Trails
Description
This is the new story of the Old West, told by ten historians who dare to reenvision the American West and knock the field of Western history on its ear. Some historians call it a revolution.
The Trails Conference in Santa Fe, a 1989 gathering organized by “new? western historian Patricia Nelson Limerick, spawned widespread media coverage and academic debate and provided the impetus for this volume. There, at the end of the Santa Fe Trail, leading scholars came together to discuss, debate, and evaluate an exciting new view of our past. It amounts to a far-reaching reexamination of the role of the West in U.S. history and of the field of Western history itself.
Trails brings together the best of this new work. The contributors provide a range of views that clarify the changes in Western history. They consider what the ?New Western History? is, what its impact on Western history has been thus far, and where it might lead as we move into the 1990s and beyond.
These historians reject both the ?tall in the saddle? myth and the concept of the frontier and its settlement described by Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893: a single, triumphant process that began with the arrival of white settlers and ended a century later when all the land was claimed. Instead, they see continuity. To them, the West is a region, washed by waves of successive emigrants over a period of 25,000 years; a place with climate, resources, and sustained damage of human habitation.
Contributors: Brian W. Dippie, Patricia Nelson Limerick, Michael P. Malone, Walter Nugent, Peggy Pascoe, William G. Robbins, Gerald Thompson, Elliott West, Richard White, Donald Worster
All prices
More details
Other editions
Additional editions
Content
Preface
I Trails: The New Western History
1. Beyond the Agrarian Myth, Donald Worster
2. Trashing the Trails, Richard White
3. Western Women at the Cultural Crossroads, Peggy Pascoe
4. The Trail to Santa Fe: The Unleashing of the Western Public Intellectual, Patricia Nelson Limerick
II Appraising the Territories: Old and New Western Histories
5. What on Earth is the New Western History?, Patricia Nelson Limerick
6. Another Look at Frontier/Western Historiography, Gerald Thompson
7. The ?New Western History,? an Assessment, Michael P. Malone
8. A Longer, Grimmer, but More Interesting Story, Elliott West
9. American Wests: Historiographical Perspectives, Brian W. Dippie
III The Global West
10. Beyond the Last Frontier: Toward a New Approach to Western American History, Michael P. Malone
11. Frontiers and Empires in the Late Nineteenth Century, Walter Nugent
12. Laying Siege to Western History: The Emergence of New Paradigms, William G. Robbins
Notes
The Contributors
Index
