From the Inside Out: Rewriting Regional History

Regional history has been enjoying a resurgence lately. In western history the combined forces of environmental history and ethnic history have produced the perspective we call The New Western History. Environmental history directs attention to areas that share similar physical geographies, while the presence of large racial ethnic populations in specific locations—Mexican Americans in the Southwest, Asian Americans on the West Coast, for example—has also served to encourage a regional approach. In fact, in the hands of some historians, these two perspectives define a methodology. Patty Limerick, for example, speaks of her hope "for a regionalism in which environmental history provide[s] a foundation for an interwoven ethnic history." ¹ So far, however, few have considered regional history from a gendered perspective. In my ongoing work, I focus on gender systems and racial ethnic difference within a regional framework, and on making those insights more central than they now are to "mainstream" history.² First, however, we need to be clear about what we mean by region.

Region turns out to be one of those words whose meaning everyone knows until they actually have to define it. Let's take the Northwest as an example of region. According to Joel Garreau's The Nine Nations of North America, the Pacific Northwest is defined by the coastal strip he calls Ecotopia (after the popular 1975 environmental novel by Ernest Callenbach).³ This wet coastal strip is so different from the rest of the arid West that the editors of the recently published Atlas of the New West refused to include it.⁴ But if Las Vegas, Denver, and Jackson Hole are included in the New West, what is the Seattle of Microsoft, Boeing, and Starbucks? Newer than New? Further West than West (to use a phrase from Portland's Ursula Le Guin)?⁵ Floating off into Pacific Rimland?

Speculations aside, there are prosaic, commonly accepted political borders to the Pacific Northwest, which is understood to encompass the states of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. A few people want to include a bit of western Montana as well. Thus defined, this region consists of a narrow coastal urbanized strip where most of the population lives, and a much larger transmountain arid hinterland, sparsely populated and devoted to agriculture, mining, and lumbering. Garreau rather meanly calls this interior The Empty Quarter; a recent guidebook more kindly calls it "The Great Outdoors." As this contrast indicates, the Pacific Northwest has enough internal physical differences to beg the question of regional homogeneity.

Even when it is possible to agree on regional boundaries, further problems arise with the term. Historians owe the particular usage of the term regionalism to Frederick Jackson Turner, and like Turner's more famous theory, the frontier thesis, the legacy is ambiguous. Following Turner's commanding lead, subsequent historians used the concept of region both confidently and sloppily, assuming that some thing or things in the region bound people together in ways that superseded cultural and racial boundaries. This assumption of general regional commonalities, while recognizing differences between regions, ignored conflicts and differences within regions. In effect, then, regional historians wrote only the history of the dominant cultural group and not that of subordinate ones, ignoring class, race, gender, and other differences.⁶

Today's New Western History, to a greater extent than has been realized, is based on a new definition of region. Donald Worster offered this succinct definition:

The history of the region is first and foremost one of an evolving human ecology. A region emerges as people try to make a living from a particular part of the earth, as they adapt themselves to its limits and possibilities. What the regional historian should first want to know is how a people or peoples acquired a place and, then, how they perceived and tried to make use of it." ⁷

Similarly, Limerick puts a somewhat less environmental and slightly more cultural twist on the same basic notion: "Western history has been an ongoing competition for legitimacy—for the right to claim for oneself and sometimes for one's group the status of legitimate beneficiary of Western...