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Well, maybe it's not so new any more. Sometime in the late 1980s, the "New Western History" became a widely circulated term of approbation or abuse, depending on the observer's perspective. From the cheering section, we heard that the New Western Historians—scholars such as Patricia Nelson Limerick, Richard White, William Cronon, and Donald Worster—were boldly reshaping a field of study that had long been captive to the potent national mythology. Hecklers said that this was merely another manifestation of the trendy revisionism everywhere apparent in history these days.
Both sides were wrong, and both were right. The cheerleaders exaggerated the deficiencies of the "Old Western History"—a habit that continues even today. On the other side, the naysayers underestimated both the ideological diversity and the achievements of this new scholarship, which is far richer than its critics allow.
In fact, the New Western History is now decades old. In their introduction to Researching Western History: Topics in the Twentieth Century (Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1997), Gerald Nash and Richard Etulain list five ways in which the study of the American West changed significantly between 1960 and the end of the century. First, most Western historians in 1960, still under the spell of Frederick Jackson Turner, wrote about the West primarily as a frontier—a frontier that shifted repeatedly with westward expansion—and concentrated almost exclusively on Western history up to 1890 (the year in which the U.S. Census director officially proclaimed that there was no more frontier in America). In the decades since, the emphasis has shifted markedly to the West considered as a specific geographical region, like the South, and to the century after the closing of the frontier.
It is important to add that for many New Western Historians, this was not merely a change in orientation toward a regional perspective but rather a conscious rejection of the notion of "the frontier." Patricia Nelson Limerick has said that if she accomplishes nothing else in life, she wants people to think twice before they use "the f word." Frontier, Limerick and others have argued, implies unsettled, uncivilized land just waiting to be filled up by white folks. But the West had been inhabited by people with their own civilizations long before any Anglo settlers got there. The title of Limerick's influential 1987 book, The Legacy of Conquest, sums it up: Western history, she suggests, should be envisioned not as frontier-settlement but as conquest. She emphasizes conflict and exchange between Native Americans and Anglo settlers, rather than seeing the West as a tabula rasa where white Easterners simply established replicas of institutions from back home.
Second, in 1960—when the Western was still flourishing as a genre, though its death would come very soon—"only a few scholars," Nash and Etulain note, "conceived of the West as a figment of the imagination, a West enshrined in myth, literature, art, music, and popular culture." The myth was still alive in 1960. But in the decades since, the work of "a veritable small army" of scholars has been devoted precisely to the West as a figment of the imagination—and to the consequences of such imagining.
Third, in 1960, few Western scholars focused on environmental themes. Today, that is a major category of the New Western History—a consequence not only of the growth in environmental studies generally but also of the shift, noted above, toward regarding the West as a geographical region, a place where certain experiences are common. The West is arid or semi-arid, forcing farmers from Idaho to California to spend more time worrying about rain than, say, a farmer in Massachusetts or Georgia. The West looks to the Pacific Ocean as much as to the Atlantic. More land in the West is under federal control than in any other region. And so on.
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