Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West
This opinionated, occasionally provocative collection of essays takes aim at Frederick Jackson Turner's thesis that the frontier closed in 1890. Picking up where her influential first book, The Legacy of Conquest (1987)--which helped galvanize a movement to revision the West's history--left off, Limerick (a professor of history at the University of Colorado) asserts that the American West is a work in progress--not a frontier. Arguing that popular images of the Old West are tinged with nationalistic self-congratulation and toxic ethnocentrism, she attempts to replace fuzzy nostalgia with a grounded, down-to-earth reassessment of westward expansion. Throughout, she gives full play to the harsh realities of the slaughter and dislocation of Native Americans, the role of frontier women and ethnic diversity. In one essay, she contends that the California Gold Rush, which fostered rapid urbanization, environmental havoc and Native displacement, was the single most important event in the American West's history. Elsewhere she dismantles romanticized or sanitized images of the American West in TV shows, Disney's Frontierland, textbooks and the appropriation of frontier rhetoric by Kennedy's "New Frontier" and Reagan's space program. She includes robust profiles of such unsung figures as Mary Roberts Coolidge, champion of Chinese immigrants in turn-of-the-century California, and deals with environmentalism, Mormon identity and Asian-American versions of the American agrarian dream. Limerick closes on an offbeat but welcome note, with a scathing critique of stodgy academic prose and with guidelines for clear writing. (Mar.)Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.