Posting 2 (for 19 September meeting): Interpretations of the West

Also see my comments on Dave's blog posting for week two.

My response to:
Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History"
Articles from The Western Historical Quarterly
William Deverell, "Fighting Words: The Significance of the American West in the History of the United States"
David Emmons, "Constructed Province: History and the Making of the Last American West"
Scharff, Ronda, Faragher, Guitierrez, Underwood, and Montoya, "Claims and Prospects of Western History: A Roundtable"

The first thing that strikes me about this week's readings is that 100 years after Turner penned his thesis on the significance of the frontier in American history, historians of the West are still trying to refute him. Both Deverell and Emmons set their arguments in opposition to the Tuner thesis. Emmons argues against assigning the settlement process "qualitative values" and applying them selectively, as Turner did in his interpretation. And Deverell opens his essay by noting the popular (and Tunerian) view that the West is representative of the American character. He then goes on to argue against any "single, all powerful conceptual model" that explains the American West or "America by looking at the West." Montoya also places his interpretation of the West in opposition to Turner's thesis. What is it about the Turner thesis that has given it such a long life in the historiography of the West? A contemporaneous thesis in Southern historiography, William Dunning's interpretation of Reconstruction, has long since been overturned by historians of the American South. No Southern historian bothers to, or feels a need to, refute his thesis.

The answer I would put forward to my question is that the long duration of the Turner thesis of the West is a result of the power of myths in the American mind. The myths of the American West are still current in the American mind and Turner's thesis spoke directly to those myths. The myths of Southern history on which Dunning founded his interpretation of Reconstruction were annihilated by the Civil Rights Movement.

I found Emmons' thesis, the West as a region, with sub-regions, made distinctive by its historical experience of the economic and political forces of the East (or North), were well argued and convincing. His comparison with the historical development of the South as a distinct region was insightful, but I disagree with him in regards to when the South became a distinctive region.

Montaya's argument that the West was not exceptional (as Turner argued) but "a region that reflected the broader trends of nineteenth-century imperial and colonial endeavors throughout the rest of the world" is intriguing.

Finally, Gutierrez, though he doesn’t make the direct connection in his essay, points to another area where Western historiography can be compared to Southern historiography of three or four decades ago: breaking the interpretation of the region as monolithic, with only one culture of importance. Gutierrez's arguments against "the legacy of intellectual imperialism" and the associated "hegemonic conceptual unity" that has been prevalent in the historiography of the West seems well founded to me. Although it seems that the work by Western historians in the last decade and a half (the New Western Historians) has begun to break this intellectual imperialism, I believe much still needs to be done (at least in regards to getting the history into the American mind) in regards to the tendency of western history "to flatten or even erase the histories and alternative cultural orientations of peoples who have lived [in the West]."