Post #4, for the week of 26 September

Post #4, Comments on Calloway (for 26 Sept seminar)

I commented on Dan's site and on Ben's site .

Astounded and relieved, I must admit that I truly enjoyed Calloway’s One Vast Winter Count. Having toiled through several other books on similar topics, I was braced for a disagreeable read. Quite to the contrary, however, I found myself poring instead of skimming. My page rate slowed significantly as I neared the end of the first chapter, as the realization dawned on me that I was guilty of what Calloway warned against in the introduction, a Eurocentric view.

I was expecting a breezy treatment of the pre-history of the early inhabitants of what would become North America, and then the meat of the tale developing only upon the arrival of the white man. Much to my surprise, Calloway stated in the first few pages that he was taken aback at the publisher’s request to start the tale at the late date of 1500! I was impressed by the detail the author was able to present in support of the likely history in the centuries before the Europeans arrived, a feat I thought impossible due to the limitations imposed by my thinking. My Eurocentric expectations led me to assume that only the slimmest conjecture could present the tale of events before the “official recordkeepers” arrived on the scene. I thought this revelation was one of the two highlights of the book.

The other was the recounting of the consequences of the arrival of the horse in North America. I think prior to this book, I was able to conceive of the profound effect of this introduction only on the individual level. What Calloway laid out for me was a more complete story of the life changes brought about on the scale of the tribe, the nation and the ensuing regional conflicts and redefinitions that followed. With my new understanding of these second and third order effects, I am challenged to find analogous introductions -- the train, the car, electrification, hydroelectric power, powered flight – that incurred a transformational vice evolutionary chage.

I was at Jamestown settlement this weekend, and reviewed the familiar story of the interactions of the English and the Powhattans through a new lens. With the richness of Calloway’s descriptions of task sharing fresh in my mind, I contemplated the Powhattans watching the English starve during the first few years, and found myself rooting against the English. Imagine, a sizable portion of the colony were “gentlemen” who were exempt from work. Even more ludicrous, think about the inanity of growing tobacco for profit instead of corn for survival, and then begging from the Powhattans to make it through the winter. The English settlers were so poorly prepared that I came to feel they did not deserve to survive. But they did. The Powhattans were so perfectly prepared that they did not deserve to lose everything, but in the end, they did. As Calloway chronicled the consequences, intended and otherwise, of interactions in the American West, I shall adopt a similar method of viewing the material the rest of the semester.

Sweet, that worked. Let's try another...

I also commented on Dave's site .

What I read tonight

Ok, here's a leap of faith.

I commented on another site Kent's Place . If that works, I'm ready for the Fortran class (finally)

Post #3, Comments on Turner (for 19 Sept seminar)


Reading Turner’s The Significance of the Frontier in American History brings to the fore portions of the discussion from last week’s seminar, specifically the dichotomous approaches of either building upon what came before or tearing down and starting anew. Our comments on Limerick last week seem to place that author squarely in the latter camp, while Hine and the bulk of reviews sympathetic to Turner that I’ve read on JSTOR this week tend toward the former.

I picture this relationship as a sine wave, naturally occurring and welcome. Turner’s speech at the AHA meeting in Chicago established a new postulation for American Historians to explore. His speech in 1893 marked the beginning of the wave and gave it an upward vector, encouraging (perhaps challenging) kindred spirits to flesh out this audacious discourse relating the frontier to the essence of American character, and postulating on the concept of coterminous geographic, thematic and temporal boundaries. This field of endeavor proved fruitful as generations of historians strove to build upon the foundation laid by Turner.

As the corpus limned by his speech reached a more complete state, however, so began a period distinguished by challenges to Turner’s assertions. This transition marks the apex of my metaphorical sine wave, and began the figurative and literal downhill careen. A fine line separates the characteristics of positive and negative critique, and the next break point on the sine wave occurs at the midpoint of this freefall, when those who offer differing viewpoints to more richly develop the discussion become the minority to those who offer alternatives primarily to discredit the basic argument. To my way of thinking, Limerick and many of the “New Western Historians” inhabit this portion of the curve.

While this negative slope, and negative characterization by me, tends to infer the contrary, this portion of the curve may be the most vital. In essence, a new idea on the ascendancy may be spared intense scrutiny, and refinement during the early decline may not test the mettle of the core statement. Near the nadir, however, scathing critique and diametrically opposed alternatives perform the unique service of trial by fire. A decision point has been reached; will the original proposal continue its descending course and slide off the bottom of the graph into the waste heap of bad ideas, or will it survive the challenge and emerge stronger for it?

Call me a romantic, but I believe that Turner’s frontier thesis has attained a new lease on life by virtue of a more liberal interpretation, and an acknowledgement of influence of the times during which he wrote. His repeated acknowledgement of the limitations inherent in the speech -- such as the elastic definition of “frontier,” the incomplete treatment of pre-existing cultures in the West, and his statement “this paper will make no attempt to treat the subject exhaustively, its aim is simply to call attention to the frontier as a fertile field for investigation, and to suggest some of the problems which arise in connection with it” – serve to diffuse the demand for thorough and literal treatment of the topic made by his critics. In short, renewed positive critique of Turner’s thesis is an idea whose time has come.

Last week's post, but now in the correct place

Post #2, Comments on Hine and Limerick (for 12 Sept seminar) by Dazed and Confused

This week’s readings, Robert Hine’s The American West: a New Interpretive History (hereafter referred to as West) and Patricia Limerick’s The Legacy of Conquest: the Unbroken Past of the American West (Legacy) offer two very different views of expansion in the American West. I thoroughly enjoyed West, especially the author’s treatment of the temporal qualities of the “frontier.” I had previously limited my cogitation on the topic to those who followed in the footsteps of Lewis and Clark. Mine was essentially a conception bounded by expansion and “fleshing out” of the territory bounded by the eastern and western terminals of that Jeffersonian-era adventure—a limitation dissolved by this book. I now frame the discussion of the “American frontier” in terms of all activities between the European incursions (and significantly, from all four compass points now that I more fully consider the Russian, Spanish, and French efforts that accompanied the more prosaic English colonization) and the advent of the Microsoft and Intel primacy of Left-Coast re-invention. More on West in seminar.

Reading Legacy, however, had an entirely different effect on me. While I enjoyed many of the presentations of material previously unfamiliar to me, and I thought she generally advanced well-reasoned arguments, I must admit that I was taken aback by her use of sarcasm, flippant remarks, and assumption of kinship with her reader. I realize that if she had taken the time to substantiate each of the arguments referred to above, presenting the facts as more of a discussion and less as a summary of judgment, I would have been mollified but Legacy would be half again its 350 pages. Still, I would offer that the effort expended in leading the reader to an allied viewpoint vice presenting a fait accompli would have been worthwhile.

For instance, throughout my reading of Legacy I worried a thread that I had tugged on while reading the introduction, and that nagging thought colored every subsequent encounter with the writing style mentioned in the paragraph above. Limerick’s discussion of an attempt by Frederick Jackson Turner, in his 1893 address “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (as quoted in Legacy p.20-21), to neatly bundle up the opening chapter of American History with the closing of the frontier evident in the census of 1890, put me on my guard for the rest of the book. I took Turner’s conclusion “And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history” much less rigidly than Limerick did. In short, I saw Turner’s statement as an attempt to apply conceptual bounds to a period, not necessarily impermeable, fixed walls to delineate a crisp, clear distinction to all that came before and all that followed – a handle to allow me to lift the bulk of the period and peer around and underneath. Limerick, on the other hand, states that Turner’s assertion of the end of a period was wrongheaded in that many of the characteristics of the frontier that Turner announce terminated in 1893 were to be found in the later mineral, oil and nuclear rushes of the following century.

While I see Limerick’s point, and appreciate the supporting argument by Howard Lamar she quotes (p.21), I feel she helps to defeat her argument by asserting that, unlike the periods of the American Revolution and the American Civil War, which each had a war to serve as an ending marker, the American period of western expansion was essentially different in that its boundaries were amorphous where the others were rigid. To draw support for her assertion, she offers the ending point of 1865 as a comparison to 1890, and it is that comparison that I challenge. If Turner’s argument fails for inability to include the later rushes, would not Limerick’s argument also fail for not including the de facto nullification of the 14th and 15th Amendments during the continuation of Southern resistance to Reconstruction, the white-supremacist Jim Crow era and violent oppression of the Civil Rights movement? These surely are characteristics clearly analogous to the state of affairs pre-1865.

It seems that history is a fluid and multi-dimensional field, and as such abhors clearly defined boundaries. I believe that Turner’s statement at the conclusion of the address quoted above, however, is, by virtue of the nature of the discipline, at best a sieve. Like any other conceptual boundary, his demarcation of 1890 and was intended to be used as such; Turner, I think, would be more interested in what oozed out than what securely remained. For Limerick to offer 1865 in juxtaposition, failing as it does the same tests she applied to Turner’s statement, left this reader questioning the rest of Legacy and reluctant to extend the benefit of the doubt.

Trial run

Does anyone know what "be sure to enable RSS feed" means? I can't find anything on this site that says RSS. Have I already failed Hist 616?