History 616

Week #14/Comments

2005-12-05T12:42:00.000-05:00

You can find my comments on Ray's Blog:
http://cahercalla2.blogspot.com/
and Carrie's:
http://carriehoover.blogspot.com/

Week #14/Blog #14

2005-12-04T11:00:00.000-05:00

I found myself treating this week's book more like a survey rather than an academic study. If I want to approach a book like Devil's Bargains as an acedemic thesis, the thesis has to be outside of our normal frame of understanding, and then has to be successfully supported. But Hal Rothman's thesis isn't exactly controversial, or unexpected, or outside of the general understanding of things. "The inherent problem of communities that succeed in attracting so many people is that their very presence destroys the cultural and environmental amenities that made the place special. This is the core of the complicated devil's bargain." (27) Tourism changes a place? Locals end up with the short end of the stick when tourism comes to town? Maybe it is because I've worked in the tourism industry for 15+ years, but this is hardly news. Rothman comes dangerously close to winning another of my "duh" awards.

So since I didn't think there was a particularly strong thesis here, I took the book to be more of a collection of stories about how the changes brought about by tourism actually take place. But as I went along I started to suffer from fatigue. Earlier chapters about the Grand Canyon, Santa Fe, dude ranches, and national parks were much more interesting than the later chapters on ski resorts and Las Vegas. It was the mental equivalent of repetitive stress disorder...I felt like I was repeating the same basic steps over and over (and over and over) again. Rothman points out that the outside influencer changed over time--from railroads to wealthy neonatives to government agencies to corporations--but it was the same basic story told too often.

But I also found myself scratching my head about the focus on the West. Was this a book about the effects of tourism that happened to be about the West? No...Rothman feels like the West is different: "This virtue and incredible burden makes tourism in the West more tantalizing, more fraught with tension and anxiety, and more full of text, subtext, and depth than anywhere else in the nation." (15) But here I really got off the train. The kind of devil's bargains he describes occur everywhere...Branson, The Outer Banks, Mackinac Island, Key West, little touristy hamlets like Helen, Georgia. So while Rothman might give us a useful framework for examining the influence of tourism on a place, he does himself a disservice by imagining that it is only applicable west of the Rocky Mountains.

Others have commented on the writing style, and I think this is a classic example of something we brought up in class a few weeks back--over-reliance on deeply theoretical language and inflated vocabulary (what one friend of mine used to call "ten cent words") often betrays an insecurity about the author's argument. Since I don't think his argument is a particularly difficult one to support, I'm not surprised to see this kind of writing throughout.

Finally, I found myself simultaneously sympathetic to and put off by some of Rothman's sweeping pronouncements. As a historian interested in tourism he does have to imagine tourists as a homogenous group, the same way we often talk about women, African-Americans, or labor as if they are all the same. But the generalizations seemed more problematic here than with other groups. Personally, I find my clients (tourists all) have very different expectations, motives, assumptions and pre-conceived notions, even though they might all be signed up for the same tour. Like Rothman, I can make general statements about my tourist clients as a collective, but I recognize that those generalizations break down very quickly when you actually talk to the individuals. Historians don't have the luxury of talking to fin-de-siecle (sorry, had to slip it in somewhere) rail travelers. But I can't help but think that if my clients are so diverse today, what makes us think they were so homogeneous then? I don't want to rule out studying tourists as a historically significant group...but I'm leery of the liberties Rothman takes here, painting with too wide a brush.

Week #13 comments

2005-11-27T18:25:00.000-05:00

See my comments on Ben's Blog:
http://huggins616.blogspot.com/

and

Rick's
http://gaulthist616.blogspot.com/

Week #13/Post #13

2005-11-27T13:50:00.000-05:00

I was so happy to read Jim's blog before starting mine...he hit the wall around page 250. I think I maybe lasted a few more pages, but was definitely drowning by Chapter Nine "The Peanut Farmer and the Pork Barrel." I also get the sense from Jim's blog that he, like me, was aware something wasn't going well, but it was a sort of vague, can't-quite-put-your-finger-on-it wrongness. I found the book to be a terrific read, entertaining, with well-chosen turns of phrase and vivid images of key figures. But I still felt like I was slogging...trying to wade through one of those swamps the Corp of Engineers is so eager to dredge. This was an odd sensation for me. That slogging feeling generally goes along with books that are written in such obtuse and convoluted language I eventually give up. That wasn't the problem here. On the other hand, Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City was a terrific read, entertaining, with well-chosen turns of phrase and vivid images of key figures, and I chomped through that in an afternoon. Cadillac Desert had me looking at the page numbers and rolling me eyes, muttering "Oh my God, I'm only on page 113?!"

If I'm obsessing over my reaction to the readability it is because I think therein lies the key to what is right and wrong with this book. Reisner picked an incredibly important and fascinating topic and tried to cover too much ground within it. He chose not to give his work the academic treatment, with footnoted references. At times I found this frustrating, because I wanted to know more about his sources. On the other hand, this choice freed him to take a less comprehensive approach, and do more illuminative writing on two or three narrower, specific cases (Like The Devil in the White City). He didn't do this, of course, and I think that is the problem. For example, the Owens Valley story is perfect for this sort of treatment. And his chapter on Dominy hints at the possibilities this kind of approach could have offered. In fact, the whole book has dozens and dozens of examples showing Reisner could have written a manuscript like Erik Larson's and done it monstrously well. But by tackling the entirety of the subject he fails on both fronts--his is neither the definitive scholarly work nor the exquisitely written case study. Which is a shame because for all my slogging and drowning, I still liked what I read...go figure.

Week #12/Post #12

2005-11-20T08:00:00.000-05:00

Would the real Roy Baker please stand up?

My build-out is on the influence of the dime novel. First off, I'm sorry to report I didn't find a "smoking gun" dime novel that is exactly like our case. Nevertheless, after reading a few dozen of them, and a few dozen articles about dime novels from the 1880's, there is no doubt that Roy was acting out the conventional dime novel script. All the elements are there--the glorification of the outlaw, the pledges of loyalty, the promise of death to traitors, the focus on a hideout, the melodramatic death threat lines, and the building up of a gang. Turns out these were all the basic building blocks of many, many dime novels. Also turns out, society was very concerned about the influence of dime novels, and about boys and young men acting out these elements, just like Roy did. There are all kinds of articles from 1870's and 1880's magazines and newspapers about this. So anyway, feeling quite happy about all this.

What I'm not happy about is who the Hell was Roy Baker? Although it isn't critical to my paper, since I'm looking at something that would have influenced Roy's life before he got to Fort D.A. Russell, I'd like to know a little bit about that life. The problem is there was no Roy Baker that was born in Peoria in 1865 (which is what it says on his enlistment papers). According to census records, there were no Roy or Leroy Bakers born in Missouri or Illinois in 1865. There was a Marion Baker born in Peoria in 1865 to farmers who was still in Peoria in 1880, and I thought that was our boy...until I found out Marion Baker lived to be about 70 years old. There was also a George Baker who was born in Peoria in 1865 to farmers, and in 1880 the family had moved two counties over and were still farmers. That could be him...but the name is too common to know for sure. Plus the enlistment papers are supposed to say if the person lived somewhere other than where they were born. You can see this on Lyons, Pence, and Thornburg's papers. But there's nothing like that on Roy's, making it pretty difficult to track down. This week I'm going after my last possible lead (and then I have to give up and move on)...after Roy's death two payments were made by the Army paymaster in November, 1890. I'm heading to the College Park National Archives site this Wednesday to see if there is a record of where those payments went.

On Monday I'll also be bringing in the Final Statement from Fort D.A. Russell for Roy's death (kinda like the death certificate and inventory of his possessions by the chaplain). Turns out Roy is buried on the base cemetery. There is a website that has the headstone information for that cemetery:
http://ftp.rootsweb.com/pub/usgenweb/wy/laramie/cemeteries/fewarren
Oddly his gravestone lists his date of death as: 31 OCT 1890...I guess that's the date when they got around to actually giving him a marker.

If I ever make it to Cheyenne, Wyoming, I'll have to stop by and pay my respects...I've somehow grown attached to our little screw-up hooligan.

Week #11/Comments

2005-11-14T11:12:00.000-05:00

This week's lucky winners are:
Marty
http://martyscowgirlblog.blogspot.com/
and Ben
http://huggins616.blogspot.com/

Week #11/Post #11

2005-11-14T07:35:00.000-05:00

This was an interesting week for synergy. I was bouncing back and forth between Indians in Unexpected Place and Becoming Mexican American, I was knocking out a lot of my Roy Baker research, and I was still thinking about images and photographs from last week's class. And into this hodge podge of discordant influences I kept returning to the construction of identity, both within and without.

Native Americans attempted to negotiate their identity in a 20th century world, but did so in constant opposition to the mountain of images and portrayals that occurred in the 19th century. Deloria mentions a few--the dime novel, the Wild West show, world's fair exhibits--but the list could go on to include illustrated biographies, picturesque books, Rocky Mountain School (The Hudson River School's Expansionist phase) paintings, railroad advertising, museum displays and (why not) those ubiquitous cigar shop statues. And if that weren't bad enough, white society didn't just rest on its laurels there. The 20th century was spent in constant visual pursuit of portraying the Native American as the "vanishing race." When the National Park Service promotes national parks with the slogan "His Hunting Ground of Yesterday" you know you have trouble.

All of which is to say it was really interesting to read Deloria's take on this, which didn't dwell any more than he had to on how white America saw Native Americans. Instead he wanted to show how Native Americans worked to get over that huge mountain of imagery and find a place for themselves on the other side. As Deloria illustrates again and again, sometimes the mountain was just too high. Going back to last week's discussion of photographs, I think we could expand on that using Deloria to discuss the power of images in general. Constructing identity in opposition to such a sea of imagery proved difficult if not sometimes impossible. I think that tells us as much about the power of the image and expectation as it does about the struggle itself.

Which is why the Mexican-American story is interesting as a counterpoint. Certainly there were some images and stereotypes. Sanchez gets into the "dirty Mexican" stereotype a bit as well as the "lazy Mexican." But what is lacking in this story is the avalanche of Anglo images that attempt to construct Mexican-American identity for them. The more pervasive stereotypical images, such as the awful "South of the Border" billboards leading to Dillon, SC, begin to emerge in the 1950's, after Sanchez's range of focus. In the absence of having to work so hard to overcome something not of their creation (i.e. Deloria's Native Americans), the Mexican-Americans in Sanchez's book are freer to negotiate their identity and be more selective in the process of "becoming Mexican-American." Admitted, I'm projecting a thesis onto Sanchez's work that he himself probably wouldn't be interested in...he makes it clear that he isn't interested in studying cultural identity through the prism of "two cultural poles: Mexicano versus Anglo United States." (6) But after working with images for two weeks straight now--their power, their constructive abilities, their influence--I can't help but feel that both their abundance and their absence have profound effects on how much freedom particular groups have in creating identity for themselves.

Week #10/Comments

2005-11-07T06:41:00.000-05:00

You can find my comments on Audrey's site:
http://ahaugan616.blogspot.com/
and
Steve's site:
http://westwardmovement.blogspot.com/

Week #10/Post #10

2005-11-06T09:30:00.000-05:00

By now I've probably tipped my hand enough for most to know what kind of history interests me. I'm fascinated by the power of things to shape and construct consciousness or identity, perception or meaning. The more "mundane" or "everyday" the thing, the more interested I become--advertising, posters, postcards, fair exhibits, labels, travel brochures, and holiday ephemera is my sort of "wish list" of everything I would love to work with. In these everyday, mundane objects I want to look for greater significance in the molding of important historical trends, identities or understandings.

Precisely because this is my particular area of interest, I read Print the Legend not just for the information contained within the pages, but for how Martha Sandweiss set about presenting that information. By the end of the book, I felt like Sandweiss had written on three tracks: a strong historical survey, a decent reflective argument, and a tentative constructive argument.

Historical survey is certainly a useful, but ultimately a very safe kind of writing. Sandweiss gives us a well-written, well-documented historical survey of the business of photography. Commercial photography emerged in fits and starts, hampered by both technological and narrative shortcomings. Sandweiss particularly provides an excellent background on the narrative side of the equation, showing how other commercial visual formats excelled (panorama, lithography) and how photography worked to catch up and hold its own against these other mediums. Since historical survey doesn't rely on an thesis argued and supported, her focus on the West seemed more a device to keep her book from swelling to 600 pages.

Sandweiss does venture more into thesis territory with the second track within Print the Legend, that of a reflective argument. The reflective argument is a thesis, albeit a fairly timid one, which says that the consciousness/identity/understanding of a particular group or thing or event can be seen (reflected) in the output of popular culture, mass culture, folk culture, and/or consumer culture (the vagaries of these categories are less important to me than their commonality--they are not traditional primary source materials like census records and voter tabulations). Sandweiss argues that photography was one such mode of cultural output that reflected (in this case) Western mythology, Manifest Destiny, and the inevitability of American success in the West. "...Western landscape photographs became a potent part of prevailing myths about the West as a blank slate upon which Americans could inscribe their own future." (206)

Sandweiss enters into the third track of her book most effectively in "Photography and the American Indian." Here she attempts to move beyond the simply reflective argument into the constructive one. To use one of my favorite metaphors for this question, she moves beyond the mirror to the mold. Instead of saying photography merely reflected or mirrored American attitudes about the West (as is the case for "Photography and the American Future") in this chapter she argues that photography actually worked to mold or construct attitudes/perceptions/understandings of Native Americans. "But increasingly it must be understood as a construction of a particular moment of American history, a particular public need fed by shrewd photographers." (273) To my mind the constructive argument is certainly the most difficult kind to make when working with this type of source material, but ultimately the most satisfying. EP Thompson wades into these waters in Making of the English Working Class as does Lawrence Levine's Black Culture and Black Consciousness. Both are excellent examples of the constructive thesis. Sandweiss, by contrast, seems timid when employing this line of historical argument. Although in her epilogue she writes "They [photographs] provide evidence of the ways in which patronage shaped the production of western views and the ways in which particular publication strategies shaped the reception of these views" [341, my emphasis added], she is only willing to really dig deep into that argument with the one chapter. Although the rest of her book is still interesting, insightful, and useful, her strongest and most risky chapter calls attention to the timidity of the rest of her work.

I suppose there is even a fourth track at work here, and that is Sandweiss's own roadmap for how a historian should work with photographs. Oddly, I had just finished Levine's "Historian and the Icon" on the very same topic. Photographs do seem to hold a strange place for historians--sometimes high art, sometimes popular culture, sometimes a commodity of the mass-consumer market, photographs are difficult to quantify. Sandweiss spends considerable time reminding us of both the strengths and shortcomings of this particular source material. She also echoes many other arguments I've read in which historians go to great lengths to justify the use of such "trivialities" as (in her case) stereographs and panorama paintings, or (in my case) posters, labels, advertisements, etc. I keep hoping for the day when such justifications are no longer necessary, but since this was just published in 2002, I suspect we still have a ways to go.

Week #9/Comments

2005-10-31T09:46:00.000-05:00

See my comments on Jim's site
http://hist616forjimjohnsonlm.blogspot.com/

and Brian's
http://lakota10.blogspot.com/

Week #9/Post #9

2005-10-29T10:03:00.000-04:00

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, once again the theme of negotiation and renegotiation of societal norms in the West strikes me as the most important thing that comes out of this week's reading. Social historians have, for over three decades now, shown that identities/consciousnesses are changeable over time and are never truly fixed (although they might seem to be to the individual). And I think social historians and western historians find the "perfect storm" when studying the concepts of gender, race, class, etc. in the West, because so often the West was the clean slate, the blank sheet of paper, the fresh start, the new beginning. Because societies were starting from scratch, societal norms also had more room for negotiation, and specifically related to this book, more possibilities for what it meant to be a woman. "The very newness of San Francisco offered a space in which benevolent women could influence community politics through pioneering social welfare programs." [my emphasis] (237, Mary Irwin)

As Irwin and others point out, there were limits to how far these new concepts of womanhood could be stretched. And in truth, much of the writing is not about how far concepts of womanhood could be expanded, but how quickly they ran up against traditional roadblocks and normative male domination. Catherine Cavanaugh's "No Place for a Woman" is particularly insightful on this topic. But the elasticity is there and throughout the book we see examples of it giving rise to more malleable identities of women as voters, women as breadwinners, and women as managers, as well as more malleable concepts of marriage (interracial, polygamist), home, and family.

While I respected Cavanaugh's essay and others that sought to quantify how expandable the concepts of gender in the West really were (or, more accurately, weren't), I found myself gravitating to the historians that weren't willing to adhere solely to the male-dominated hegemonic model. Also this week I've been working with Lawrence Levine's writings, and I find myself agreeing with his basic premise that we need to be suspicious of viewing any group--women, African-Americans, Depression-era poor, Native Americans--as lacking the ability or interest to shape their own identity, consciousness or place. I think this is especially true in the West, where like that broken record, I keep returning to the greater possibilities and opportunities for new or adjusted societal norms. Although some essays challenged me not to get too swept up in that idea, I still came away feeling more sure than not that this is a major part of what made the West unique...what made the West "The West."

Two tangential notes on deja vu. First was when I read in Peggy Pascoe's essay "although such marriages were infrequent throughout most of US history, an enormous amount of time and energy was nonetheless spent in trying to prevent them from taking place." Gee, why does that sound so familiar to me today?! :-) My second deja vu was reading the well-written piece by Lynn Hudson "Strong Animal Passions." It was really bugging me why I thought I had read it before when I knew I hadn't. Finally, figured it out--a historical fiction novel called "Sister Moon" features many of these figures as characters including Mary Ellen Pleasant and Thomas Bell. If you ever get the chance to read something NOT assigned, it is worth picking up.

Week #8 Comments

2005-10-24T12:55:00.000-04:00

See my comments on John's site:
http://lottareading.blogspot.com/

and

Dave's site:
http://davehistory616.blogspot.com/

Week #8/Post #8

2005-10-22T18:01:00.000-04:00

I have to say, William Robbins wins this semester's "Duh" award. Colony and Empire's basic thesis is that the pursuit of profits transformed the American West. All together now...DUH! This is right up there with "Westward Expansion transformed the American West."

OK...yes, I'm being overly reductive in my snarky attempt to say I wasn't a huge fan of this week's reading. Yes, the argument is SLIGHTLY more nuanced. Robbins argues that historians have sometimes ignored these forces, and that these forces sometimes run counter to our mythology of rugged individualism driving back the wilderness of the West to create civilizations, cities, and societies in the mountains, plains and deserts. And his point is interesting that the West was instead mostly a manipulated product of the East, a puppet that responded to the yanks and pulls of its strings by capitalists and industrialists in New York and London.

But sheesh...if I'm guilty of being reductive to prove a point, then it is only because I learned from a master after spending the week with this book. If there is anything we've learned from this course, it is that the story of the West doesn't have one box, one neat thread that ties it all together with a big, pretty bow. What Robbins is providing is an interesting collection of facts, stories, and statistics that nestle into our overall understanding of the West. Capitalism and the pursuit of profit is not, however, the single, all-encompassing narrative that explains the West, which is what I think Robbins is ultimately hoping for.

I went on Jstor to see how other historians reviewed this book. (Come on, admit it...you do it too!). I was glad to see I wasn't alone on this. Jeffery Adler had a similar reaction: "Robbins narrative is forceful but sometimes lacks nuance....Perhaps more important, in his effort to organize western history around a single theme, Robbins minimizes the crucial roles played by cultural, ethnic, racial and political conflict in the region's development." (see The American Historical Review Vol 101, No. 2, April 1996. pg 557-558.)

Unfortunately, The American Historical Review or any other publication doesn't give out "duh" awards for books that state the obvious. Maybe they should...I could write "Manifest Destiny transformed the American West" and give Colony and Empire a run for its money.

Week #7 Comments

2005-10-17T07:33:00.000-04:00

My comments this week are on Audrey's site:
http://ahaugan616.blogspot.com/
and
Ricky's
http://gaulthist616.blogspot.com/

Week #7/Post #7

2005-10-15T20:09:00.000-04:00

Back in Week #5 with Roaring Camp and Murder in Tombstone I wrote "I think of it [the West] as a petrie dish, a grand experiment, the ultimate reality show...the West is where we got to again and again recreate community and society. And perhaps more tantalizing, more teasing, the West is where there was always the possibility of chucking all of society's conventions and rules out the window and starting from scratch."

The Way to the West has actually helped me to support that theory, and to really begin to think of the West as where, as Elliott West (did he make that name up?) describes, there are conflicting impulses that need to be worked out. "First, the country's difference invited new arrivals to change it" (134) and the second impulse to leave it exactly as the found it. "They praised the new land for its lack of what they had left behind them." (135). That "lack of what they had left behind them" is really key to me. Certainly Elliott West is mostly talking about land issues...cultivating wilderness, building cities on the plains, creating civilization out of the chaos. But I think it also goes deeper than that, to the creation of societies, and the decisions of what to import from the East or whatever "other place" you came from.

Consider Elliott West's "Old Geezer fiction" summary: "The Geezers in these stories are men who were there at that moment when people came from the east to reproduce their own world in the innocent, unstoried western paradise." This sounds suspiciously like Roaring Camp's disappointed miners who lamented the arrival of "society" on their doorstep.

This is not to say I buy into the myth that the West was ONLY lawless debauchery (although after Roy Baker, I might be willing to say that was more true than not). But I do think the West stops being the West when it starts to look, feel, smell and sound like the East. I think the West is the "other" to the East, and every time a bit of that "otherness" slips away, the West becomes a little less of itself, no matter where it sits geographically. Of course, if I keep up this line of thought, I'm going to need to take a whole other class called "The American East" so that I can know where one ends, and the other begins. Or maybe we cover that next week...

Week #6 Comments

2005-10-11T08:15:00.000-04:00

I have left comments on John's and Brian's sites.
http://lakota10.blogspot.com/
http://lottareading.blogspot.com/
My commments provide a tiny bit of my logic in who I think killed Roy Baker.

As I suspected, my blog has attracted some attention. Let me say before class tonight my theory is not without some flaws. I happened to have my parents in town for the weekend and ran it by them, a murder mystery fan (Mom) and a former officer with a fair amount of military history knowledge (Dad) and they were both skeptical. Still, I think I can marshal the testimony to make a pretty good case. Now I'm wondering, do I spill the beans in class or does Dr. Petrick want us to keep our theories to ourselves and present them exclusively in our papers? (And can you tell I'm obsessing over what the heck these papers are supposed to be all about?!)

Week #6/Post #6

2005-10-08T04:34:00.000-04:00

In History 610 one of the approaches we studied was "microhistory," using the book The Return of Martin Guerre. I was hooked. I found microhistory to be fascinating and full of possibilities, and have used it since to discuss both the Columbian Exposition of 1893, and the rise and fall of the American whaling fleet.

So going into this week I thought I knew what I was going to do with Roy Baker. I assumed the Roy Baker story would be almost superficial to my paper, that the real purpose would be to use it as a springboard to a variety of topics about the American West. Poor, dead Roy would be just a device to get me into those topics.

But there is a problem. Having worked my way though these documents all week, really pouring over them, I now think I know who killed Roy Baker. I mean, I think I really know. And suddenly Roy Baker's murder mystery isn't so superficial to me...it is core. I know that to really do it right, I could devote my paper just to building my case. I need those pages to bring Roy's killer to justice! So unless I want to double the number of pages set out in the syllabus, suddenly the springboards need to be abandoned.

With the paper looming, it is a big question--is Roy Baker's story important enough to devote the whole paper to, or was he always supposed to be a device to larger topics? I thought I knew going into this. Now I'm not so sure.

Week #5 Comments

2005-10-03T09:59:00.000-04:00

You can find my comments on John's Site:
http://lottareading.blogspot.com/

and

Kent's Site:
http://kentplace.blogspot.com/

Week #5/Post #5

2005-10-01T17:31:00.000-04:00

In reading Roaring Camp and Murder in Tombstone I had an epiphany as to one of the reasons we are fascinated by the West. The West is the story of what happens to people when they are forced to create a society or community from scratch. And we fascinated by this phenomenon. Think about what is at the core of reality tv shows, which are still a mainstay of popular culture after more than a decade. It is the interpersonal dynamics of being forced into a new community in which the rules of engagement are built from ground up. Big Brother, Real World, Survivor...they are all about people negotiating the rules of community in isolation and, left to their own devices, how they establish the dynamics of their tiny "societies." Don't like reality tv? Think Lord of the Flies, Alas Babylon, Mad Max, Gilligan's Island, Lost...take your pick. The fact remains that we are drawn to these stories and fictionizations because we love to place ourselves vicariously in situations in which rules are erased and rebuilt. And that is what happened again and again in the West.

Susan Lee Johnson delights in this, as her two strongest chapters (Domestic Life in the Diggings and Bulls, Bears and Dancing Boys) illustrate. She is enamored with the California in which life is upside-down, where men take on women's roles, where whites take on non-white roles, where men from families of means in the East become waitresses and domestics in the West. It is the ultimate in a carnevelesque, Bizzaro world of inversion except that it doesn't last for a few days or weeks but for years. And then "normal" society creeps back in and rights the inverted order so that it is no longer unique. Lubet, of course, is less interested in this than his trial, but he too hints at this trend, providing a brief sketch of a town that started with a prospector’s snub at predictions of death and became a magnet for Eastern capital, Eastern mayors and Eastern concepts of law and order. But like everything else, these needed to be negotiated against the realities of circumstance and isolation. Those realities included Cowboys, and economies based on stolen cattle and free-flowing whiskey.

It isn't the West that becomes the East that fascinates us. How interesting was Sonora after all the trappings of society (schools, churches, WOMEN for heaven's sake!) moved in? Isn't our love of the O.K. Corral based on the fact that we imagine a "lawless" town where gunfights break out in broad daylight? Those crazy Tombstoners...what wild lives they must have led! (Kudos by the way to Lubet for busting those myths).

Every week I may have a different idea of what the West actually was/is. But this week, I think of it as a petrie dish, a grand experiment, the ultimate reality show...the West is where we got to again and again recreate community and society. And perhaps more tantalizing, more teasing, the West is where there was always the possibility of chucking all of society's conventions and rules out the window and starting from scratch. Bizzaro worlds indeed...

Week #4 Comments

2005-09-25T18:07:00.000-04:00

You can find this week's comments on Marty's site:
http://martyscowgirlblog.blogspot.com/
(p.s...sorry I typed Martha off the class list before I remembered Marty.)

and

Dave's site:
http://davehistory616.blogspot.com/

Week #4/Post #4

2005-09-25T08:49:00.000-04:00

As we approach what some angrily call "Rape of the Indigenous Peoples Day" (more commonly called Columbus Day) indignation over disease, slaughter, guns and alcohol are sure to make their annual rounds in the press and media. But as horrible as the history between Indians and Europeans (and their descendents) is, isn't it tempting to distill these horrors into a neat little dichotomy where pre-European life on the American continent was a utopia of happy hunting grounds, and native life after European contact was the non-stop destruction of culture, religion and social structure. To me the real story that emerges out of One Vast Winter Count is that of Indian agency...and this sometime means culpability...in the shaping of their own story. Calloway has done an excellent job of reminding us of two important points: 1) that Indians faced war, slaughter and catastrophic disruptions before Europeans, and 2) that Indians were not helpless, impotent children in the face of an unstoppable European juggernaut.

Again and again Calloway demonstrates that Indians took pieces of what Europeans offered to them or tried to force upon them, and made them their own. Of the Hopis: "They chose what they wanted from the Spaniards and incorporated foreign ideas and things by imbuing them with their own values..." (189). Of the Caddos: "Now they extended their exchange relationships to incorporate Europeans, who promised merchandise and military assistance. But they did so on their own terms." (252) Nowhere is this better demonstrated than Calloway's chapter on the horse, which proves that certain aspects of European contact can't just be labeled "good" or "bad." The introduction of the horse into Indian lives had seismic repercussions that favored some tribes and weakened others. But again, Indians showed agency in how they chose to use this new development in their lives, with sometimes surprising results: "Despite an ethos that required restraint and respect in hunting, the Indians' annual harvest of buffalo began to exceed the herds natural increase in periods when the toll taken by wolves, fire, habitat degradation, and drought were high. Buffalo populations were falling even before American soldiers, hunters and ranchers began to destroy the herds in the second half of the nineteenth century." (312)

Calloway reminded me of other topics like slavery and treatment of immigrants in which recent scholarship has shown that groups facing assimilation and/or annihilation still show remarkable adaptability in the face of adversity, including deciding for themselves what works and what doesn't from the "dominant" culture. And Calloway doesn't try and strain the theme too far...eventually choices do spiral out of control and out of the hands of the Indians, such as the small pox epidemic. Pestilence leaves little room for agency.

But all of this is important to remember when reading Lewis and Clark's entries. When Clark writes of the Tushepau [Flathead] offering robes and peace pipes, and continues "I was the first white man who ever wer on the waters of this river," (233) it is vital not to get swept up in some fantasy that these lands or tribes were free of European/American imprint before Lewis and Clark. For many generations, Indians had been picking and choosing what from the white man's world influenced their lives.

Post #3/Week #3

2005-09-04T15:46:00.000-04:00

My Week #3 entry will be after our class has had its session, as I am returning from Australia the night before that class. (I also make no promises on how coherent I'll be that night). However, I hope to write on reading Frederick Turner and our other selections while traveling in a country where the stories of the pioneer, the indigenous tribes, and the “frontier” have importance mirroring our own country’s history.

Post #2/Week #2

2005-09-04T15:45:00.000-04:00

Barreling through American history at break-neck speeds (the Civil War in 12 pages!), _The American West: A New Interpretive History_ takes us on a whirlwind tour of the West. It seems to have two primary aims as it careens forward: 1) Synthesize the scholarship on the West's "under-represented" groups--Indian history, Chicano history, African-American history, immigrant history, women's history, labor history, etc. and 2) to serve as a sort of MythBuster on every conceivable subject from rangers (guess what, there were women!), to Mormons (they weren't all for polygamy!) to the Pony Express (it was doomed before it ever began!) and on and on and on.

The loftier goal, and where the book succeeds, is the synthesis of the segmented analysis of the West by recent historians. The "New Interpretive History" to which the subtitle refers is the scholarship of the last 50 years or so, in which hyphenated history allowed scholars to approach a large subject like "the West" from a variety of angles, and more importantly, from the perspective of groups other than white, male settlers. Hine and Faragher have not really broken new ground here, but have allowed us to catch up on all the new ground that has been broken over the past half-century. It is a valuable service, and I admired the organization and readability they brought to the topics. Their chapters are roughly chronological, but are broken into larger themes that don't necessarily adhere to a strict year-by-year timeline...to the book's benefit. In trying to keep it interesting and readable, I do think their presentation sometimes smacked of pandering to younger audiences, as if Hine and Faragher are hoping to pop up on every undergraduate history syllabus across the country. While what they report is anchored in sound scholarship (as the extensive notes can attest), the eagerness to go myth-busting sometimes slipped into easy-to-consume, USA Today-style factoids.

In spite of admiring, liking, and respecting this book, I couldn't help but feel like I was in some sort of history smorgasbord Hell. Bear with me as I stretch this metaphor to its limits...imagine a buffet where you have a 100 different items, but instead of selecting a few choices that go well together, you keep taking a little bit from all 100. Soon your plate is piled high, greens beans running into chocolate pudding and chickpeas lost under fettuccine alfredo. That is how I was starting to feel as all the various groups received their due attention, with plenty more to pile on. Hine and Faragher write as if they are driven to include everything and forget nothing in this sphere of "new interpretive history." But because there has been so much scholarship over recent decades, the book becomes an excess of riches...and simply too much to digest.

Post #1/Week #1

2005-09-02T17:31:00.000-04:00

Ordering textbooks from Amazon instead of going to the campus bookstore is not only an exercise in savings, but has introduced an entirely new way of preparing for a class. Given the staggering tonnage of books (how many forests have died so that we might learn?!) for History 616, had I purchased them all at once from the bookstore, I would have merely staggered home under their crushing weight, too exhausted for much more. They would have tumbled into a heap on the floor, laying inert and ignored until I was forced to rifle through the rubble for the next week's selections.

But ordering from Amazon and its subsidiaries meant they arrived in ones and twos, like guests to a party. I could appreciate each one as it was delivered, and an almost ritualistic process took shape: taking note of the cover art, reading the back, testing its heft, opening to see if the print was large or tiny, flipping through looking at illustrations, rummaging through the index seeking out interesting words and topics. Getting these books through a gradual process meant I could appreciate what we were going to study this semester, rather than be simply overwhelmed.

The words and phrases of which I took note in those indexes are perhaps indicative of where my interests lie for this course. "Books, photographically illustrated" from _Print the Legend_ jumped out because I'm fascinated by travel and tourism literature, and how wilderness has been portrayed through history. "Expositions" popped up in _Indians in Unexpected Places_, and is one of my favorite topics...I'd love to study World's Fairs more completely. "Homosexuality" certainly caught my attention until I realized that it was actually "Homosociality" in _Roaring Camp's_ index. And I'd been wondering with a fellow student just last week how much queer history overlapped with Western history. Fortunately I won't be left hanging: "homosexuality, among cowboys" got two whole pages in _The American West_. "Jefferson National Expansion Memorial" (most people just call it the St. Louis Arch), was a spot in _Devil's Bargains_. St. Louis being my hometown I went ahead and peaked what Hal Rothman wrote about that (but I won't spoil the surprise).

So thanks to the wonders of internet shopping I approach 616 with a whole level of excitement and appreciation I never would have had otherwise. Of course, not everything I found the indexes filled me with wonder and anticipation. You might have to wake me when we get to "miners and mining, egalitarian phase of."

(Although I tried to use italics for book titles, there seems to be some problem with my browser allowing this through the keyboard shortcuts. Until I get this resolved I used _Title of Book_ to help break them out from the surrounding text.)