|
|
 |
|
|
|
Teaching the New Western History
|
|
| |
by Tim Lehman
Rocky Mountain College
Billings, Montana
|
|
| | Beyond the "End of the Frontier"
As a western historian living in Montana, I am often bemused when I read that western history (or frontier history, the difference is not always clear) ended with the turn of the last century. Perhaps I should tell my neighbors -- the other 100,000 residents of Billings -- that our region ceased to have an independent identity in 1890, the year the federal government declared the end of the frontier.
But what am I to do with the cowboys (yes, working ranch hands) and Indians (yes, the ones who did not vanish) who populate my classes? I can take my classes to the Little Bighorn Battlefield, less than an hour's drive away, for a discussion of an event that they know about from their history text and from listening to their grandparents' stories. Because of these stories, they know that the battle was more complicated, and more interesting, than the cursory textbook treatment. If they are Crow, they know that their ancestors may have fought alongside Custer, while if they are Northern Cheyenne or Lakota, they know that their ancestors fought against Custer.
Yet for both groups, the Custer name still resonates with meaning that has not dulled with time. The complexity grows when we discuss the history of this region since the Indian Wars. Judging from many textbooks, nothing of national importance has happened here since the nineteenth century. Somehow the complexity that surrounds our daily realities in the West rarely makes it into our history classes.
Rethinking the American History Course
Restoring the complexity that allows all sorts of westerners to find themselves in our regional and national history requires some rethinking of how we teach the AP United States History course. Fortunately, western history is not what it used to be. Not too long ago, according to historian Patricia Limerick, western history was like a stock character in the movies. Uncertain of who his parents were, he (the West was almost always masculine) suffered from identity confusion, rejected authority, lived hard and fast, experienced colorful moments of sheer joy along with tragic moments of great pain, and died young. Just so, the West makes its tenuous appearance in most textbooks as part of pre-Columbian Indian societies and features briefly in the story of Coronado and the Spanish conquest of New Mexico and California.
When "the West" appears again, it is a thousand miles or more to the east as part of the trans-Appalachia or the trans-Mississippi frontier. Here it is full of color and vigor, heroes and villains. Western expansion, Indian Removal, and Manifest Destiny receive full treatment in the national narrative of most textbooks. But like any stock character, the West can take center stage only for a moment, and then only to highlight the increasing sectional tension between North and South, the main characters in the drama. After the Civil War, the West plays another small role as transcontinental railroads bring inevitable progress into the region, ranchers and farmers conquer the harsh and forbidding land, and Indians fade nobly into the background. If the West survives into the twentieth century, it is as a ghostly afterlife in the movies, more mythical than real, but like any belief in afterlife, not a myth easily trifled with.
To bring the complexity of the contemporary West into the historical picture requires us to extend the life and tease out the richness of the character of the West in the national drama. A generation of "new western historians" has been doing exactly that. In general, these historians reject the definition of the frontier adapted from Frederick Jackson Turner's thesis (summarized as "the place where white people get scarce") as excessively Eurocentric and chauvinistic. A good place to start is with Patricia Nelson Limerick's synthesis of the new western history, Legacy of Conquest, or with her more recent collection of essays, Something in the Soil. In both books she argues for understanding the West as a multicultural place, not a white-dominated frontier process, and for the continuity of western distinctiveness into the present.
Critics charge that Limerick and her colleagues are excessively negative in their revisionism, replacing the democratic frontier with brutal conquest, the control of nature with ruthless exploitation, the American hero with "dead white men," and the story of success with one of relentless failure. It is, they say, the politically correct fare of race, class, and gender analysis applied to the West, with a dash of environmentalism added. Whatever one thinks of Limerick's interpretations, her skill as a writer makes the ideas of new western historians accessible to all. My students concur with this view of her readability, even if they reject her interpretations.
Teachers, although perhaps not AP students, can turn to several, more nuanced versions of this newer western history. An excellent analytical summary of recent research, which does not use the word "frontier" in its 600-plus pages, is Richard White's It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A New History of the American West. White describes the region as "a product of the conquest and of the mixing of diverse groups of peoples." The West, according to White, is also important as "the kindergarten of the American state," that is, the region where the federal government exerted its power earliest and most completely. White notes, for instance, the continuity of the Army presence in nineteenth-century Indian wars and the economic development associated with the growth of the military-industrial complex in the cold war West. Another useful synthesis of newer interpretations is The American West: A New Interpretive History, co-authored by John Mack Faragher and Robert Hine. Full of engaging stories, vivid characters, and eye-catching analysis, this is a good source for lecture notes and research projects.
Multimedia Teaching Resources
The influence of these interpretations is evident in many Web sites that are accessible for classroom use. Ken Burns, along with the Public Broadcasting Service, has produced a fine eight-part documentary titled "The West" that combines Burns' creative approach with stories told not only from the points of view of white males but also from female, Native American, and Chinese perspectives. The result creates a feeling of tragedy more than triumph, of loss more than gain. Portions of this documentary, accompanied by the excellent companion Web site with documents, time lines, and lesson plans, tell a powerful story and can spark lively discussion:
 PBS: New Perspectives on the West
The Library of Congress sponsors several sites in its American Memory series that vividly demonstrate the complexity of the West. These sites include both photos and documents and are accompanied by a page for teachers that suggests questions, projects, and other classroom uses.
Rivers, Edens, Empires: Lewis and Clark and the Revealing of America
"California as I Saw It": First-Person Narratives of California's Early Years, 1849-1900
History of the American West, 1860-1920
Edward S. Curtis's "The North American Indian"
Ansel Adams's Photographs of Japanese American Internment at Manzanar
In addition to these historical sources, film and fiction have long been important interpreters of the American West. In fact, watching these media can clarify conflicting historical interpretations better than reading historical texts. Pairing selections from a classic western with a recent western can lead to a lively classroom discussion. I have used Stagecoach and Fort Apache, but anything starring John Wayne and directed by John Ford will do. Recent "revisionist" westerns that have worked well with my students include Little Big Man, which provides a great entry into discussing how the Vietnam War influenced historical interpretations of Custer; Dances with Wolves, which inverts the Indian/Army dualism so thoroughly that most people in the audience are cheering for the Indians when the cavalry arrives; and Smoke Signals, a delightfully whimsical view of modern reservation life. This last movie is adapted from Sherman Alexie's collection of short stories titled The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven. Alexie is not a historian, and his name may never appear on the AP U.S. History Exam, but these short stories are powerful and informative windows into the twentieth-century Indian experience. Another fictional version of modern reservation life, although a much bleaker version, is Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, a story of an Indian veteran struggling to come to terms with the contradictory demands of his Indian and white societies.
A New View of the West
What emerges from these and other sources is a new view of the West that necessarily alters our view of the nation. From the time of Coronado and the Spanish conquest, the West has been a place of the clash of cultures. And since the Pueblo revolt, it has been a place of resistance to mainstream culture. This multiculturalism has persisted through the centuries and includes the Chinese Exclusion Act, Indian reservations, and the internment of Japanese Americans. Coming to terms with a West full of Indian reservations and Chinatowns might mean that we rethink race relations as not only black and white but also as a spectrum of varied cultures that either cannot or will not assimilate. The persistence of large public landholdings and the dominance of military spending in western economies means that federal power is at least as important a theme in the national narrative as individual initiative. And the postwar migration to the Sunbelt, combined with immigration from not Europe but Asia and Latin America, means that the population center of the nation is increasingly in the West.
Viewed from this vantage point, the western past is both more complex and more important to the nation's history than textbooks usually allow. This historical richness helps my students, and I hope yours, to appreciate the presence of the past in their complicated present experiences.
References
John Mack Faragher and Robert Hine, The American West: A New Interpretive History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001.
Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. New York: W.W. Norton, 1987.
Patricia Nelson Limerick, Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001.
Richard White, It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A New History of the American West. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993.
Tim Lehman (Ph.D., University of North Carolina) is a professor of history and political science at Rocky Mountain College in Billings, Montana, and is author of Public Values, Private Lands. A longtime reviewer and contributor to AP Central, he also taught U.S. history for six years at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics in Durham.
|
|
|
|
|
|
