As someone drawn to the history of the American West while an undergraduate in the mid-1990s, I am of a generation whose careers were profoundly influenced by the emergence of the New Western History. The basic contours of this shift are now familiar. Patricia Nelson Limerick’s The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (1991) spurred a popular and academic rethinking of the history of the American West. It appeared the same year as the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American Art’s The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820–1920, which critically examined ideologies related to the U.S. conquest of the American West and led to a public outcry. There was debate about the “old” versus the “new” western history, and organizations like the Western History Association went through growing pains.
There was also tremendous excitement over new topics and those especially suited for...
University of California Press