New Western History
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The "new western history" movement emerged among professional historians in the 1980s, a belated manifestation of the 1970s "new social history" movement. The new western historians aimed to recast the study of American frontier history by focusing on race, class, gender, and environment in the trans-Mississippi West. The movement is best known through the work of Patricia Nelson Limerick, Richard White, William Cronon (who soon distanced himself from the movement’s excesses), and Donald Worster. The philosophy and historiography of the new western historians is the discussed thoroughly and supportively in Patricia Nelson Limerick, Clyde Milner II, and Charles E. Rankin, eds., Trails: Toward A New Western History.
Like the new social historians, new western historians did make important contributions. By focusing on race, class, gender, and environment, they added to the work of older Borderlands scholars of Hispanic studies, furthered the understanding of American Indians and frontier women, and worked the fertile ground of twentieth-century western history.
Frontier history did not show the impact of the new social history until over a decade after most other historical fields. The reason for the lag is that frontier history, from its inception in Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 "Frontier Thesis" paper, had always been home to a strong school of non-Marxist economic determinists (“Progressives”). These “old” western historians had addressed multiethnic and environmental issues on the Colonial, trans-Appalachian, and trans-Mississippi frontiers. Although they left much work undone, these Progressives planted the fields the new western historians later harvested. One of the new western historians’ greatest failings is their borrowing of heaping portions of Progressive analyses---including those of Turner---without acknowledging the debt.
The new western historians appeared almost simultaneously with the 1980s and 1990s “culture wars.” This conflict produced a backlash against “political correctness” in general, and the use of scholarship to advance a neo-Marxist political agenda in particular. The new western historians were particularly vulnerable to the charge of using scholarship for political ends, as witnessed in Limerick’s neo-Marxist polemic Legacy of Conquest and Richard White’s dark textbook, It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A New History of the American West.
As of this writing, the new western historians have come to dominate the academic governance, teaching, and writing of western history. As their books have flooded the field, however, their book sales and influence of mainstream culture has declined. As in the fields of American Revolutionary and Civil War history, educated Americans have been drawn to the work of non-academic or “popular” historians like David McCullough, Ken Burns, Barbara Tuchman, Stephen Ambrose, and others to find a balanced interpretation of American history.
[edit] References
Michael Allen, "The ‘New’ Western History Stillborn," The Historian 57 (Fall 1994), 201-208 and "Cowboyphobia, or The Emperors Wear No Duds," Journal of the West 36 (October 1997), 3-6.
Patricia Nelson Limerick, Clyde Milner II, and Charles E. Rankin, eds., Trails: Toward A New Western History (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991). ISBN 978-0700605019
Richard White, It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A New History of the the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991). ISBN 0-8061-2366-4
