on excerpts from longer texts. In cases where he includes an entire chapter or a complete portion of a journal or diary, the text retains its literary integrity. Often, however, Noy omits portions of chapters, documents, and accounts so that we do not have even the complete sections of a particu­ lar text. Why include only a few stanzas of Whitman’s poem “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” or selected portions of a chapter from Cather’s M;y Antonia? Selections from longer works, like Sarah Winnemucca’s autobiography, become merely a series of excerpts. This editorial practice compromises the effect of longer works by turning them into a series of digestible writing bites— akin to television’s sound bites. And without notes, the reader has no sense of what has been omitted or why. In his general introduction, Noy uses the phrase “unique American west­ ern mosaic” to describe his project; he also uses the model of the “sampler.” 2 2 4 WAL 3 5 .1 S u m m e r 2 0 0 0 Both ofthese ideas are carried out conscientiously inhis anthology. Overall, this is a useful resource to have for anyone who teaches American history or cultural studies and wishes to sample a variety of literary works in the classroom. The Lizard Speaks: Essays on the Writings of Frederick Manfred. Edited by Nancy Owen Nelson. Sioux Falls, S.Dak.: Center for Western Studies, 1998. 228 pages, $15.95. Reviewed by Gordon Johnston Three Rivers Community College According to the editor, the theme around which this collection is built is Manfred’s “innate connection to the primordial ‘lizard brain’ which is the center of the creative process” (vii). To Manfred, the “Old Lizard” (“intuition” is a useful but inadequate synonym) was the source of his voice as a writer; this theme also played out in his fiction in the actions of his characters. A master storyteller, Manfred wrote novels to explore our relationship to the land, our animal nature as a source of knowledge and power, our relationship to our ancestors and our cultural heritage, and the male/female duality of our inner selves. As Manfred’s voice developed, he explored all these themes as aspects of that primordial lizard brain. As is often the case...

Western Technological Landscapes (review)

Reviewed by: Western Technological Landscapes * Timothy J. LeCain (bio) Western Technological Landscapes. Edited by Stephen Tchudi. Reno, Nev.: Nevada Humanities Committee, 1998. Pp. xii+204; illustrations, notes/references. $14.95. This intriguing collection of essays, memoirs, poems, and photographs takes for its theme an issue as big as the West itself: the many ways in which technology has changed and responded to the varied and sometimes unique qualities of the western landscape. Equally ambitious is the collection’s effort to examine this theme by bringing together contributions from a variety of disciplines in the sciences and humanities. As is inevitable with any such collection, the quality of these pieces is somewhat uneven, and the multidisciplinary approach may displease the specialist searching for a more tightly focused package. Nonetheless, there is much to recommend this volume. Historians of technology will find two articles in the section titled “The Effects of Technology” especially worthwhile. The most interesting and original is James C. Williams’s essay, “Energy, Conservation, and Modernity: The Failure to Electrify Railroads in the American West.” Williams, who is the author of an excellent recent monograph, Energy and the Making of Modern California (Akron, Ohio: University of Akron Press, 1997), here focuses on the early-twentieth-century competition between oil and hydropower to become the dominant western energy source. The West—and in particular California—had potentially abundant supplies of both power sources. The ready supply of oil from southern California led many railroad operators to convert their locomotives from coal to oil and to enter into the oil production business during the early 1900s. Yet given the proximity of many western rivers, which could be dammed for hydropower, managers also considered electrification of their rail lines to be an attractive alternative to oil. A surprisingly important factor in the debate, though, was the advocacy by men like Gifford Pinchot for using electrification as a conservation measure: by increasing the use of hydropower in the rail industry, increasingly scarce oil resources would be conserved. As it turns out, while Californians rapidly developed hydropower for other uses, new oil discoveries prevented the railroads from widely electrifying. Nonetheless, Williams proposes the early western view of hydropower as the epitome of modern conservation practices that later significantly contributed to “harnessing the nation’s water power, from the Colorado and Columbia Rivers to the Tennessee Valley” (p. 62). Of all the essays collected here, Williams’s offers the most new information, and it is a valuable contribution to the growing body of work at the intersection of the history of technology and environmental history. Unfortunately, Williams does not examine the consequences of the battle between oil and hydropower for the western environment, and the collection [End Page 891] as a whole generally fails adequately to demonstrate the connections between technological change and changes in the western landscape. To some degree this oversight may stem from the volume’s lack of a shared definition of the western “environment” or “landscape,” as is evident in a second useful essay, Jen A. Huntley-Smith’s “The Genius of Civilization: The Material Culture of Print Technology in the Nineteenth-Century American West.” Huntley-Smith provides a fascinating technical history of the development of printing in the West during the latter half of the nineteenth century that challenges simplistic theories of an East-to-West pattern of cultural and technological transmission and domination. She makes a good case for western technological innovation in printing, which she suggests may have been partly rooted in a desire to escape eastern hegemony. But while this is an intriguing observation, clearly it has little or nothing to do with the “landscape” of the West in any sense beyond regional geography. Still others of the essays focus more closely on the land itself, and several (written by engineers and scientific experts) are valuable primers on the fundamental environmental dynamics of irrigation, waterpower, and cattle grazing. Thus the challenge and opportunity suggested by this collection is to further incorporate historical and other humanistic disciplines with the insights offered by environmental science and technology. Perhaps then we may begin truly to understand the ways in which, as the essayist David Fenimore rightly concludes, westerners have developed...

Peak Practices: Englishwomen's “Heroic” Adventures in the Nineteenth-Century American West

Many Englishwomen explored the mountainous regions of the American West in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s, hiking and taking excursions into popular tourist destinations such as the Rocky Mountains and Yosemite Valley. This paper examines the writings of seven women who toured these regions and published accounts of their journeys. These elite international travelers produced a complex array of gendered subjectivities in their writings. They represented themselves as actively “conquering” mountain peaks as well as passively waiting for the men to do it, as fearing danger and fatigue but also ridiculing the incompetency of local male guides, and as “resisting” adventure, yet expressing female empowerment and abandonment in it. The paper problematizes “feminine” codes of behavior, first-wave feminism, and convergence of these within nineteenth-century British imperialism and narratives of adventure, to show how conventional as well as more transgressive discourses of Victorian womanhood worked with imperialist, nationalist, and class discourses. I examine what the women wrote about both the indoor spaces of mountainous landscapes and their outdoor mountaineering adventures. In many ways, the women reinscribed themselves as feminine domestic subjects in wilderness environments, yet they also explored and contested the powerful inscriptions of conventional Victorian womanhood.

A Chinaman's Chance: The Chinese on the Rocky Mountain Mining Frontier

Writers and historians have traditionally portrayed Chinese immigrants in the nineteenth-century American West as victims. For them, the American frontier was place that offered no more than a Chinaman's chance. By examining the early history of the Boise Basin, Idaho, Liping Zhu challenges the stereotypical image of the Chinese pioneers. Looking at various positive aspects of their experience, he takes an entirely new approach to the study of this ethnic minority. Between 1863 and 1910, large number of Chinese immigrants resided in Idaho's Boise Basin, searching for gold. As in many Rocky Mountain mining camps, they comprised majority of the population. Unlike settlers in many other boom-and-bust western mining towns, the Chinese in the Boise Basin managed to stay there for more than half century. Like other pioneers, the Chinese immigrants in this unique Rocky Mountain mining region had equal access to the pursuit of happiness. Their basic material needs were guaranteed, and many individuals were able to accumulate considerable amount of wealth and climb up the economic ladder. Chinese equality was also seen in frontier justice. To settle disputes, they frequently challenged white opponents in the various courts as well as in gun battles. Thus, the Chinese played all the stereotypical frontier roles -- victors, victims, and villains. Despite occasional conflicts and personal rivalries, race relations between the Chinese and Euroamericans were relatively good; cultural accommodation, not confrontation, was the predominant theme. The Idaho Chinese actually received opportunities far beyond what has previously been assumed. Interesting and provocative, A Chinaman'sChance: The Chinese on the Rocky Mountain Mining Frontier not only offers general readers narrative account of the Rocky Mountain mining frontier, but also introduces to scholars fresh interpretation of the Asian experience in nineteenth-century America.

Horizontal Inter-Ethnic Relations: Chinese and American Indians in the Nineteenth-Century American West

Horizontal Inter-Ethnic Relations: Chinese and American Indians in the Nineteenth-Century American West

The geographical imagination of Frederic Remington: the invention of the cowboy West

The artist Frederic Remington was one of the most important and enduring iconographers of the nineteenth-century American West. Through his paintings and bronzes, his illustrations for periodicals, and his books and articles, Remington helped to shape an image of the American West which has endured to the present. In particular, it was Remington's “invention” of the cowboy which insured his lasting reputation as the artist responsible for American images of the West. The West of Remington's time was, however, a different place from the place he presented in his art. Prior to Remington's first trip west and the development of his career as America's foremost western artist, his own western image was based on childhood exposure to romantic adventure stories. The differences between his pre-conceived image and the reality of the West he encountered in the 1880s and 1890s caused him to refit reality to match his preconceptions. In this refitting, Remington invented an image of man and nature in the West by taking his preconceptions and applying them to Darwinian philosophy to create characters and environment which were less representations of reality than they were inventions of the imagination. Even today, the American image of the West and Westerners (particularly the cowboy) is derivative of Remington's invented tradition.

From the Women's West Teaching Guide: Women's Lives in the Nineteenth Century American West

Journal Article From the Women's West Teaching Guide: Women's Lives in the Nineteenth Century American West Get access Martha Boethel Martha Boethel Martha Boethel is a freelance writer and experienced in the development and editing of curriculum materials. Melissa Hield is a historian, writer, and video producer. She co-founded the Coalition for Western Women's History, which in conjunction with the Sun Valley Center for the Arts and Humanities, produced The Women's West Teaching Guide. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar OAH Magazine of History, Volume 3, Issue 2, Spring 1988, Pages 30–34, https://doi.org/10.1093/maghis/3.2.30 Published: 01 March 1988