Hist 616 Post 1 Jim J. The American West and Legacy of Conquest

In Legacy of Conquest Professor Limerick sets out to do nothing less than define/redefine Western history. She debunks the myths of pioneer independence and that in the United States the “Anglo” fulfilled his (her) destiny in the 18th and 19th centuries by settling the largely uninhabited spaces of North America west the 100th meridian. Instead, she describes the West as a meeting ground of diverse peoples - Indian American, Anglo American Latin American and Asian/Asian American – attempting to occupy and ultimately contesting “common ground” for physical and cultural dominance. The history of the west is one of “a place undergoing conquest.” She observes, and convinces, that Western history became and remains a “center” for each of these groups, and “an actor in everyone else’s play.” She continues that “understanding any part of the play now requires us to take account of the whole.”

Coming from California, I knew some of this “new” western history. There the Spanish heritage is inescapable, and even for a non-activist Anglo a source of pride. I enjoy the Mexican food, the Spanish language (and although I have mostly forgotten it in the 40 years since high school, it is spoken everywhere), the exotic place names and history, and a generally positive perception of California Spanish culture. Being brought up near San Francisco and the gold country makes one aware of the Chinese elements of California history, and today many greengrocers and large independent fruit sellers are of Japanese heritage. Until the 70s and 80s most Anglos were less aware of Native Americans; now their presence is more prominent due to the large number of casinos they operate. And every Californian of my generation was introduced to Fremont, Sutter, and Stanford in elementary school, and that introduction was reinforced at intervals in and out of school. Water is always a topic of conversation as some of us are aware that California is classed as having a semi-arid climate. The contests Limerick talks about are there too: Anglo condescension, Hispanic marginalization, industry vs. environment, etc.

In looking for another perspective on Limerick’s themes here, I wanted to get her later book, Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckoning in the New West (2001) but settled for an essay which might be useful for next week: “Turnerians all: The dream of a helpful history in an intelligible world,” The American Historical Review, June, 1995, Vol. 100, No 3. In this essay Professor Limerick refers to The Legacy of Conquest as her “Frontier Antithesis,” challenging Fredrick Jackson Turner’s “Frontier Thesis” of 1893 (reading for next week). Early in the essay she uses a compilation of Turner’s writing to construct in his own words a refutation of his famous thesis “The Frontier Antithesis by Frederick Jackson Turner with the assistance of Patricia Nelson Limerick” but later states her own Antithesis. One of the points of this essay is that one hundred years on, while rejecting his Thesis, historians in many ways have followed Turner in his “presentism” in that they believe that the present can used to explain the past - how we have arrived at this present. Limerick writes of some of the ideas she advances in Legacy “As Turner knew and as I now know (and it seems to have caught us both equally by surprise), the present turns out to be even more complicated, more muddled, and more maddening than the past. A historian who goes around declaring that an understanding of the present will deepen our understanding of the past is a historian who will eventually have to eat crow. The 1990s have served me a generous helping of this unattractive substance.” Quite honestly I didn't see the presentism when I read the book, but then I guess that is the point - she didn't either.

Coming from the West and having done a reading course with Professor Petrik meant that The American West: a new interpretive history wasn’t really new for me. Although consuming it as if drinking water from a firehose due to the criminally short period of time given for the task, I admired it for its scope and its deliberate goal of presenting the diversity and interactions/ clashes that Professor Limerick writes about. It makes a great survey text but necessarily lacks depth.