The American West Reprised, Revised, and Revived

Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher. The American West: A New Interpretive History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. 576 pp. Illustrations and index. $40.00 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

One measure of the vitality of a field is the quality and quantity of new textbooks. Judged by that standard, the history of the American West is very healthy indeed. Not too long ago, of course, that was not a typical diagnosis. To many in the field and to most outside it, western or frontier American history seemed in a sickly and declining state. But in the decade since the word "new" came to be commonly attached to works in western history, the field has enjoyed a scholarly renaissance. During the 1990s, three hefty texts have appeared that have attempted to survey and synthesize this outpouring of innovative research. First, in 1991, came Richard White's "It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own": A New History of the American West. Three years later, The Oxford History of the American West, edited by Clyde Milner, Carol O'Connor, and Martha Sandweiss, was published. And now, at decade and century's end, Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher have collaborated on The American West: A New Interpretive History, an extensively revised edition of Hine's earlier text, which carried the same title, minus the "new." Together these three volumes, which have much in common, highlight the perspectives and findings that have made western history so vibrant of late. More instructive, though, are the differences between texts, for these reveal points of contention that will shape the study and teaching of western history into the next decade and the next century. At stake are the geographic and chronological boundaries of western history, as well as its significance in American history.

It was in the last decade of the last century that western history first announced its significance in American history. According to Frederick Jackson Turner, the westward expansion of the United States explained not only western, but all of American development. In Turner's vision, the recurring processes that characterized the settlement of successive and shifting frontiers held the key to understanding the origins of the nation's democracy, the character of its people, and the path of its progress.

For a few decades in the early twentieth century, Turner's thesis reigned, and its broad acceptance lent considerable intellectual currency to the study of America's various western frontiers. Mounting criticism, however, discredited much of Turner's argument and the frontier's influence over the academic writing and college teaching of American history steadily waned. In the second half of the twentieth century, that disfavor grew more widespread. To be sure, many western historians clung to Turner's tenets, lest their field be deprived of its claims to significance. Try as they did to reprise the frontier thesis, these persistent Turnerians could not do much to revive western history.

The articulation of a new western history, one professing independence from Turner and his frontier thesis, stimulated a most surprising recovery. In its simplest guise, the "overturnering" merely inverted the story of frontier progress. What Turner and his disciples conceived as the triumphs of civilization over savagery, as explanations of how America's wests were won, gave way to tales of paradise lost, of edenic Indian worlds conquered, and pristine landscapes corrupted. In more sophisticated tellings, new western histories moved beyond the rejection of Turner and triumphalism to incorporate previously overlooked peoples and previously understudied periods. In contrast to Turner's parade of white men, new scholarship proceeded from the overdue recognition that the western half of the United States has long been home to an unmatched diversity of ethnic groups and to women as well as men. Departing too from Turner's assumption that the supposed closing of the frontier in 1890 marked the end of western history, new scholarship stressed the significance of the American West in...