The Essential West
Collected Essays
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5703633 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jon T Coleman (University of Notre Dame, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2013 |
| Volume | 100 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 855-856 |
| Publication date | 2013-12-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of American History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/jahist/jat362 |
| OpenAlex | W1984909316 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
One of the joys of trailing Elliot West through this collection of essays comes from watching him follow his druthers. Since the 1970s he has displayed a knack for jumping trends. He has written new social histories of mining camps and frontier childhood, new environmental histories of grasslands and gold rushes, and new western histories of Native Americans and frontier myths. Most recently, he has asked American historians to reconsider Reconstruction as a national project that encompassed the West and the South. These meanderings have earned West considerable applause. Like Bruce Springsteen, he has occupied the future of his profession into his AARP years. The Essential West offers a glimpse into the mentality that led him to stray into so many fields. In the essays, West repeatedly opts for angles over head-on collisions. Take, for instance, his relationship with “the new western history” (his quotation marks). The burst of creative energy set off in the 1980s by the likes of Patricia Nelson Limerick, Richard White, Donald Worster, and William Cronon obviously stoked West as well. He is a kind of regionalist, viewing the American West as a distinctive place. He asks questions about the West that can only be answered through interpretations that include race, class, gender, and the environment. Yet he fits in “the new western history” like a tall man in high-water pants: parts of him jut out. He refuses to drop the concept of the frontier, and he veers toward old-school topics, exemplified by the pieces in this volume on the telegraph and Jesse James. Several of the essays deal with the prehistory of the region. The place, he argues, was many things to many people before it became America's West
American west · Archaeology · Art history · Ethnology · Frontier · Gold rush · Mythology · White (mutation · American Environmental and Regional History · Classics · History
| Citations per year | 0.55 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2015 - 2020 (6) |
| Highly cited | No |