lottareading

Post #14, Comments on “Devil’s Bargains”

2005-12-04T19:11:00.000-08:00

Post #14, Comments on “Devil’s Bargains” (for 5 Dec seminar)

I also commented on Carrie’s site and Dan's site .

Just flew in from Germany, and boy are my…oh, you’ve heard that one? Well, it is 4am on my biological clock, so it seemed like a humorous blog opening.

I finished up Devil’s Bargains on the flight back tonight, and I’m sorry to say that I’m unimpressed. I agree with the bulk of this week’s blog comments (too long, excessively ornate word selections, no real thesis, repetitive, etc.) so I’ll just comment on what I liked about the book.

Rothman’s statement (receiving the “duh” award from Dan) is that the initial development of a tourist destination is soon taken over by “outsiders” who push the locals aside, fabricate a reality to support the myth, and essentially sell visitors a bill of goods in the guise of an authentic experience. The interesting statement was that the locals “always” end up the worse for the bargain. I disagree, but I’m alright with that. I think he did a good job of illustrating just how the locals, at least in the cases he chose to discuss, ended up trapped in dead-end jobs, living in an altered town and subject to the decisions of outsiders.

I disagree because I can offer examples where the results were less dire, even possibly—dare I say (gasp)—positive? But I’m way too tired to type it up now, it’ll keep for tomorrow night’s session.

Post #13, Comments on “Cadillac Desert”

2005-11-27T20:44:00.000-08:00

Post #13, Comments on “Cadillac Desert” (for 27 Nov seminar)

I also commented on Jim's site and Dan's site .

This book wins my vote for the biggest surprise of the semester. I was fully expecting to be crushed by the deadly triumvirate: a belly full of turkey, a 514-page snoozer, and whiny enviro-twaddle about the sad fate of the three-toed wart less salamander. By the end of the week I fully expected to be found in a corner with bloodshot eyes and a pallid complexion, whimpering “please, please, just let me read some history…that’s all I ever wanted.”

Fortunately, for all of us as I am leading the discussion this week, I sit here hale, hearty and refreshed, eager to dive into the discussion tomorrow night. In short, I liked the book. I found some sections fascinating (especially the sagas of the early explorers, feats of engineering derring-do, bankers with pistols, and incredible tales of hubris). I was entertained by most of the book (two excellent dam-meltdowns) and even disposed to yield grudging admiration for the parts that featured more detail than I would have liked. In short, Reisner’s writing style made the dry section palatable and the good parts great.

There is no doubt that the book is thoroughly researched using primary and secondary sources. I am usually suspect of gratuitous use of numbers as a symptom of 1980’s fetish for quantifiable history (as in reviews that praised books for thorough charts and tables in the appendix without establishing a need fulfilled or value added by the inclusion in clarifying the information or informing the reader), but was impressed by Reisner’s ability to help a reader grasp the immense scale described by the numbers. Some of my favorites explained that as late as the 1930’s over 70% of the Northwest’s three million people were without electricity (p. 161, bottom), or that the storm surge flow of the Missouri river as sufficient to supply New York City for 70 years (p. 189, bottom). I may not be able to picture water flow of 892,000 cubic feet per second, but I’ve lived in New York and now better understand how much water can flow through the Missouri River.

But the book isn’t just about rivers and dams. It is also about people and organizations. Reisner began with the missions of the Bureau of Reclamation and the Corps of Engineers—the former to enable irrigation agriculture, the latter to control flood damage—and graphically depicted the wheels coming off both carts over time due to a synergy of organizational momentum and individual failings.

Finally, I was tickled by three quotes that I used to reflect on the meaning of the 500 pages I read (and to assist in the digestion of the holiday feast):

“Water flows toward power and money.” (p. 307)

“Don’t bring the water to the people, let the people go to the water.” (p. 392)

“The people who support these boondoggle projects are always talking about the vision and principles that made this country great. ‘Our forefathers would have built these projects’ they say. ‘They had vision.’ That’s pure nonsense. It wasn’t the vision and principles of our forefathers that made this country great. It was the huge unused bonanza they found here.”

I’ll send the questions out via e-mail momentarily.

What I've learned about the Buffalo Soldiers

2005-11-20T18:57:00.000-08:00

Post #12, Continuing research re: Roy Baker (for 21 Nov seminar)

I also commented on Audrey's site and Dan's site .

I volunteered to conduct further research into the Buffalo Soldiers angle of the Roy Baker project. I was initially interested in the character of Briggs and how different his Army experience was than that of black regular soldiers serving in the West about that time. My interest was later piqued by a discussion Prof. Petrik led one evening that delved into the reason Pearl Raymond had said “Baker does not come to my house,” which led to the supposition that the Cheyenne brothels were racially segregated.

While I hadn’t even noticed that nuance in my readings of the transcript, reflection brought memories of previous study of the history of the Buffalo Soldiers in the Spanish American War and references to periods of service in the West. Were there two units at Fort D.A. Russell in 1890? Was the 17th Infantry Regiment (Baker’s unit) paired with a regiment of Buffalo Soldier cavalry (or even infantry)? If so, given the racial prejudices of the time I would not be surprised to learn that Kate’s (and other such Cheyenne brothels) was also mirrored by a brothel serving a black clientele. With a regiment of black soldiers at the fort, or even a few attached companies, there would be enough of a client base to make such an enterprise profitable.

Armed with these curiosities, I set out to see just which units were stationed at Fort D.A. Russell in the fall of 1890. I started with the U.S. Army “Post returns,” the official monthly reports to Washington listing units stationed at the post, strength of the units, officers assigned and a record of events. Dead end; the only unit reported at Fort Russell in 1890 was the 17th Infantry.

Knowing that the Army was highly segregated at the time, and allowing for the potential that even the records were separated, I then pulled the individual cavalry and infantry unit returns. Instead of searching all units, I limited my search to the four Buffalo Soldier Regiments as they were the only black units in the Army at the time (the volunteer black units of the Civil War were long since disbanded and the volunteer black units of the Spanish American War were not yet in existence).

A note of clarity here. In many of the webpages of Wyoming history we have read on the Roy Baker blog, the Buffalo Soldier units are named correctly but are universally listed as a new concept in 1890. All the websites read “in 1886, Congress formed four black regiments: the 9th and 10th Cavalry and the 24th and 25th Infantry. The 25th was the only unit that didn’t serve at Fort D.A. Russell.” Apparently one of the sources was deemed to be the authoritative repository of all things Wyoming and was trusted without verification by the authors of all the other websites. Here’s what actually happened, according to the Army Historian, the National Archives, and most of the academic writings I’ve found on the subject:

The Buffalo Soldiers, the first units of black soldiers in the regular Army, were authorized on July 28 1866. Six regiments were raised, four infantry and two cavalry. Three years later, the 38th, 39th, 40th and 41st Infantry regiments were reorganized with the former pair becoming the 24th and the latter the 25th. These units served in remote posts throughout the West and had their first experience with Army life east of the Mississippi in 1898 while transiting to Tampa, Florida enroute combat in Cuba during the Spanish American War.

Accustomed to living and fighting in close proximity to white troops while both prosecuted the Indian Campaigns between the end of the Civil War and just before the Spanish American War, the black troops were taken aback by the rampant racism and unfair treatment by both the locals in Tampa as well as their fellow soldiers. Buffalo Soldiers had served admirably in the West, several had even earned the Medal of Honor. Fortunately for the white troops who they saved in this nearly disastrous campaign, the Buffalo Soldiers performed superbly in Cuba as well—especially in comparison to the white volunteer units—and several earned the Medal of Honor in this war as well.

Back to Wyoming in 1890. Given the statements above of the favorable comparisons Buffalo Soldiers had drawn to their service in the West, I was anxious to find if any had been at D.A. Russell with Roy Baker. Alas, by pulling the official unit returns for the four units, I discovered that the 24th Infantry was in Arizona and New Mexico, as was the 10th Cavalry. The 25th Infantry has companies at Forts Shaw and Custer as well as in Missoula, Montana. The closest Buffalo Soldiers to Fort D.A. Russell during the time in question were members of the 9th Cavalry, with four companies each at Fort Washakie (roughly 100 miles west of the geographic center of Wyoming…Cheyenne is in the southeast corner of the state) and at Fort McKinney (near Buffalo, WY, about 300 miles from Cheyenne in the north, center of the state).

So, what have I learned? Since there were no units of the Buffalo Soldiers at Fort D.A. Russell for the nine months preceding the murder of Roy Baker, then Pearl’s place of employment did not count on black soldiers to stay in business. Unless Pearl’s drew white customers as well, that bordello was either quite small or there was a sizable black community in Cheyenne that is invisible in the documents we have been exposed to. Assuming that the mental picture we have developed, which features a predominately white town with a few blacks working in the bars and casinos, is more or less correct, then why would Parkinson include Pearl’s place in the rounds as he “searches” for Roy Baker and spills the tale of the pistols?

Post #11, Comments on Becoming Mexican American (for 14 Nov seminar)

2005-11-12T18:35:00.000-08:00

Post #11, Comments on Becoming Mexican American (for 14 Nov seminar)

I also commented on Dave's site .

This book offers an alternative to the traditional study of the immigrant experience in America. Instead of the traditional story of European immigrants arriving at Ellis Island and then settling in either the industrial Northeast or the agrarian Old Northwest, Sanchez challenges us to consider the story of Mexican immigrants entering the United States between 1900-1945, and their subsequent settling in Los Angeles. While this book does an impressive job explaining how religion, family, music, labor relations and education were integral parts of the immigrant experience, I was fascinated by the parallels between the book’s sections on assimilation and the current events in France.

If history is, at least in part, intended to explain how events helped shape life in the past as a way of helping us understand the same relationship today, this book served that purpose in spades. Sanchez offers “important alternative theoretical approaches such as internal colonialism, the process of barrioization, or the dual labor market theory to explain the constraints on assimiliation.” (p. 7) He also explains the cultural, governmental (both American and Mexican) and social brakes applied to the process, but asserts that despite all that, the process went on anyway. Once a person had arrived from Mexico, either directly or following a sojourn elsewhere in America, Sanchez contends that chances were good the person would either assimilate, return to Mexico, or (rarely) lodge in an enclave resisting either preceding alternative. It is that last category, the resistant enclave dweller, that gave me pause.

Drawing parallels to current events is never a precise or intrinsically fair process. Nevertheless, the current firestorm (literally and figuraitively) in France merits comparison. In the latter case, large numbers of obviously non-native peoples have settled in a strongly nationalistic (these people regulate unwanted additions to their language) state that has largely ignored their presence. (for a more detailed analysis, see Eugene Robinson’s column “Where France Failed” on the OpEd page of Saturday’s Washington Post) The immigrants in question have been awarded sustenance and shelter, but no offer of inclusion. Thus, without potential of ever becoming truly one of the whole, this group had chosen to remain apart, and thus allowed the seeds of bitterness, anger and radicalism to sprout.

Taking Sanchez’s portrait of similar process regarding Mexican Americans in comparison, he states “ironically, it was not the search for Mexican nationalism which engendered political radicalism for large numbers of Mexican and Mexican Americans in the 1930s, but the forging of a new identity as ethnic Americans.” (p. 12) While there were cases of violence, (Sanchez offers the Sleepy Lagoon murder, labor organization, and the Zoot Suit Riots as cases in counterpoint) the Mexican American experience was largely marked by frustration with bigotry and a large hiatus in progress as the Great Depression stalled the forward momentum, the Mexican American adjustment to life in Los Angeles was by and large an incremental process of small steps toward a larger goal. By Mexican Americans downplaying consequences of obvious differences, Sanchez believed that whites were “more apt to see Japanese and Chinese immigrants as “unassimiliable,” these reformers considered the Mexican immigrant as similar to the European in adaptability.” (p. 95)

While there are plenty of injustices yet to work out, Mexican Americans have largely succeeded in carving out a new ethnic identity. One of the slogans of the Mexican American Movement is illuminating: “Experience reveals that Equality, like its companion, Freedom, exists in four modes—
The equality which God gives,
The equality which the State gives,
The equality which a man wins for himself,
The equality which one bestows on another.”
By concentrating on the third, and allowing progress in that area to positively affect the others, Mexican Americans have succeeded in ways that continue to allude immigrants living in enclaves without any assimilation at all. Sanchez’s book is history done well, and has resonance in the present as well as the past.

Post #10, Comments on Print the Legend

2005-11-06T20:46:00.000-08:00

Post #10, Comments on Print the Legend (for 7 November seminar)

I also commented on Marty's site and Dan's site .

Print the Legend challenged me to dispense with my focused concept of “history worth reading,” and try something a bit different. To her credit, Martha Sandweiss was able to keep my attention through almost all of the 340-odd pages. Her blending of an overview of the history of photography in the West and a deeper discussion on the power of photography to influence impressions provided just enough historical content to offset the overabundance of technical photographic information.

I’ll start with what I didn’t like first. I believe the discussion on the shortcomings of daguerreotypes could have been consolidate to half its length…not quite as succinct as “there were damn few of them that had much impact, they were very small, they were on metal so adding language was difficult, and they could not be easily reproduced to meet a mass market,” but close.

I could have also done with a bit less on the panoramas. Got it, they were impressive in size and duration, they benefited from narration, they were much more popular than daguerreotypes, and they were much better suited to an iconographic or mythic portrayal of the West. Good, let’s move on.

So, what did I enjoy about Print the Legend? Once the author finished the descriptions of daguerreotypes and panoramas, and worked her way through the frustrations of the early expeditions that brought along wet plate photographic equipment, I noticed the pace and the relevance of the book pick up. I really enjoyed the recounting of the narrative breakthrough of photography…easily reproduced on paper, it seemed natural to add words… and the subsequent increase in popularity and relevance for the medium.

I also enjoyed the janus-faced argument about field of view. In the case of the photo of the Golden Spike, the Chinese were kept just out of view giving the illusion of a great technological triumph achieved by the white men pictured (p. 160). On the other side of the coin, the narrative accompanying a prosaic view of a canyon that states that a silver mine is just out of sight around the bend (p. 186).

I also enjoyed the discussions of reality. As Dave noted in his blog, the comparison of the stark daguerreotype image of Henry Clay Jr.’s grave (p. 36) and the accompanying portrait’s heroic depiction of his death (p. 37) speak at once to both the power (and limitations) of each medium, and to the changing tastes of the consuming public – the former was too foreboding and the latter was accepted as it spoke to the type myth that would be preferred to truth, probably the opposite today.

All in all, a great book that strove to blend several disciplines. While that blending was the source of my initial frustrations, I was able to set the extra art emphasis aside and truly enjoyed the history.

Post #9, Comments on Women and Gender in the American West (for 31 Oct seminar)

2005-10-30T20:44:00.000-08:00

Post #9, Comments on Women and Gender in the American West (for 31 Oct seminar)

I also commented on Audrey's site and Dan's site .

Once again I am faced with a book that challenges my limited understanding of the West. In the collected essays in Women and Gender in the American West, I read and re-read alternate approaches to looking at the same question differently. Perhaps we are asking the wrong question.

Instead of dwelling on who did what to whom and positing that that action is more important that the previous discussions, maybe historians could embrace the Rodney King statement “why can’t we all just get along?” Wouldn’t it be nice to read a book that acknowledges the importance of a holistic picture vice a dogmatically-driven soda straw view of the elephant?

Is there anything wrong with openly acknowledging that the environment, topography, weather, wildlife, domestic animals and the people – all the people: men, women, indigenous nations, invading Europeans, mixed-race neighbors from the North and the South, Africans brought to North America in literal bondage but now constrained by social bondage, Asians deciding if they will build a nest egg and return home or remain here, and on and on – are vital to the tale of the West? And most importantly, could we also come to grips with the statement that the same could be said of any other region in the world?

In short, I am in favor of additive, vice alternative, history.

Comments on Colony and Empire

2005-10-23T17:30:00.000-07:00

Post #8, Comments on Colony and Empire (for 24 Oct seminar)

I also commented on Audrey's site and Dan's site .

Much like last week’s collection of expanded lectures, Colony and Empire is an amalgam of related essays lashed together into a single volume. This approach significantly detracted from the readability of the entire work and watered down the useful sections with non-sequiturs and annoyingly stiff arguments.

The book’s thesis, that capitalism is the root cause of all western development, is at once both insipid and Machiavellian. It is about as far as one could possibly get from Turner, and it also strips any agency at all from the actors who are actually transforming the region. While I’m sure this Orwellian view of the world warms the cold, dark recesses of his Marxist heart, I believe that Robbins has lost sight of the goal. His assertion that capitalism, and capitalism alone is the answer might be palatable if delivered in an additive manner, as in “let’s all compare our wildly different views of the elephant to try to construct a composite image that is better than the individual parts.” Instead, the combative tone I detected in this work would best be paraphrased as “I’m right and you and the other historians are dim for not having seen it sooner.”

Even this abrasive tone would have not completely turned me off if the book itself did an adequate job in supporting the point. Alas, the third and final failing of this book is that it’s scattered structure and weak conclusions did not add up to a cogent, well-supported and convincing argument. I was confused by his hopping around geographically and topically, so maybe I didn’t try hard enough to ferret out the salient connections, but should it really be so hard?

Yes, global forces matter. Yes, those who control the capital get to make decisions that victimize those who lack the capital. Yes, the myth of western independence is just that, a myth. Is that all he wanted to hear? Will he go away now and never come back? Good.

Post #7, for the week of 17 October

2005-10-16T11:50:00.000-07:00

Post #7, Comments on The Way to the West (for 17 Oct seminar)

I also commented on Ricky's site and Dan's site .

This small book, a collection of expanded lectures from 1993, succeeds at telling a careworn tale in a unique way. Using an interdisciplinary approach, incorporating measures of history, anthropology, environmental studies and sociology, the author paints a picture of a limited section of the West – between the Platte and Cimarron in the years well before gold fever struck Colorado – that has received critical acclaim in academia by ethnologists and historians alike.

Central to the book is the assertion that it was human interaction in general, not just white settlers, which had a cumulative effect on the region. It is this thesis that interested me, and had the strongest representation in the first two chapters. I was fascinated by the discussion of repercussions from competing interests of settlers and Native Americans that had never previously entered my mind. If I had given thought to the interaction of Bison and horses, I had certainly never drilled down to discover a hidden competition for forage and water between the horses of the tribes and the teams of the settlers. The author’s assertion that this competition between the two categories of horses had an effect on Bison long before the commercial destruction of the latter was a new insight to a problem I had assumed I had an adequate understanding. This additive nature is, to me, a hallmark of a useful work.

I was also impressed by the sections dealing with the Great Peace of 1840, and by discussion of the changes to the Platte River Valley due to transient Oregon Trail travelers. I would have never associated a peace between nations as directly contributing to the demise of the Bison, but the author makes a compelling case for exactly that result. Prior to reading this book, I would have also assumed that the vast expanse of the area would have allowed for wagon ruts to be the only trace left by the settlers heading west. This book quickly disabused me of that notion as well, by presenting the reduction in firewood and forage in the river valley – commodities the Cheyenne relied on for winter survival – as a consequence of the passing of settlers.

Excellent read, I’m saddened that I will miss the discussion (I’ll be in Germany until Wed) this week.

Post #6, Comments on Roy Baker (for 11 Oct seminar)

2005-10-10T19:31:00.000-07:00

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

Someone is lying. Many are being less than truthful, either with intent to deceive, or by virtue of innocent mis-recollection. There is an uncanny preoccupation with precise timekeeping that is found throughout the testimony, and an equally ubiquitous predilection for malice. There are myriad small axes to grind, and, of course there is a murder.

The reading of the transcripts from the coroner’s inquest into the demise of Roy Baker offers an interesting reversal of the usual process. We are afforded the gist of the story, however veiled by the individual testimonies, without any context. Allusions to long-standing infighting, aborted desertion attempts, previous thefts, and identification of favorites by both the women of town and the men of the Fort prove a weak substitute for a working knowledge of the day to day activities and interrelationships between the two. Lacking that understanding, the cryptic nature of the allusions imbedded in the testimonies force a binary decision on the part of the reader. One can either dispassionately accept each assertion of fact at face value, or allow the suspect nature of the testimony – the incomplete tale, the imprecise recollection of time in contrast with more specific citations, the expectation that two individuals at the same brothel could not fail to notice each other, the decidedly personal reasons for not being completely forthcoming – to erase any chance of acceptance. What the reader is unable to reliably do, however, is perform as a “jury of your peers.”

Therein lies the rub of walking a mile in shoes that have sat dormant for over a century, and the challenge for the historian. Can any amount of research prepare me, or my contemporaries, to be a meaningful participant of an inquest into the murder of Roy Baker? Can we really know what the hidden back-story might be that explains actions, reactions and acceptance of late 19th century behavior? Or are we resigned to the role of voyeuristic spectator, surmising the portent or lack thereof as we examine each statement and action recounted (maybe it was common in the gaming houses and saloons of 1890 Laramie to stick another fellow in the chest with a knife without constituting the presumed attempted murder we ascribe such actions today)?

2005-10-02T20:30:00.000-07:00

Post #5, Comments on Johnson and Lubet (for 3 Oct seminar)

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

In keeping with the themes of “meeting and conflict” previously addressed in One Vast Winter Count, Susan Johnson’s bottom-up history of life in the camps gives voice to those denizens of the mining communities who heretofore have been silenced in history. In Roaring Camp, she underscores the transitory nature of society on the fringes, as successive periods of exploration, settlement and finally civilization shape the character of the towns in question.

In Murder in Tombstone, however, Lubet deals not with the temporal quality of the character of the town of Tombstone, but instead serves up a layered and subtle depiction of the more nefarious backstory of one particular period. Other than the explanatory pre-story and the denoument, Lubet focuses most of his book on the infamous day of the shootout at the O.K. Corral and the following inquest and findings; he covers a span of a few months. What I most thoroughly enjoyed about this work was the effort the author went to portraying the events from the viewpoint of both an advocate and a detractor. With a bit of supposition and counterfactual postulating, Lubet does yeoman’s work in ferreting out the story as seen by both the Earp-sympathizers in 1891 Tombstone, and the concerned citizens who were as concerned by the law as the lawless.

What both these books add to our discussion, and my education, it a understanding of the complexity of these stories, and by extension of the history of the American West. Suffice it to say that I will be giving a closer read to accounts that I may have previously taken at face value, and will also strive to discover the story behind the story.

Post #4, for the week of 26 September

2005-09-25T18:20:00.000-07:00

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...

2005-09-18T20:31:00.001-07:00

I also commented on Dave's site .

What I read tonight

2005-09-18T20:18:00.000-07:00

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)

2005-09-17T12:38:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-16T16:05:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-01T18:58:00.000-07:00

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