We Are All New Western Historians Now

Walter Nugent. Into the West: The Story of Its People. New York: Knopf, 1999. xxiii + 493 pp. Maps, photographs, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00 (cloth); $16.00 (paper).

Ferenc Morton Szasz. Religion in the Modern American West. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000. xviii + 249 pp. Photographs, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00 (cloth).

It is now almost fifteen years since the "New Western History" announced itself to the world with the publication of Patricia Nelson Limerick's Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (1987) and the "Trails: Toward a New Western History" symposium in Santa Fe.¹ By attacking many of the assumptions underlying the United States's best-known work of history--Frederick Jackson Turner's "The Significance of the Frontier in American History"--the New Western Historians helped return the American West, which only a generation before had carried more than a vague hint of antiquarianism about it, to the mainstream of historical scholarship. This dramatic shift in fortunes received a boost not only from the press attention that Legacy of Conquest and the "Trails" conference garnered and from the powerful prose of Limerick and her fellow members of New Western History's so-called "Gang of Four"--William Cronon, Richard White, and Donald Worster--but from larger national trends as well. To a United States grappling with a sense of ecological limits and with a multicultural future in which Asian Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans would play increasingly prominent parts, the American West suddenly seemed to offer a potent new version of that age-old historical objective: the "usable past."

As Western history successfully re-asserted its place in the academy in the 1990s, however, the central debates sparked by the New Western History began to die down. Once-heated discussions as to whether the west was best understood as a process (read: frontier) or a place (read: region) burned themselves out, the participants apparently having concluded that their exchanges had reached the point of diminishing returns. In place of writing manifestos, historians of the American West returned to producing monographs, generating a growing array of studies that revealed far more about ethnic relations, economics, geography, and ecology in the west than ever before. Building upon this wealth of new research, two senior scholars of the American West, Walter Nugent and Ferenc Morton Szasz, have recently released ambitious works that, taken together, offer an important glimpse of where the study of the American West may be headed now that the New Western History has reached its adolescence.

At first glance, Nugent's and Szasz's works would seem to suggest very different destinations for their discipline. Nugent's Into the West is a sprawling work, covering some five hundred years of history in almost as many pages. Although termed by its author "a social-demographic history . . . a history of the people, not of their politics or other doings" (p. xix), Into the West traces not only the ebb and flow of human populations across the terrain now called the American West, but touches on a startlingly wide variety of other issues as well: Mexican land law, irrigation, war-time industrialization, race relations, and the like. In contrast, Szasz's work, Religion in the Modern American West, is a taciturn and slender study of religion, a subject that receives only passing mention in Nugent's text. Szasz does not attempt to provide a sweeping panorama of all western experience. Instead, he confines his study to the "modern" era, which in his definition is virtually synonymous with the twentieth century. Furthermore, Szasz remains far more interested in specific individuals and intellectual developments than in the broad trends and material transformations that drive Nugent's narrative.

Beneath these distinctions, however, lie several points of agreement that suggest some emerging points of consensus among historians of the American West. If Limerick and her fellow New Western Historians were never as monolithic a group as many...