Searching the Shadows

If you’ll forgive a mild jeremiad and some family history, I’d like to revisit the old West. No, not the “Old West” with capital “O,” with gunfights and “Indian scrapes,” but a different old West disappearing in the shadows of cultural drift. The old West I’d like to revisit is the dimming past of Populism and progressivism. That particular old West has not escaped historians’ notice. Interest, however, has waned as attention to colonialism has waxed. New flowers bloom, old ones wither. That’s how history works. Nevertheless, the momentum of scholarship can lead to a kind of reductionism. At times, historians portray the West’s political history as a perpetual chain of reaction. Let’s consider two examples: Greg Grandin’s The End of Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America (2019) and Heather Cox Richardson’s How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the...

Archaeology · Colonialism · Democracy · Economic history · Frontier · Oligarchy · Political science · Politics · Populism · Progressivism · Scholarship · Sociology · American History and Culture · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society