The "F-Word"

Last night, in a rather silly (but fun) comments thread/battle, David of Scrivenings and I had a western historian's moment, in the course of which I expressed doubts about the work of one of the Big Names of the field, Patty Limerick.  David wanted to know more about these doubts, so I promised a more elaborate answer later (given the limits of comment thread space).  jo(e) and Phantom Scribbler also expressed interest.  So here goes.

(Note:  it has now been several years since I've actively thought about this, and my notes turned out to be crappier than I'd assumed -- does one ever take truly good notes on things one believes one knows cold? -- and my copy of the book is in storage, so I'm apologizing in advance for any less-than-stellar explanations.  Hopefully David can step in when I falter.)

Most of you will probably need some background first.  For a long time, the history of the American West has been dominated by what has since come to be known as "the frontier thesis."  It was first laid out by Frederick Jackson Turner in an 1893 address at one of the World's Fairs (Chicago?) in response to a US Census report that declared, due to population spread and growth in the West, the frontier was now "closed."  Turner, in his talk, articulated a theory in which he claimed that the uniqueness of American society and culture rested in large part on its repeated encounters with the outer edge of civilization, that is, the frontier.  The crucial mechanism, he argued, was that over time, successive waves of migrants recapitulated the rise from savagery to civilization, starting in a primitive wilderness environment that they built up from scratch time and time again.  Moreover, he claimed, this frontier had played an important role for the more unsettled members of society, by providing a safety valve of sorts.  His stance at the time of his presentation was one of both optimism and misgivings about the "closing" of the frontier; his "frontier thesis," as it came to be known, was an attempt to make sense of the larger implications. 

The frontier thesis came to dominate a considerable degree of American historical thought in subsequent years.  If, as a kid, you read stories about waves of bold pioneers marching westward into unsettled lands and driving the Indians before them, you were reading history influenced by Turner. However, it turns out that there are numerous problems with this thesis, problems that received particular scrutiny in the wake of the transformations wrought on the historical profession in the 1960s and 1970s.  (Short story:  a new generation of historians, who'd grown up in a time of social turmoil, brought their politicized sensitivities to racial, class and sexual discrimination into the academy -- sensitivities that combined with a growing interest in the "social sciences.")  Among the larger problems:  ethnic insensitivity (especially with regard to Indians),  an absence of a discussion of the role of women, a blindness to environmental factors, and above all, an air of perceived triumphalism (which, honestly, I don't think was predominant in the original text).  So a new group, touting the New Western History, set about challenging Turner and his thesis, and writing a new narrative.  One of these was Patricia Nelson Limerick, who wrote The Legacy of Conquest in the 1980s.

(There are other aspects of Turner's thesis that don't work, particularly the notion of steady waves of rebuilding migrants -- the settlement in the West actually occurred leapfrog fashion, with early cities providing a framework for later immigration -- but I do think Turner got one thing right:  the importance of the Western environment in the process.  More on this later, perhaps.)

Anyway, as I recall, Limerick's central argument was that the West should not be viewed from the perspective of the supplanting waves of migrants, but in terms of those who were already in the West.  That is, we should not lose track of the Native American and Hispanic cultures who were displaced and marginalized.  This, she argues, means that the West is not defined by civilization building, but by colonization, by successive waves of conquest and re-conquest.  She includes the environment among the "victims" -- a move that I have particular issues with, as I'll explain in a moment.  (People who really want to grasp my upcoming points may wish to track down her book.  It's a pretty quick and friendly read -- one thing that Limerick does admirably is insist that history books be readable and interesting to the general public.)

I have three main beefs with Limerick's argument, even though I appreciate its role in reframing Western history.

The first is that her understanding of "environment" is profoundly naive and anthropocentric.  As an environmental historian, it grates when people blithely talk about "Nature" as if it were an active agent that can "suffer," "strike back," etc.  One thing that I appreciated about Turner was that he saw the environment of the West as having transformative capabilities, but in his case it was because people had to adapt and re-adapt to it, not because the environment itself was actively changing them.  Limerick's framing is useful rhetorically; analytically it is primitive and overly simplistic.

The second is that for all her emphasis on changing the viewer's perspective from East looking at conquered West, to West looking at conquering East, she's still oddly focused on the East.  She tends to talk about the West predominantly in terms of its relationship with the East (which makes some sense, given the profound effects of that relationship), and to see change as something that is imposed from without rather than also developing from within.  You get, weirdly, an impression of static cultures being bowled over by a wave of change/conquest, and then changing as they struggle to survive and adapt.  Since I know from my own work that change does not occur only in the instance of cultural conflict, that cultures develop and evolve according to internal dynamics as well as external pressures, I (again) find her explanation somewhat simplistic.

The final beef is more of a quibble, really.  It's this:  for all that Limerick (and other members of the New Western History) purport to be about challenging and overturning Turner, they are so preoccupied with doing so that they tend to throw out the baby with the bathwater in a number of instances; simultaneously, they continue to allow their work to be defined by his thesis, even as they challenge it.  There are waves of settlement in Limerick's book, there is a sense of "frontier" still, there is a belief (shared by Turner -- and also myself) that the West played a profound role in the development of the country (i.e., the West "matters"), and so on.

Okay, David, your turn now!

Comments

[Scrivener]

First minor detail: Yep, Chicago World's Fair, 1893. Buffalo Bill, by the way, was also there with his Wild West show. As was about everyone else interesting in the country, it seems.

I'm not exactly an expert on Patty Limerick--it's been a very long time since I read Legacies, and I'm not actually an historian, but an English prof who does work that relates to "frontier" issues--but I basically agree with your criticisms of her. What's more, I think she would more or less admit to them herself, certainly with your final beef. Have you read the two essays by Limerick and Richard White in The Frontier in American Culture: An Exhibition at the Newberry Library, August 26, 1994-January 7, 1995? They're both wonderful pieces by two of the most important "New Western Historians" out there (and they both pride themselves on writing clearly and engagingly). I might be confusing the two a bit, but I think it's Limerick who has a whole section entitled "the F-word" in which she admits that by continuously arguing against Turner, NWHs seem to simply be entrenching him more deeply into the field--bringing that conflict, and thus the frontier thesis, front and center. She talks about the idea of getting NWHs to simply refuse to mention Turner's name anymore, I think, but ends up admitting that this is not a valid response.

The fact that she ends up "oddly focused on the East" I think is true, but it's the kind of criticism that I myself make and then fall victim to myself. It's like the point about maintaining a sense of the frontier--in trying to carve out a space to analyze "the West" in and of itself, you've got to engage with the Eastern biases and focus of traditional history work, even of "frontier" history work. But that engagement recapitulates the dynamic even as it resists it.

I agree with you that Turner himself is not especially triumphalist, and he gets blamed an awful lot for what his followers, especially his followers outside of academic history) do with his thesis. And the attacks on his thesis also throw out the baby in the process, because the fact is that, however flawed much of Turner's thesis may be, it was a profound step forward in the practice of professional history in America. He relied on social scientific methods and statistical data (like the US Census records that start his piece off, but also more). He might not have given proper attention to women in the westward migration, but he gave much more attention to them than his predecessors did because he saw the settlement of the frontier as a move of families an farmers, rather than of lone trappers and Wild West gunmen. There is lots of reason to discount his safety valve theory, but then I think it says something that so many generations of Americans have so deeply identified with that theory--it rings true, despite the criticisms (by which, I don't mean we should jsut accept it based on our guts, but that we should pay attention to its reception and what that tells us, for example about our own ideological beliefs regarding this safety valve affect and class).

I have been meaning to go back to the Thesis and to pay more attention specifically how Turner deals with the environment. My guess is that I agree with you that Turner's got a much more complex and "modern" (?) view of the environment then he ever gets credit for. That's a line of enquiry that I find really intriguing.

Ok, my comment is too long to fit anywhere near inside this little box, so rather than trying to read it over and edit it or something, I'm just going to hit post and read it when it's all on the page. I hope I haven't said anything crazy here.

[Rana]

Doesn't look crazy to me. If you want to look into Turner's environmental thinking, his later stuff is better; there's some interesting ideas about regionalism and what it means (or doesn't).

I haven't looked at the article in question; seems like it might be a good idea for me to do so. :)

Part of my personal quirks regarding the Eastern focus stems from being an environmental historian; I tend to see environment as front and center, and while I'm very interested in how Easterners adapt to and make sense of it, I'm also just as interested in how the locals made sense of it. (The country would look very different if the Spanish had settled it from the West, given their cultural and legal frameworks about aridity, ethnicity, and community formation.)

It also comes from being a Westerner myself, born and bred. I'm used to the idea that West = norm, and dealing with Easterners who don't share it, so I'm perhaps a bit more sensitive to the privileging of one over the other.

(Given which, it's a little odd that Limerick herself slants eastward, as she was born in Banning, Calif. Perhaps it's those years of grad school in the East?)

[New Kid on the Hallway]

LDH has taught History of the West (his own stuff is sort of western, sort of not, depending on how you define West), and I think he'd agree with most of this; but I think he'd probably argue that one of the very problems of the field is that its definition depends on its relation to something else (thinking about your comments about the "oddly focused on the East" thing). I think he's come to feel that "Western" history is really something that's very difficult to sustain as a cohesive field, because it's ALWAYS in reaction to someplace else. (Disclaimer: I'm speaking for him, not me; and since I'm speaking for him, I may well have this wrong; and this is not meant to suggest that he thinks that people shouldn't study what gets called the West!)

Also, sort of non sequitur, but have you heard the stories about Turner being an incredible perfectionist who worked and worked and worked but wouldn't let anything leave his desk, so published almost nothing other than the infamous F-word thesis? An editor got another book (textbook?) out of him by dint of downright bullying and once said that he thought it should be engraved on his tombstone that he was the only person to get something out of FJT. (Lots of editors etc. wanted FJT to write stuff for them, he committed to all kinds of stuff, but just never produced it.)

Your perfectionist's cautionary lesson for the day. ;-)

Last commment: another f-word, feudalism, gets treated a lot like the environment as you describe it, Rana; it's something that "invades" or "infiltrates" and "changes" society, almost like some amorphous creature from a B-movie. It's hard sometimes to get away from such metaphors but they're certainly misleading.

[Rana]

Hee. I hadn't heard that about Turner. I'm not surprised, though; his writing is pretty tight for its time.

I agree with the problem of even having a field called "western history" -- not least because it is amorphous when you start tossing in all the variables of time, space, culture, environment. The Appalachians are "West" under one frame, but not Spanish California -- and there is a mirror-image frame of that where the latter counts but the former does not. When pressed, I'll argue that "the West" is a region that combines a wet-winter/dry-summer climate (west of the middle of the Plains states, more or less) with a history of intense federal involvement in its development and a culture that thinks of itself as "Western." Obviously each of these falters at some points, but the general mass tends to work for me and coincide with my own gut sense of what "the West" means.

But that's when I'm pressed. I prefer to describe myself as someone who does (did) environmental and cultural history in locations that can be described as Western by the average person. I'm not so interested in defending the field as a field, or the region as a region, as in doing history that happens to have occurred in a place I consider more "home" than others.

(The frameworks and questions I've been interested in can be applied very fruitfully to Western contexts, but, really, I consider them to be applicable in a wide array of contexts.)

The bit about feudalism is funny. That's waaaaay outside of my time and space, but D. bumps into it occasionally, and I bet he'd find this familiar.

[Scrivener]

I like that you are particularly interested in "in a place I consider ... 'home.'" One of the things that I find especially attractive about ecocriticism or environmental history or whatever you wanna call it is that it seems much more amenable to that kind of endeavor--personal involvement, and activism as opposed to simple analytical detachment. It took me a while to see it for myself, but my dissertation is very much tied up in my own personal history, not quite as explicitly as writing about my home, but similar in certain ways.

If I didn't hate where I grew up so much, I wouldn't mind writing about it ;)

[Rana]

Yeah. If you reduce my work down to its barest essentials, it's really about the meaning of home, and how one successfully adapts to and tweaks a place that is new or changing so that you and it fit well, and it becomes a home, not just some place you live. (And when I say "place" I'm talking cultural space as well as physical space.)

Which is an appropriate subject for a person who moved around a lot as a kid. (Though not as much as you!)

That I gussy it up with references to cultural frameworks and appropriate environmental behaviors is more where the academic/activist edge to it comes in.

[dr. m]

What an interesting read here. It seems that in every discipline certainty leads to complacency leads to reductionism. Rana, by any chance do you use the work of Gilles Deleuze in your research? Some of the ways that you respecify the nature of relational terms is familiar (at least in spirit) to Deleuze.

[Rana]

I haven't heard of him. *ears prick up*

Is there a particular piece that you're thinking of, or which would be a good entree into his approach?

[jo(e)]

Wow. This is a fascinating discussion. I would have posted something earlier but I’m a perfectionist and needed Rana to bully me into it.

This makes me want to read Limerick just so I could have an opinion on her work. I am especially interested in how she sees the environment as a victim and the implications of that.

One oft-heard criticism of ecocriticism has been that most people doing work in the field focus on literature based in the west; the idea that the west is somehow more “wild” and therefore closer to nature than the east. The southeast is especially ignored; the Thoreauvians at least care about the northeast. ASLE, which is the main group of scholars associated with ecocriticism, grew out of the western lit conference which accounts for the western bias as well. Two years ago, when the ASLE conference was held in Boston instead of out west somewhere, the conference organizers took a lot of heat for their decision.

I think I'm on a tangent here.

It is interesting to hear a historical perspective, though, since my perspective comes from literary criticism and science.

[Scrivener]

Rana, You do know that my classes this semester are called "There's No Place Like Home" and are more or less on exactly that topic, right?

Can't say more, gotta take my turn reading stories--Ella's picked the sad one about the grandfather who has a heart attack (Now One Foot, Now the Other or something like that).

[Rana]

David -- I didn't! How cool! Are your syllabi online?

jo(e) -- as a fellow perfectionist who has learned to embrace the casualness of the blog, I do understand. The upshot is that I'm lazy and like to spout off more than I care about perfection -- but only slightly. ;)

Limerick is a pretty interesting read. As I say, I have my beefs with her, but I can't deny that she has a knack for stirring up shit in productive ways. She's not really interested in environmental issues per se, though; you'd have better luck with either William Cronon or Richard White if you want to get at environment + west stuff. Be warned, though; all of these folks are slightly prickly when it comes to the "mythic" West (there's a bit of irritation with the way that the "real" west gets mixed up with the "fake" -- which I find irritating in turn, as I think that how people think about the West is not inconsequential to its history).

I hadn't realized that the lit side of environmental studies had a western bias too. Interesting. I'll have to file that away for future meditation.

*smile* It's conversations like this that ended up pushing me in the direction of environmental studies rather than just history. I have such productive discussions out of field. Not to mention it wins me nifty prizes. *grin*

[jo(e)]

I enjoy taking to people outside my field because then I always learn so much. Teh two confrences I go to (ASLE and SLSA) are both interdisciplinary. I talk to lots of scientists -- both hard science and social science -- but I don't really know many historians. We don't have any on my campus. But it does seem like there a good number of evil historians in this blog community.

[Phantom Scribbler]

The western bias of environmental lit really struck me as an undergrad, mostly because it was such a contrast to the New England-centric bias of my New England college (where they often appeared not to have heard that we'd won the American Revolution). So much wilder-than-thou posturing going on! One of the counter-concepts I really liked was John Stilgoe's "wildering" landscapes -- like old New England farms that were reverting back to forest after being abandoned.

[Rana]

jo(e) -- yes, it does. I'm not quite sure why. Or whether it's a perceived overrepresentation, or whether there really are a lot more historians online. (I suspect the former.)

I'll hang out with all sorts, if they're friendly. ;)

PS -- I'm beginning to be fascinated by this institutional bias! (Gad. My initial thought was, "paper topic!" You can take the girl out of academia, but...) The New England-centrism is also interesting; the main self-centered region I was aware of before this was Texas (and, to a degree, California). Texas really does have a high opinion of itself -- and expects everyone else to share in this belief.

(No offense to actual Texans; I have relatives who live there, and they've noted the same thing. It's more a shared culture thing, than the foibles of individuals.)

One oddity of the west/environment bias is that jobs in either field tend to cluster in the western states, and most job descriptions for environmental history tend to assume a western bias, if they specify additional fields at all.

Unfortunately for the scholar working in these fields, the vast majority of schools (especially small colleges) are NOT in the West.

[New Kid on the Hallway]

The institutional bias thing is very interesting. I grew up in PS's part of the world and the version of history I got growing up was:

"[British] colonists came to America! They landed on Plymouth Rock! They met Indians [who promptly vanished]! They Founded the Colonies! They started the Revolution [but just the northern folks, not those strange rice- and cotton-growers]! We gained our Freedom from England and founded the Constitition!

(....and later some other stuff happened....)."

Now I am in the most Anglo-philic of schools in a fairly Anglo-philic region. You can kind of understand Western history's insistence about existing at all when you realize the utter absence of attention to it in this part of the world.

(I should add that my dept actually has a Western historian - I'm thinking culturally, not literally.)

Not sure if this makes any sense... ;-)

[New Kid on the Hallway]

PS - I tried to post this before but my computer hung and I lost it (drat!), but Rana, I found your description of what you do/did? (don't know how you prefer to refer to it) really interesting. I study a region completely unrelated to any of my own "homes" (except in a general ancestral sense, since part of my family did come from there, not even very long ago, but when I'm talking about things that happened 500+ years ago I refuse to draw a direct connection between in and me). On the other hand, I study ways that people define themselves socially, which is sort of a variation on how to find/define a "home" - just in a societal/social status sense, rather than other senses of the word.

There was a prof in my grad program who claimed that everyone really was trying to study themselves in some fashion. He himself studied Modern Japan, which was, he said, because he went there during college and became fascinated with its difference as a way to understand himself. I won't go into the kind of Otherness and so on that's entailed in this, but it did strike me as an interesting point. Which is not to suggest that people only study themselves literally, or that you have to be one of something to study it (ick, I hate that argument!), but just that whatever anyone studies has to be something that's intensely meaningful to them in a personal sense, and it's always fascinating to hear about what that is for different people.

[Rana]

No, it makes perfect sense to me. :)

And I think it gets back to that earlier point: the weirdness of having "western" history and "regular" history, which is how things are so often presented.

I often wondered why, if focusing on California or Arizona was doing "western history," or on Mississippi or Georgia was doing "southern history," focusing on New England was not "eastern history." But it's not. You'll get an occasional anomalous "Northeastern Studies" major here and there, but really, I don't think there's a defined field that goes by that label. It's just "history" or subsumed into a topical rather than regional category, like "colonial history." (Of course, my lack of awareness about this could also be a reflection of my own bias; it's just I myself haven't seen as much fuss made about it by generalists as they do about western or southern.)

(I have a similar rant about the segregation of environmental history into that box that containts all the specialized subsets of "real" history. I mean, geez, it's not like all the rest of history took place in some amorphous, completely neutral and malleable space where no one breathed air, drank water, or ate food. For me, it's an approach as much as a topic, applicable to a wide range of contexts.)

[Rana]

Whoops. Jumped you there.

I very much agree with the idea that what one does has to be personally relevant. Heck, given the amount of work and sacrifice that goes into the typical graduate experience, it would almost perforce have to be.

What I tend to find particularly interesting is the form that personal fascination takes. For some people it's the topic itself, for others it's the themes they can explore there, and for other (probably most of us) it's a combination of the two. (So my work explored personally relevant themes and filtered them through the study of places and peoples I find interesting -- partly because of childhood associations, partly because they are, well, weird, and thus interesting to me.) I tend to agree, too, with D's idea that certain modes of thought are more or less intelligible or agreeable to a person, and areas of history in which such modes are prevalent will appeal on a subconscious level.

(My own "most comfortable" era is 1920s and 1930s America, and my "most comfortable" people are writers, scientists and engineers.)

And I also LOATHE the idea that one must be something in order to understand it. It is the utter rejection of everything history is about -- and the people who talk about identity-based history are stupid, stupid, stupid.

For exampled, it could easily be argued that I have far more in common psychologically with a poor black man living today than I do with a lower-middle-class white woman living two hundred years ago. To assume otherwise is to commit that horrible sin of presentism.

Faugh.

(Dang. I never know where I have rants stored up until I trip over them!)

[Jill Smith]

I've only skimmed the comments (which I must return to and peruse at greater length when I don't have clients breathing down my neck), but I have a slightly odd perception of the "West vs. East" thing. When I lived in Minnesota, I noticed that a lot of people referred to where I was from (New England) as "back East" - as if it was someplace they had also personally come from (even from people who had never been there). I thought that was a curious way to put it.

[Rana]

Interesting. I always read it myself as being akin to things like "the back forty" -- that is, the far away part.

When were you in Minnesota, if you don't mind me asking?

[Scrivener]

Wow, Rana, you've stirred up a really interesting discussion here. I'm gonna have to circle back to read all these comments, but just wanted to say that my syllabi are only on WebCT, which isn't available. I've been meaning to post them on my website too and just haven't managed yet. But I will do that now that you've expressed an interest--it'll be next week, when I'm on campus again, though. Or I can email them to you. Think I've got an email around here somewhere...

[Jill Smith]

I lived in Minneapolis from early 1991 through the middle of '93. I lived through the Halloween Blizzard. You could be right about "back East," but a couple of times (before I wised up to the fact that it was just something that was said), I said, "Oh, are you from the East coast too?" and nobody thought it was a particularly surprising question given what they had said.

[Rana]

Hmm. You know, I am now wondering if the phrase has a longer history that explains it having those two meanings (personal and general). What made me think this is that there isn't an equivalent "back West" phrase; it's "out West" if anything. (And "out East" sounds silly.) And then there's "down South" and "up North" -- so what we seem to have here is a whole lexicon of place/direction phrases that may be linked with the ways that Americans oriented themselves over the course of the nation's history. I wonder what people in Alaska and Hawaii use.

David, I'd love an email. But go ahead and post them online too; judging by the responses this conversation is generating, I suspect other folks might like to take a look too.

[Phantom Scribbler]

LOL at New Kid's description of the history of America as seen from the Hub of the Universe. That pretty much sums up my undergrad experience. But that was why I loved what I was doing. I've lived almost my entire life east of the Hudson River, and I love being able to read the landscape I see everyday with an eye to its history and its flux. And bias is bias, sure, but once you've recognized it then it's good for a lot of laughs...

[Rana]

There is indeed something to be said for being able to read a landscape. It took a move to the Midwest to teach me not to take that ability for granted. It was like suddenly being immersed in a place where the locals spoke a language that was only 25% like English. It was exciting learning a new place, but it also made me homesick -- a concept I'd never really understood before then, for all my moving.