Introduction

JEROME FRISK AND FORREST G-. ROBINSON Introduction The emergence of the Old Western History, we are often reminded , has a fixed point ofinception (the Chicago convention of the American Historical Association in 1893), an authoritative founding text ("The Significance of the Frontier in American History"), and a single progenitor in the person of Frederick Jackson Turner. Perhaps not surprisingly, the New Western History has an "origin story" that resonates with the inflections ofwhat some have called our postmodern condition. It may be the only "new school" yet conceived that managed to launch itself inadvertently, came into being through a questioning of its own existence, and that is obliged to consider itself the product in no small part of an academic media event. In the fall of 1989, Patricia Limerick was uncertain about the title she had chosen for an neh symposium soon to be held in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Should it be "Trails: Toward a New Western History"; or rather, should they delete the "Toward" and thereby proclaim the existence of the fledgling school? Limerick wrote to participants to solicit their views, and received a response that in turn inquired "what the New Western History might be." When the conference was convened, Limerick distributed her answer, a brief statement entitled "What on Earth Is the New Western History? (Not a Manifesto)." Though insisting that she had no intention of founding or naming a school, Limerick concedes that something "quite understandable" occurred when several conference speakers referred to the "new western history" in their presentations , and when reporters drew on the "not a manifesto" statement to announce the formation of a new academic movement. Articles in the Washington Post and the Arizona Republic, she recalls, "started offan improbable rush of media coverage. A variety of news organizations Arizona Quarterly Volume 53, Number 2, Summer 1997 Copyright © 1997 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004-1610 Jerome Frisk and Forrest G. Robinson picked up the story," and soon "the New Western History had come to exist."1 As the news from Santa Fe spread, this behind-the-scenes account of improbable beginnings was not, to be sure, part of the story. The "newness " ofthe New Western History provided the lead and focus ofattention . The mythic iconography of the West was being challenged and "nobody had ever done this before"; critical histories of colonial conquest and environmental plunder were being written "for the first time." It has since become evident that such initial proclamations were not mere journalistic hyperbole. For it is above all else their claim to originality that separates the New Western Historians from those who have gone before them, and it is the bold newness of the revisionist narrative that holds the attention of contemporary workers in the field. There can be no doubt about it: the New Western History now dominates the center foreground of regional studies. And to the considerable extent that the West is viewed as a mirror of larger American realities, the revisionist narrative has implications that exceed regional boundaries. It is our principal task in this volume to assess the contributions of the New Western History. First, however, it will be useful by way of introduction to identify the revisionists, and to set out the main elements ofthe story they have to tell. By most accounts, the leading proponents of the New Western History—sometimes referred to as "the Gang of Four"—are William Cronon, Patricia Nelson Limerick, Richard White, and Donald Worster. Other names frequently appear in association with the "school," among them Brian W. Dippie, Peggy Pascoe, Elliott West, and Michael P. Malone. Numerous other regional scholars and writers of the post-Vietnam era, virtually all of them concerned with questions ofrace, class, gender, and the environment, are often cited by the leaders of the movement, and may be thought of as contributing or lower-case new western historians. In the essays that follow, the phrase "New Western Historians" will refer principally to Cronon, Limerick, White, and Worster. Of course, as topics vary from chapter to chapter, different members of the Gang of Four will be drawn into the foreground . Richard White is prominent in discussions of Native Americans , for example, while...