United States Western Research Articles

Primitive politics in sanctified landscapes: the ethnographic fictions of Laurens van der Post

The Cold War confrontation of the 1950s‐60s posed a threat to civil existence and cultural life as Western Europe and America knew it. In the atmosphere of immanent nuclear annihilation and ecological dissolution reinforced by a communist menace, modernity with its science and technology appeared to undermine Euroamerican cultural meaning. One metaphorically powerful resolution to this crisis arose in a revival of attention to humankind's presumptive primordial roots. Ethnographers, film‐makers, and novelists responded by inventing a primitive past world as a foil to the seemingly apocalyptic present. ‘Bushman’ quickly became a main subject attention. In the existential image of Kalahari ‘Bushmen’ as the Jungian archetype of authentic humanity these personal and collective crises were fused and resolved. This essay, focuses on the image as it evolved in the novels, films, and polemical writings of Laurens van der Post.

Rebuilding Europe: Western Europe, America and Postwar Reconstruction.

Rebuilding Europe: Western Europe, America and Postwar Reconstruction.

Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Conference on the History of Western America

Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Conference on the History of Western America

The Sky’s the Limit? Technology and the American West

Review Essay THE SKY’S THE LIMIT? TECHNOLOGY AND THE AMERICAN WEST HAL· K. ROTHMAN Although the American West lends itself to many frequently overused metaphors, it has taken the historical community a long time to plug into the obvious. Finally, for the first time in a generation, one of the most representative and symbolic features of the West, the sky, has made it into the title of not one, but two new works that seek to reevaluate the relationships among human beings, their technologies, and the physical environment in the West. It would be hard to find two more different books. One, Donald Worster’s Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West, is a graceful collection of thoughtful and thought-provoking essays from an acknowledged leader of not only environmental history but of what has been termed the New Western History.1 The other, Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past, edited by William Cronon, another of the leading scholars in environmental history but not generally identified with the New Western History; George Miles, curator of the Western Americana Collection at Yale University’s Bienecke Library; and Jay Gitlin, a lecturer at Yale, is a festschrift in honor of Howard R. Lamar, one of the most distinguished of western historians, acting president and formerly Sterling Professor of His­ tory at Yale University.2 It highlights Lamar’s former students as well as a number of his many friends and admirers in the held. Dr. Rothman is associate professor of history at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, where he edits Environmental History Review. He is the author of On Rims and Ridges: The Los Alamos Area since 1880 (Lincoln, Nebr., 1992), Preserving Different Pasts: The American National Monuments (Champaign, Ill., 1989), and numerous articles about the environment of the American West. 'Donald Worster, Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. ix + 291; notes, index. $27.50. •William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin, eds., Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America's Western Past (New York: Norton, 1992), pp. xiii + 354; illustrations, notes, index. $35.00.© 1994 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/94/3501-0006$01.00 168 The Sky’s the Limit? Technology and the American West 169 The two works represent a taking of the pulse in what has become one of the hottest and most controversial fields in the historical discipline. In few areas has the tension between older and newer ways of doing history become more pronounced as practitioners grapple for not only the minds of their peers and students but for the attention of the popular press as well. Worster’s work is aimed at this public context as much as at a scholarly audience. Derived from a series of invited lectures, newspaper articles, and other pieces he has written in recent years, this collection sparkles with the passion and insight for which Worster is famous.3 An engaging and opinionated writer with the rhythm of a Bible-toting preacher, he leads his audience through a scathing critique of the application of American cultural values to the fragile environments of the West. Under an Open Sky is necessarily less cohesive, ranging from Cronon’s own primer of the environmental history of the West, “Kennecott Journey: The Paths Out of Town,” to D. Michael Quinn’s “Religion in the American West,” but this eclecticism is a reflection of the range of subjects for study in this complex field. Worster’s view of the relationship between technology and culture mirrors the increasing ambivalence with which science and technol­ ogy are treated both in scholarship and popular writing. His perspec­ tive has much in common with authors such as Michael Crichton, who describes a series of events that result from the réanimation of dinosaurs cloned from traces of their DNA in his novel Jurassic Park.4 This attempt leads to disaster, as the ability of humans to control these technologically invented beings is far smaller than their capacity to use technology to create them. Crichton’s point is that technology advances more quickly...

Geography and Mentality Some Aspects of Max Weber's Protestantism Thesis

AbstractIn his essays on the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Max Weber proceeds from the observation that in Germany there is a clearly recognizable difference between the economic behaviour of Catholics and Protestants. As one of the reasons for this difference, the essays reveal-as a guiding principle for people's conduct of life-the principle of worldly asceticism inherent in Protestantism. This, Weber said, especially contributed to the formation of modern bourgeois capitalism in the occidental world. This thesis was mainly developed on the evidence of phenomena which Weber observed in Western Europe and North America and which he himself related to Calvinism. The problem now is that the Germany of Weber's time, as a leading industrial state, participated in modern western capitalism without Calvinism playing for the German Protestants a role which would have been in any way comparable to its role in the more western countries. Detailed examination of governmental, economic, and social conditions in the history of the denominalisation of some German territories and the comparison with the living conditions of Protestants in Western Europe and America leads to the conclusion that the later development of bourgeois economy and what I would like to call "Word Culture" (cf. p. 176f.) depended on the following factors: on with what methods and with what severity the rulers of the Reformation Era succeeded in imposing their own personal choice of faith upon their subjects or how far they allowed things to take their course without interference; then on whether they in this way curtailed, permitted or even supported the development of that capitalist and bourgeois economic spirit and "Word Culture" which had its roots as far back as the pre-Reformation era and which had then been boosted by Calvinism. Both individual belief and the rulers' power over this belief influenced equally vigorously and lastingly the mentality of all people concerned. Even more generalized: depending on whether and to what extent the religious and intellectual culture of a society are subjected to state oppression and coercive formation over a long period of time, the intellectual culture and economic attitude and potential of this society will develop. Life-style, economic ethic and cultural profile of many later generations depend on this.

Rebuilding Europe: Western Europe, America, and Postwar Reconstruction

Rebuilding Europe: Western Europe, America, and Postwar Reconstruction

The Navajo photography of Edward S. Curtis

Abstract The Navajo people of the American Southwest have been abundantly photographed since the beginnings of photography's extension into Western America — indeed, from almost since the beginnings of photography itself. Navajoland ‘offered’ dramatic landscapes and ‘The People’1 have served as exemplar for an assorted series of Western projects, changes in Western projects, and objects of Western desire. The photographs of Native Americans by Edward S. Curtis, though largely ignored during his lifetime, emerged shortly after his death in 1952 to become popular icons, which were so dramatic a phenomenon from the 1960s that today they are something of a cliché. ‘Original’ prints currently sell for thousands of dollars.2 This resurrection is also characteristic among specialists on Native Americans. Indeed, after having been neglected and abused by anthropology for many years for his elaborate staging, soft focus, excessive pastoral romanticism and nostalgia, Curtis has more recently become fashionable again and now enjoys something of an anthropological embrace.3

Incorporating Individuality: Nineteenth-Century Statemaking in the Far West

In the century after the Civil War, fourteen new states were created out of America's western territories. Although their exuberant founders shared goals and assumptions about how these new states would function, David Alan Johnson argues that statemakers in California, Oregon, and Nevada took a course in the Far West in the decades before 1865 which differed significantly from the process of creating states in the East and later in the other trans-Mississippi western territories. The result was three very differing societies, which at the end of the nineteenth century still bore their founders' indelible imprint. Johnson divides his study into three sections: California, Oregon, and Nevada's territorial period; the statemaking process in each state; and the founders' legacies in the generation after statehood. While he draws comparisons to the earlier trans-Appalachian experience in the process by which these three territories achieved statehood, the emphasis is on the roles of ideology and political culture. He elucidates these two concepts by drawing finely wrought portraits of the writers of the three state constitu-tions who had a dramatic impact on their respective societies. Their greatest achievement, the author finds, was successfully incorporating their creations into the larger milieu of nineteenth-century America. The Far West region differed significantly from earlier frontiers. The three new states were isolated from their eastern contemporaries, not contiguous to them as earlier territories had been, so people who migrated to the Far West were often permanently cut-off from their original societies. Primitive transportation and communication networks afforded them few opportunities to remain in close contact. The new societies that resulted reflected this sense of separateness. They also reflected their founders' shared political, cultural, and religious

Genetic variation in Bromus tectorum (Poaceae): introduction dynamics in North America

The Eurasian grass Bromus tectorum was collected first in its 19th century invasion of western America in six widely separated locales. We used allozyme variability to evaluate whether populations at these locales and elsewhere in North America stem from different founders. By identifying the same geographically restricted alleles in both introduced populations and potential source populations and tracing the distribution of these alleles in western North America, we identified a minimum of five or six independent founder events. These alleles were often at their highest frequencies in populations at or near the earliest collection sites. Founder events likely occurred near Cache Creek, B.C., Ritzville, Wash., Juniper Flat, Nev., Emigrant Pass, Nev., and either Dubois, Idaho, or Provo, Utah, or both. Multiple introductions and the spread of allelic variants produced a mosaic of genotypes throughout western North America and partially offset the reduction in genetic variation this alien grass would have probably incurred during intercontinental migration. Key words: Bromus tectorum, biological invasions, multiple introductions, shared alleles, enzyme electrophoresis.

Reviews and Short Notices

Reviews and Short Notices

The Frontier Trail: Rethinking Turner and Reimagining the American West

The Frontier Trail: Rethinking Turner and Reimagining the American West Get access Cronon William, Miles George, and Gitlin Jay, eds., Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America's Western Past (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992). Etulain Richard W., ed., Writing Western History: Essays on Major Western Historians (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991). Limerick Patricia Nelson, Milner Clyde A.II, and Rankin Charles E., eds., Trails toward a New Western History (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991). Nash Gerald D., Creating the West: Historical Interpretations 1890–1990 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991). Worster Donald, Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). John Mack Faragher John Mack Faragher Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 98, Issue 1, February 1993, Pages 106–117, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/98.1.106 Published: 01 February 1993

The Significance of the History of the American West: Postscripts and Prospects

After annual meeting of American Historical Association in December 1888, John Franklin Jameson wrote to his father, the meetings ... were extremely stupid ... We had much Western history warmed-over from [the canceled meeting in Columbus]. Western history is stupid anyway, I think .. .' Seven years later Catalogue of University of Wisconsin carried a new course heading, The History of West, and instructor, young FrederickJackson Turner, was to become Jameson's trusted advisor in latter's important roles in developing profession. Jameson's letter, inception of Turner's course, and his emergence as a person of professional consequence were all related to major changes underway in history discipline. This paper considers origins and development of western history in American institutions of higher learning, examines changing face of western history textbooks used by generations of college students, and tries in some degree to evaluate past and future significance of history of western America as a curricular offering.

Proceedings of the Thirty-Second Conference on the History of Western America: Minutes of the Annual Business Meeting

Proceedings of the Thirty-Second Conference on the History of Western America: Minutes of the Annual Business Meeting Paul Andrew Hutton Paul Andrew Hutton Executive Director Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Western Historical Quarterly, Volume 24, Issue 1, February 1993, Pages 133–137, https://doi.org/10.1093/whq/24.1.133 Published: 01 February 1993

The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science

Londa Schiebinger's adventure in scholarly sleuthing discovers the hidden, finds the lost, and celebrates the forgotten women in medicine and science in Western Europe and America from the 16th through the 19th centuries. This important, intellectually powerful book is often very funny in relating historical reasons why there are so few women scientists. Seventeenth-century pundits, imitating Aristotle, asserted that women's brains were too cold and too soft to sustain rigorous thought. Some 18th-century theorists thought that female cranial cavities were too small to encompass powerful scientific brains. A common 19th-century belief was that vigorous exercise of a woman's brain shriveled her ovaries. And the great philosopher Hegel thought that women should study botany because the mind of a woman is as placid as a plant. Beyond comedic virtues, this book's true power lies in its revelation of women's scientific achievements and its recasting of the question at hand: why are

Rainbows in the Indian rock art of desert western America

For thousands of years the image of the rainbow was pecked and painted by native Americans onto the rocks of the Great Basin and the Southwest. This long-lived tradition, which transcended major developments in lifestyles and cultures, underscores the important symbolic significance of the rainbow to the inhabitants of this arid region. The rainbow rock art depictions were usually associated with humanlike ceremonial figures, snakes, clouds, rain, and lightning bolts, suggesting that the rainbow symbol was employed as part of an elaborate sacred tradition. Although such ceremonial usage of the rainbow image tends to lead to abstraction and symbolic representation, there are examples, including a properly colorized rainbow painting from central Utah (approximately a thousand years old), that indicate observationally based rainbow reproductions of relatively great antiquity.

Married to Antarctica

By trade, geologists display a rather cavalier attitude toward the continents. In their minds or on computer screens they frequently rearrange the world, shuffling about Africa and Asia faster than an interior decorator might move sofas. But even those long accustomed to the game of continental twister are doing a double take at a novel theory about Earth's ancient history Two researchers propose that North America and Antarctica once lay side by side, locked together in a marathon union spanning perhaps more than a billion years. think it's pretty surprising to most people. When I first told it to a colleague of mine, he told me I was out of my mind, says Ian WD. Dalziel, a geologist at the University of Texas in Austin and one formulator of the new theory Dalziel and Eldridge M. Moores, from the University of California, Davis, devised independent versions of the hypothesis after Moores visited Antarctica in 1989 on a field trip led by Dalziel. Plate tectonic experts have long suspected that most of Earth's continents combined to form a giant landmass, existing from about 800 to 600 million years ago, the end of the Precambrian time. The details from that far back remain fuzzy Yet geologists know that when the unnamed supercontinent splintered apart, some landmass separated from North America's western edge, which at the time ran through the present locations of Montana, Idaho and Nevada. The popular theory among researchers holds that the missing block of continent now forms Siberia. Moores and Dalziel believe East Antarctica makes a better candidate for North America's long-lost mate, despite the incredible distance now separating the two. They proposed this connection after noticing that certain rocks from the frozen continent bear a close resemblance to those found in parts of the United States. According to Moores, the Dronning Maud Land section of East Antarctica contains a band of 1.1-billion-year-old metamorphic rocks very similar to the so-called Grenville belt that runs from Texas through the Adirondack Mountains of New York and into Quebec. He suggests that Dronning Maud Land originally sat next to present-day Texas, forming a continuation of the Grenville province into Antarctica. If the ancient core of Antarctica was indeed wedded to early North America, the marriage may have lasted for an unusually long time, even by geologic standards. Similar rocks found in Arizona and Antarctica indicate the two continental cores got hitched at least 1.6 billion years ago. Locked together, they wandered the Earth as a unit for hundreds of millions of years and then joined up with other regions to form the late Precambrian supercontinent. North America would have finally divorced from Antarctica about 600 million years ago, when an ocean opened between the two continents. In Dalziel's view of the ancient world, Antarctica and North America both connected to Australia, which then bordered what is now northwest Canada (see map). After those western connections developed, the eastern side of North America bonded with ancient parts of South America. Dalziel describes North America as a keystone at the center of the late Precambrian supercontinent, which apparently straddled Earth's equator. Moores and Dalziel are not the first to suggest a connection between the polar continent and North America. More than a decade ago, Canadian geologists proposed a similar idea but never developed the concept, which lay fallow for many years until Moores and Dalziel developed it independently in separate papers, which will appear respectively in the May and June issues of GEOLOGY. The two researchers discussed their work last month at a meeting of the Geologic Society of America in San Francisco.

Pioneer Conservationists of Western America. By Peter Wild. (Missoula, Montana: Mountain Press Publishing Co., 1979.) xxv + 246 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, index

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsPioneer Conservationists of Western America. By Peter Wild. (Missoula, Montana: Mountain Press Publishing Co., 1979.) xxv + 246 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, indexPeter A. CoatesPeter A. Coates University of Bristol, U.K. Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 15, Number 1Spring 1991 Published for the American Society for Environmental History and the Forest History Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/3984683 Journal History This article was published in the Environmental History Review (1990-1995), which is continued by Environmental History (1996-present). © 1991 American Society for Environmental History. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Sun Is But a Morning Star: Studies in West Coast Poetics by Lee Bartlett

Reviews 269 The Sun Is But aMorning Star: Studies in West Coast Poetics. ByLee Bartlett. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989. 217 pages, $27.50.) Bartlett’s useful and stimulating book is more a collection of studies and interviews toward a western poetics than a unified critical work. The style is often informative and informal, studded with queries, parenthetical asides and biographical/bibliographical data. Bartlett’s emphasis on the West Coast reminds us that there may be western American poetries rather than a single entity. The essays on Rexroth, Everson and the one on Thom Gunn and Nathaniel Tarn are relatively traditional. The essay on Michael McClure’s “meat poetry” is as eccentric as its subject: fair enough. The chapter on Gary Snyder brings together intelligent comments on Snyder’s Han-Shan versions and a very basic reading of Myths & Texts. The discussion of Michael Palmer and Ron Silliman is an outstanding discussion of the Language Poetry move­ ment, which has flourished in the Bay Area. Language Poetry is not a move­ ment often associated with western writing, which we often think of exclusively in thematic terms. Readers of Bartlett’sexcellent collection of interviews, Talking Poetry, will not be surprised to find that the newbook has a useful interview with Everson on the subject of Robert Duncan and a dialogue among Bartlett, Nathaniel Tarn (an expatriate English poet settled in New Mexico) and Everson. The dialogue raises questions about place, language and archetype that all students of poetry in western America will want to consider. The entire collection will have interest for such students. What we need now is for someone—and Bartlett is a good candidate—to do a full study of the western poetry (or poetries), taking into account the thematic basis, the imaginative stance (often bardic, even shamanistic), and the somewhat neglected technical aspects. Materials toward such a study have been available for some time, and this book adds more. BERT ALMON University of Alberta Theodore Roethke’s Far Fields—The Evolution of His Poetry. By Peter Balakian. (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1989. 165 pages, $25.00.) In his preface, Peter Balakian states that while most critics of Roethke “consider his work in terms of a single thesis”—i.e., “dynamic perception,” (Richard Blessing), “American Romanticism” (Jay Parini), “mysticism in poetry form” (Neal Bowers)—he focuses on the development of Roethke as an artist. Admittedly “gymnastically eclectic” in his approach, Balakian traces the evolution of Roethke’s poetry, despite the many changes in his style, in terms of “the continuity in his sensibility.” With relevant examples he docu­ ments how Roethke combined and advanced the traditions of English meta­ ...

Japanese Pure Land Buddhism in Christian America

For a historian of Buddhism, the present age is truly a fascinating epoch in which to witness the evolution of Buddhism. Like those pivotal periods when Buddhism ventured from India to China, to Japan, or to Tibet, this is also a time when Buddhism is encountering an utterly new and foreign culture-this time, that of America. Each time Buddhism has gone from one culture to another, it has undergone major modifications and evolutions to adapt itself to the new host culture rather than to transform the culture to its own ends. In each transition, there have been traditionalists who have felt that the newly evolving brands of Buddhism were heretical or un-Buddhist; yet it is not too much to say that Buddhism's very success in survival is because it made no attempt to remain rigidly Indian, but conformed itself somewhat to each culture it encountered (Kiyota 26). Having come from India through China, Korea, and Japan, Buddhism is today facing yet another cross-cultural encounter, largely between oriental Americans and Caucasian Americans; and this is the subject of the present study. It has been estimated that there are some half-million Buddhists in America today (Layman 44), of which the Jodo Shinshu or True Pure Land Sect ofJapanese Buddhism constitutes the largest single group, with approximately 100,000 members (Prebish 68). While the Zen sect may have attracted more attention in literature and the press, this dominance ofJodo Shinshu is due to the fact that the vast majority ofJapanese (especially of non-samurai) belonged toJodo Shinshu, and it was these Japanese who came in the greatest numbers to labor in the fields of America's western states over the past century. Several generations have passed since that first major wave of immigration, so the present descendents of those immigrants are totally American. This leaves them with the more conscious choice of whether to cling to their Sino-Japanese roots, Americanize old foreign rituals, or reject their foreign past for the watereddown Christianity of the surrounding majority culture. Three periods can be identified in the evolution of Shinshu in this country. From the 1890s until the Second World War, Jodo Shinshu held close ties with its temple headquarters in Kyoto, Japan. The Shinshu temples in America,

Pioneer Conservationists of Western America. By Peter Wild. Missoula, Montana: Mountain Press Publishing Company, 1979. xxv + 246 pp. Illustrations Pioneer Conservationists of Eastern America. By Peter Wild. Missoula, Montana: Mountain Press Publishing Company, 1985. xvi + 280 pp. Illustrations

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsPioneer Conservationists of Western America. By Peter Wild. Missoula, Montana: Mountain Press Publishing Company, 1979. xxv + 246 pp. Illustrations Pioneer Conservationists of Eastern America. By Peter Wild. Missoula, Montana: Mountain Press Publishing Company, 1985. xvi + 280 pp. IllustrationsChar MillerChar Miller Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 33, Number 1January 1989 Published for the American Society for Environmental History and the Forest History Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/4005059 Journal History This article was published in the Journal of Forest History (1974-1989), which was continued by Forest & Conservation History (1990-1995). © 1989 Forest History Society, Inc. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.