A Legacy Of Conquest: The Unbroken Past Of The American West
Despite all this attention there is no clear consensus on what exactly the New Western History is. The assessments can be broken down into three categories; those that claim the New Western History is a new and valuable approach, those that believe it is simply a recasting of the revisionist work of the past two decades, and those that are harshly critical of it. Patricia Limerick, who by dint of her commanding personality and prolific writings on the subject has become the primary spokesperson for the New Western History, was asked to define the approach for a symposium in 1989; in response she wrote a single-page summary that "had a prosperous career in copying machines" over the following year as it spread outward from the symposium attendees. Her definition was based on the concept of the West as place, generally the area west of the hundredth meridian. (20) Unlike Turner, however, the New Western Historians did not accept the idea that the "frontier" ended in 1893, or "any other year." Instead of the single process that Turner identified with the frontier, they speak in broader terms about the processes of invasion, conquest, colonization, exploitation, and development as shaping the West, which necessarily eliminates the "progress" narrative that Turnerians developed to explain the impact of the West on America. It is important, Limerick noted, to "face up to the possibility that some roads of western development led directly to failure and to injury," and to admit the Western myth is in fact myth-- that heroism and villainy were just as prevalent in the West as anyplace else in America. Finally, she wrote, New Western Historians must "surrender the claim of an omniscient, neutral objectivity" and "admit that it is OK for scholars to care about their subjects, both in the past and the present." (21) The New Western History, to Limerick, is not "a set of principles to which all members must swear allegiance" but rather "a movement to allow westerners to take...
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