Paricia Nelson Limerick's "Not a Manifesto"

The following document is just what it says it is and reprinted here for educational purposes only with the express permission of the author. Read and study it and compare it with Stegner's statement of personal beliefs. Be ready to discuss both of them in class along with your own statement.



What on Earth Is the New Western History?

(Not a Manifesto, but One Person’s Convictions)

New Western Historians define “the West” primarily as a place—the Trans-Mississippi region in the broadest terms, or the region west of the 100th meridian. The boundaries are fuzzy, because nearly all regional boundaries are.
New Western Historians do see a “process” at work in this region’s history, a process that has affected other parts of the nation as well as other parts of the planet. But they reject the old term for the process, “frontier.” When clearly and precisely defined, the term “frontier” is nationalistic and often racist (in essence, the area where white people get scarce); when cleared of its ethnocentrism, the term loses an exact definition.
To characterize the process that shapes the region, New Western Historians have available a variety of terms: invasion, conquest, colonization, exploitation, development, expansion of the world market. In the broadest picture, the process involves the convergence of diverse people—women as well as men, Indians, Europeans, Latin Americans, Asians, Afro-Americans—in the region, and their encounters with each other and with the natural environment.
New Western Historians reject the notion of a clear-cut “end to the frontier” in 1890, or any other year. The story of the region’s sometimes contested, sometimes cooperative relations among its diverse cast of characters, and the story of human efforts to “master” nature in the region, are both ongoing stories, with their continuity unnecessarily ruptured by attempts to divide the “old West” from the “New West.”
New Western Historians break free of the old model of “progress” and “improvement,” and face up to the possibility that some roads of “Western development led directly to failure and to injury. This reappraisal is not meant to make white Americans “look bad”; the intention is, on the contrary, simply to make it clear that in Western American history, heroism and villainy, virtue and vice, nobility and shoddiness appear in roughly the same proportions as they appear in any other subject of human history (and with the same relativity of definition and judgment). This is only disillusioning to those who have come to depend on illusions.
New Western Historians surrender the conventional, never-very-convincing claim of an omniscient, neutral objectivity. While making every effort to acknowledge and understand different points of view, New Western Historians admit that it is OK for scholars to care about their subjects, both in the pas t and the present, and to put that concern on record.

Patricia Nelson Limerick
August 17, 1989