TY - JOUR
AU - Aron, Stephen
AB - So long has “the West” stood for America, that it is hard to imagine it as part of the Americas. Likewise, so long has its history been associated with the westward expansion of the United States, that it is difficult to envision the West as a place shaped by movements from other directions. Yet to understand how the West became a West (and not a “North,” a “South,” or an “East”) and how it became American requires that we recover a history in which it was not always “ours” and is still not exclusively ours. By returning the West to the world, we recapture a history that was more international than national and far less exceptional than has often been assumed. The notion that the westward expansion of the United States made this nation what it is and its people who they are has broad and deep roots, but it was Frederick Jackson Turner who gave this idea its most powerful and enduring scholarly spin. In his 1893 essay on “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Turner boldly asserted that the “the advance of American settlement westward explain[ed] American development,” nurturing the growth of democracy and nourishing the spirit of individualism and enterprise. Movements west held the key to “effective Americanization”—a process that Turner limited to the transformation of “European” into “American.” In short, Turner's “frontier thesis” insisted that what was uniquely American about the United States owed to its westward expansion (1). By returning the West to the world, we recapture a history that was more international than national and far less exceptional than has often been assumed. More than a century of criticism has knocked Frederick Jackson Turner's thesis from the scholarly pedestal it once occupied. Few historians now accept that westward expansion alone explained the patterns of the American past. Not many argue for an American exceptionalism based exclusively on a frontier or western heritage (2). But if the West and the process of westward expansion no longer play such large roles in manifesting one nation's destiny, these acquire fresh significance when restored to the intersection at which the destinies of many nations, peoples, and empires converged. To that end, historians must first reckon with the multiple colonial enterprises that sought to expand their domains across North America. From this multicolonial perspective, the history of expansionism in North America is more easily linked to imperial currents that flowed from Europe to the Americas and across much of the globe from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Those connections, in turn, open up possibilities for comparing the colonialisms that evolved in North America and elsewhere during this era. Finally, in the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, the West has retained its international position, both as a crossroads of peoples and as a terrain for global dreams. Returning the West to the world begins by acknowledging its contested origins in what Americans call the “colonial era.” Of course, when Americans think about that period, they don't typically think about the West. Year after year, this lesson gets driven home to me when I ask students in my course on the history of the American West what images and individuals they most closely identify with colonial America. Always they have responded with Pilgrims (at the first Thanksgiving), Pocahontas (as drawn by Disney animators), and patriots (led by George Washington). No surprises here: depictions of Pilgrims, Pocahontas, and patriots remain staples of American popular culture, and they figure prominently in a colonial history that commences with the founding of Virginia and Massachusetts and culminates with the independence of the United States. Still, I remain surprised that no student has added “missions” to this list, an omission that is especially puzzling because the vast majority of my students are from California. That means back in fourth grade almost all of them built an elaborate diorama of a mission. When prompted, students remember in great detail the experience of constructing missions from sugar cubes, popsicle sticks, egg cartons, and whatever else could be scrounged from parents' kitchens. Yet despite this most memorable of grade school projects, missions do not enter their vision of colonial history. In their view, the history of colonial America happened exclusively on the Atlantic coast and involved only the thirteen mainland British American colonies that became the original United States. From this vantage point, the interior of the continent, laying west of the seaboard colonies, was only a West awaiting annexation by the United States. Not that long ago, that is how most scholars conceived the field too, but recent work has forwarded a broader vision, spanning continent, hemisphere, and even oceans. Increasingly more typical are colonial surveys that bring all of North America into sight, that juxtapose Portuguese, Swedish, Russian, Dutch, French, and Spanish brands of colonialism alongside the imperial endeavors of the British, and that tie colonies in the Americas to trading systems that drew the products and people of Europe, Africa, and Asia together. Moreover, from this wider view, stretching from Canada to the Caribbean and Mexico to Alaska, what was merely a West from the perspective of the Atlantic coastal colonies becomes a South, a North, and an East (3). In fact, the interior of North America was not west at all for many of the people who lived there or moved there. It was instead the focus of prolonged rivalries between European empires, principally Spanish, French, and British, that emerged in the seventeenth century and intensified in the eighteenth. Into the nineteenth century, much of the continent remained up for grabs, with the designs of European empire-builders then competing with those of westward-minded Americans. We must always keep in mind that the ultimate making of the American West required the breaking of rivals' claims on the land (4). From the start, expansionist schemes followed varying paths into and inside North America. For the Spanish, prior colonial experiences in Mexico guided expectations about building empires based on the extraction of mineral resources and the exploitation of native labor. In moving north, however, Spanish colonizers found lands without gold or silver and with Indian inhabitants not easily mastered. Like the Spanish, French empire makers laid claim to a vast domain in the interior of North America. But like the Spanish North, French colonists sparsely populated an arc of settlement reaching from the St. Lawrence Valley, across the Great Lakes, and down the Mississippi River. These settlers were especially dependent on the good will of Indians, for only with the partnership of native men and women could traders acquire the furs and skins that were the principal export of New France. In contrast with the North American claims of the Spanish or French, the British mainland colonies quickly established much larger European populations and more equal sex ratios. Compared with their Spanish and French brethren, English men consorted with Indian women far less frequently. Rising colonial numbers also fed increasing demand for land, creating tensions with Indian claimants, though on the eve of the American Revolution, British settlements had barely penetrated the Appalachian Mountains (5). All of these expansionist projects were entangled with one another and with the counter-colonial aspirations of diverse Indian peoples. In Madrid, Paris, and London, and in colonial capitals, imperial authorities elaborated grand strategies and displayed maps with impressive boundaries, but the actual situation in the North American interior defied their projections. Again and again, the programs designed by distant metropolitan officials could not be enforced on Indian peoples who maintained the power to draw their own borders and protect their own rights. Through the eighteenth century across most of North America, Europeans could not dictate, but instead had to negotiate, their relations with Indians (6). For indigenous peoples, the territories over which European empires vied were not “North,” “South,” or “West,” but homelands, though some Indians were themselves relatively recent arrivals to the region. Into the nineteenth century, Indians pursued a variety of paths to resist dispossession and dependency at the hands of one or another colonial invader. These included migrations, accommodations, confederations, and revitalizations. All proved successful for a time, especially so long as one or another European power lent support to their cause. But once imperial rivals withdrew from what the American republic claimed as its west, Indian options narrowed (7). As the world, in the sense of imperial competition, retreated, the pace of westward expansion accelerated. In the century and a half after the founding of Jamestown, colonial settlements spread inland less than two hundred miles. The treaty that ended the American Revolution assigned the United States a western boundary at the Mississippi River, but for several decades, the republic's control over this first American West was tenuous. Only after the War of 1812 did Britain relinquish its interest in the lands south of the Great Lakes and did American settlers complete their occupation of the country between the Appalachians and the Mississippi (and complete as well the removal of Indians from that region). By then, the United States had also acquired an immense new West beyond the Mississippi River. By mid-century, American pioneers reached the Pacific, and in the century's second half, they filled in what was now indisputably the United States's West. In 1890, the extent of settlement was such that the Census Bureau declared the American frontier closed, an announcement that Frederick Jackson Turner determined marked the end of “the really American part of our history” (8). As the preceding paragraphs have emphasized, what Turner deemed “really American” was international before it became national. Not until the West ceased to be a zone of interimperial rivalry did it become manifestly American. Nor did this “effective Americanization” make the history of westward expansion particularly exceptional. To the contrary, the frontier processes that unfolded across North America readily—and sometimes uncomfortably—equate with numerous episodes of colonization and resistance around the globe (9). The most frequent comparisons are with other European “settler societies.” Here, the United States's northern neighbor, Canada, stands both geographically and historically as the nearest point of reference. Canada, too, had a history of westward expansion, though Canadian historians have often stressed the differences between their frontier and that of the United States. In contrast with the United States, Canada's more forbidding West required greater government effort to attract settlers, and even then western Canada boasted a much smaller population than the western United States. Fewer in number, late-nineteenth-century homesteaders on the Canadian prairie put less pressure on native landholdings, and displacements of Indians did not provoke the same level of conflict and bloodshed as in the United States. Still, Canada and the United States shared much with one another and with other settler societies like Australia and New Zealand that had common roots in “Anglo” traditions of law, economics, and governance. These societies all evolved as well into “neo-Europes,” that is, nations outside of Europe where persons of European ancestry came to dominate demographically. Such settler societies did best in temperate zones around the globe, where the climate eased the transplantation of European people, as well as of their familiar crops and livestock (10). The dominance of newcomers came, of course, at the tragic expense of natives. By the end of the nineteenth century, the number of Indians in the United States had fallen to around 250,000. Although historians disagree on how high the pre-Columbian population might have been, the general consensus is that Indian numbers plummeted by 90–95 percent in the four centuries after 1492. By no means was this demographic catastrophe unique to North American Indians. Across the hemisphere, a similar collapse occurred, as waves of epidemic diseases decimated natives who lacked immunity to the germs brought by newcomers. A key difference, though, was that much of Spanish and Portuguese America, especially those colonies situated in tropical regions that were less hospitable to European transplantations, did not become neo-Europes. Instead, generations of intercourse between Europeans, Indians, and imported African slaves created societies where mixed-race ancestry was the rule (11). Diseases took their toll beyond the Americas, most destructively among Australian aborigines, but these depopulations were largely an unwitting product of European colonizations; not so, the calls for extermination and the policies of expulsion that were deliberate, often state-sponsored, assaults on indigenous peoples. In the nineteenth century, the United States government maintained that military campaigns against Indians were retaliatory actions and that removal from homelands and confinement to reservations were humane policies devised to save and civilize natives. Today, though, “ethnic cleansing” would seem a more appropriate designation for the violence and forced relocations that accompanied American westward expansion. Applying that term facilitates comparisons with a host of historical and contemporary episodes, albeit ones that Americans may not want to see as parallel to their own. Consider, for example, the lessons that later expansionists took away from America's “success.” As Charles Bright and Michael Geyer have pointed out, the American program of spatial expansion and economic development served as a “model” for Germans and Japanese, who “imagined themselves doing in the twentieth century what they thought Americans had done in the nineteenth: conquering a territorial hinterland” and purging it of “savage inhabitants” to transform it into “a source of food and resources, a controllable inland market, and a homeland for a growing population organized for maximum production” (12). Illuminating parallels may also be drawn between the ways in which native peoples resisted colonial domination. Migration was one option that some natives employed to get away from invaders. Others sought accommodations that might allow a measure of autonomy or secure a place within colonial society. Still others fought back, with confederations occasionally developing among previously divided indigenous groups. Often these confederacies were inspired by charismatic prophets, whose dreams emphasized the power of ritual to purify and protect followers and restore precolonial conditions. In North America, the most notable Indian prophets included Popé, Neolin, Tenskwatawa, and Wovoka, who, while emerging at different times and in different corners of the continent, shared visions that promised to revitalize Indian cultures demoralized by colonial oppression. None of these counter-colonial strategies was exceptional to American Indians. From Africa to Asia, direct European imperialism—or even indirect pressure on traditional societies brought about by increased contact with European commerce and ideas—prompted responses similar to those of American Indians. Not surprisingly, then, these histories of anti-colonial struggle witnessed the emergence of powerful prophetically-inspired movements such as Wahhabism in the Arabian Peninsula or the Taiping and Boxer Rebellions in China that, despite their disparate context and content, bore considerable resemblance to the uprisings spurred by Popé, Neolin, Tenskwatawa, and Wovoka (13). The records of resistance make for fruitful comparison between the American West and the world, but these revitalization movements were not connected to one another. Taiping Rebels knew nothing of Tenskwatawa. Wovoka was wholly unaware of Wahhabism. Their prophecies drew on local traditions, and their ambitions were not in any respect global. At the same time, the West and its people were in most respects becoming ever more worldly. The transoceanic connections that European empires created did not disappear when the United States consolidated its political control over the region. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the resources of the American West were pulled more deeply into the world economy. The West remained, too, a land of many peoples. Indeed, recent scholarship has accented the region's racial and ethnic diversity and made that the centerpiece of western American exceptionalism. In the West, Asians coming east, Hispanics coming north, and Indians both long established and newly removed mingled with westering white and black Americans and European immigrants. Absent this multiracial complexion that gave the region its distinctive character, the West, in historian Richard White's judgment, “might as well be New Jersey with mountains” (14). Beginning in the late nineteenth and continuing through the twentieth century, a variety of measures were taken to make the population of the West less worldly. In the 1850s, the California legislature passed a foreign miners' tax that was intended to keep immigrants out of the state's gold fields. Two decades later, white Californians blamed Chinese workers for economic hard times. Bowing to popular pressures from white westerners, the government of the United States implemented the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. This was followed by a series of laws contrived to keep other Asians out, all enacted well before the United States moved to restrict immigration from Europe. In the second half of the twentieth century, immigration restrictionists shifted their focus to the West's southern border, seeking to stop people from Mexico and Latin America from entering the United States. But the border patrol has never stopped the flow of immigrants coming to “El Norte,” and, in the wake of immigration reform in 1965, the West became again an east open to Asians. Over the last four decades, increased immigration has not only made the West more worldly, but also the rest of the nation. In fact, at the start of the twenty-first century, New Jersey, now boasting growing Latin American and Asian American populations, has come to look more like the West—though still without the mountains (15). Now here was the changing ethnic composition of the American West more dramatic than in Los Angeles, which had been the “whitest” of major U.S. cities until it became the destination for millions of migrants after the 1965 Immigration Act. By the end of the twentieth century, two out of five Los Angelenos were foreign-born, and more than 40 percent of residents were of Hispanic descent. Likewise, the proportion of Asians jumped five-fold in the years after 1965. So great and so diverse was the flood of immigrants into Los Angeles that at century's end the city's public schools enrolled children who spoke nearly one hundred different languages (16). It is fitting that the world has now come to Los Angeles, because it was Los Angeles, more than any other place, that gave the West, or more accurately “the western,” to the world. True, even before the birth of Hollywood, Buffalo Bill's spectacular touring shows gave Europeans a taste of the “Wild West.” But it was cinema that magnified the spectacle and multiplied the audience for westerns. For decades, westerns reigned as Hollywood's dominant product, thrilling not only generations of American movie-goers, but also providing tens of millions of people around the globe with a West to fire imaginations. And when Hollywood stopped making westerns, directors elsewhere began making their own. Take the so-called “spaghetti westerns,” of which there were hundreds produced in Italy in the 1960s. The most famous of these were made by the Italian director Sergio Leone. These were filmed in Spain, based on Japanese samurai movies, and starred a cast of American, Italian, and Yugoslav actors. What a striking example of how the western belongs to the world (17). So, it should be clear, does the West. Its history has long belonged to the world. For centuries before it became just the West, it lured European expansionists, and its products were linked to trading routes across the Atlantic and Pacific. The westward expansion of the United States in the nineteenth century created clearer boundaries, but these borders remained permeable to the flows of people and goods to and from distant shores. In the twentieth century, the western gave the West a mythic profile that struck a powerful chord worldwide. And in our day, the American West is more than ever a place of global convergence. Further Reading More than seventy years ago, Herbert E. Bolton, in “The Epic of Greater America,” American Historical Review 38 (April 1933): 448–74, called for returning the American West to the world by putting its history in a broader hemispheric context. Although Bolton's suggestion did not stimulate much hemispheric work by historians of the American West, Latin Americanists were more responsive. Some good examples of this scholarship are collected in David J. Weber and Jane M. Rausch, eds., Where Cultures Meet: Frontiers in Latin American History (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1994). Beyond the Americas, historians of the American West have engaged in a number of “comparative frontier” projects. Among the most notable of these is The Frontier in History: North America and Southern Africa Compared, edited by Howard Lamar and Leonard Thompson and cited in endnote 9, which pairs essays on North American and South African frontiers and which inspired James O. Gump, The Dust Rose Like Smoke: The Subjugation of the Zulu and Sioux (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994). Equally first-rate for the comparisons and connections it draws between gold rushes in Australia and North America is David Goodman, Gold Seeking: ictoria and California in the 1850s (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994). Also worthy of attention for their wider ranging geography and chronology are George Wolfskill and Stanley Palmer, eds., Essays on Frontiers in World History (College Station: Published for the University of Texas at Arlington by Texas A&M University Press, 1983), and Bradley J. Parker and Lars Rodseth, eds., Untaming the Frontier in Anthropology, Archaeology, and History (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2005). Over the last twenty years, however, many “new western historians” have turned on Frederick Jackson Turner, eschewing his frontier framework in favor a regional perspective on the history of the American West. Foremost among these critics is Patricia Nelson Limerick, whose The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1987), makes for an especially engaging read. Yet, Limerick has recently signaled her own interest in returning the West to the world. Instead of limiting the comparisons and connections to shared frontier histories, Limerick's “Going West and Ending Up Global,” Western Historical Quarterly 32 (Spring 2001): 5–23, focuses on common legacies of colonialism and environmental transformation. Indeed, historians of the environment have recognized that ecosystems do not usually conform with regional or national boundaries. Taking cues from Richard White, “The Nationalization of Nature,” Journal of American History 86 (December 1999): 976–86, environmental historians have experimented with a variety of scales, including transnational ones. Jared Diamond, in Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), provides the largest of all scales to explore and explain how environmental advantages underwrote European conquest of the Americas, as well as much of human history. As this article emphasizes, one need not leave North America to take account of the international dimensions of western American history. The idea that colonial America, which extends beyond British America to encompass the entire continent, was international before it became national informs Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “International at the Creation: Early Modern American History,” in Thomas Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 103–22. That insight also shapes Alan Taylor's American Colonies: The Settling of North America, cited in endnote 3, and Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher, The American West: A New Interpretive History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), which, more so than any other recent western history textbook, considers all of North America's colonial frontiers. The convergence of Spanish, French, British, and American colonial regimes in the middle Mississippi Valley is the subject of Stephen Aron, American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border State (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). The broad syntheses presented by Taylor and Hine and Faragher can be profitably supplemented with survey texts that focus on a single frontier, yet accent the international dimensions of the West before it was fully an American West. David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992) and John L. Kessell, Spain in the Southwest: A Narrative History of Colonial New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and California (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002) are two excellent ones that update the tradition of borderlands studies initiated by Bolton. David J. Weber, The Mexican Frontier, 1821–1846: The American Southwest Under Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982), examines the Mexican North before its acquisition by the United States. Valuable as well for its binational approach is Andrés Reséndez, Changing National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). For New France, W. J. Eccles, The Canadian Frontier, 1534–1760, rev. ed. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1983), is a fine overview. Exploring the expansion of the French into the Great Lakes region and the accommodations they reached with Indian peoples, Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), is a seminal interpretation that has profoundly influenced a generation of scholarship about intercultural relations in North America and around the globe. A sterling example of that influence is Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), a poignant account of the shifting relations between Britain, the United States, and Iroquois Indians in the 1780s and 1790s. Moving further forward in time and further west in space, Jeffrey Ostler, The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), links nineteenth-century American westward expansion and Indian resistance to similar currents around the globe. That the West remained international even after it was incorporated into the United States is a major theme of much recent work, particularly on the Southwest. For a sampling, see David G. Gutiérrez, “Migration, Emergent Ethnicity, and the ‘Third Space’: The Shifting Politics of Nationalism in Greater Mexico,” Journal of American History 86 (September 1999): 481–517, and Samuel Truett and Elliott Young, eds., Continental Crossroads: Remapping U.S.-Mexico Borderlands History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). Finally, the place of the West in the world's imagination has sparked many interesting contemplations, diverse examples of which include S. Ilan Troen, “Frontier Myths and Their Applications in America and Israel: A Transnational Perspective,” Journal of American History 86 (December 1999): 1209–30; Robert W. Rydell and Rob Kroes, Buffalo Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World, 1869–1922 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), and Kevin Mulroy, ed., Western Amerykanski: Polish Poster Art and the Western (Los Angeles: Autry Museum of Western Heritage in association with the University of Washington Press, 1999). End notes 1. Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in his The Frontier in American History (New York: H. Holt & Co., 1920), quotations on 1 and 4. This essay has been reprinted in scores of books and can be found online at <http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/TURNER/>. For discussions of the intellectual roots of the “frontier thesis,” see Richard White, “Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill,” in James B. Grossman, ed., The Frontier in American Culture: An Exhibition at the Newbury Library, August 16, 1994–January 7, 1995 (Chicago: The Library, 1994), 7–65; John Mack Faragher, “‘A Nation Thrown Back Upon Itself’: Frederick Jackson Turner and the Frontier,” in Faragher, ed., Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” and Other Essays (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1994), 1–10. 2. Hundreds of books and articles have been written critiquing one or another aspect, or all, of Turner's frontier thesis. For an excellent analysis of these debates, see Kerwin Lee Klein, Frontiers of Historical Imagination: Narrating the European Conquest of Native America, 1890–1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 3. The best new survey that takes a continental approach to colonial history is Alan Taylor, American Colonies: The Settling of North America, reprint (New York: Penguin Books, 2002, 2001). 4. I elaborate on the relationship between the “making” of an American West and the “breaking” of the claims of imperial rivals in Stephen Aron, “The Making of the First American West and the Unmaking of Other Realms,” in William Deverell, ed., A Companion to the American West, Blackwell Companions to American History series (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 5–24. 5. D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective of 500 Years; Volume 1: Atlantic America, 1492–1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), provides an excellent survey of the geography of European colonial expansion in North America. 6. Colin G. Calloway, One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis and Clark (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), offers an exceptional synthesis of American Indian history prior to the nineteenth century in what became the American West. 7. For a more extended explanation of the relationship between imperial rivalries and Indian counter-colonial strategies, see Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History,” American Historical Review 104 (June 1999): 814–41. See also the responses to this article in “Forum Essay :Responses; Borders and Borderlands,” American Historical Review 104 (October 1999): 1221–39. 8. Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” quotation on 4. 9. Those comparisons become easier once “frontier” is more specifically defined. As critics have pointed out, vague and shifting definitions deprive historians of the analytical precision needed for useful comparison. Worse still would be to adopt Turner's rendering of the frontier as “the meeting point between savagery and civilization.” Shorn, however, of such ethnocentric baggage, the frontier is more simply a meeting point. For greater clarity, I follow Howard Lamar and Leonard Thompson, who define frontier as the meeting point between peoples of differing ways and from distinct polities, where no single authority has established hegemony and fixed control over clearly demarcated borders. See Howard Lamar and Leonard Thompson, “Comparative Frontier History,” in Lamar and Thompson, eds., The Frontier in History: North America and Southern Africa Compared (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 7–8. 10. Walter Nugent, “Comparing Wests and Frontiers,” in Clyde A. Milner II, Carol A. O'Connor, and Martha A. Sandweiss, eds., The Oxford History of the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 803–33. For interpretations that emphasize the differences between Canadian and U.S. expansionism, see J. M. S. Careless, Frontier and Metropolis: Regions, Cities, and Identities in Canada before 1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989); Gerald Friesen, The Canadian Prairies: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984). 11. On the consequences of the “Columbian exchange” and the creation of “neo-Europes,” see Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 12. Charles Bright and Michael Geyer, “Where in the World Is America? The History of the United States in the Global Age,” in Thomas Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), quotation on 81. A Commission of Experts established by the Security Council of the United Nations to investigate interethnic violence in the Balkans in the early 1990s defined “ethnic cleansing” as “a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas. To a large extent, it is carried out in the name of misguided nationalism, historic grievances, and a powerful driving sense of revenge. This purpose appears to be the occupation of territory to the exclusion of the purged group or groups.” See Commission of Experts, Final Report (S/1994/674), available online at <http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/comexpert/III-IV_D.htm>. For studies that explore “ethnic cleansings” in North America, see John Mack Faragher, A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from Their American Homeland (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005); Gary Clayton Anderson, The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land, 1820–1875 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005). 13. Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815, paperback ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Robert L. Tignor, et al., Worlds Together, Worlds Apart: A History of the Modern World from the Mongol Empire to the Present (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2002), 239–69. 14. Richard White, “Race Relations in the American West,” American Quarterly 38 (1986), 394–416, quotation on 397. For a excellent survey of the peopling of the American West, see Walter Nugent, Into the West: The Story of Its People (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999). 15. Roger Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants Since 1882 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004). 16. For a provocative set of articles on Los Angeles as a global city, see “Los Angeles and the Future of Urban Cultures,” American Quarterly 56 (September 2004). 17. For Buffalo Bill, see Louis Warren, Buffalo Bill's America: William Cody and the Wild West Show (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005). For Sergio Leone, see Christopher Frayling, Once Upon a Time in Italy: The Westerns of Sergio Leone (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2005). Figures and Tables View largeDownload slide Danse des habitantes de Californie a la mission de San Francisco [ca. 1815], print by Louis Choris. (Image courtesy of California Cornerstones: Selected Images from The Bancroft Library Pictorial Collection, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.) View largeDownload slide Danse des habitantes de Californie a la mission de San Francisco [ca. 1815], print by Louis Choris. (Image courtesy of California Cornerstones: Selected Images from The Bancroft Library Pictorial Collection, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.) View largeDownload slide In the 1700s many Spaniards created casta paintings to illustrate an elaborate social hierarchy and naming system that classified different mixtures of Spaniards, Indians, and Africans. (Unknown artist, “De Indio y Zambaigo, Abarazado.” Image courtesy of the Southwest Museum of the American Indian Collection, Autry National Center, Los Angeles.) View largeDownload slide In the 1700s many Spaniards created casta paintings to illustrate an elaborate social hierarchy and naming system that classified different mixtures of Spaniards, Indians, and Africans. (Unknown artist, “De Indio y Zambaigo, Abarazado.” Image courtesy of the Southwest Museum of the American Indian Collection, Autry National Center, Los Angeles.) View largeDownload slide The Shawnee Indian leader Tenskwatawa (the Prophet) “shared visions that promised to revitalize American Indian cultures demoralized by colonial oppression.” (Image courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZC4-3419.) View largeDownload slide The Shawnee Indian leader Tenskwatawa (the Prophet) “shared visions that promised to revitalize American Indian cultures demoralized by colonial oppression.” (Image courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZC4-3419.) View largeDownload slide Gary Cooper, portraying the sheriff in the Hollywood western High Noon, graced this poster distributed in the 1980s by Solidarity, the anti-communist Polish trade union. (Image courtesy of the Museum of the American West collection, Autry National Center, Los Angeles.) View largeDownload slide Gary Cooper, portraying the sheriff in the Hollywood western High Noon, graced this poster distributed in the 1980s by Solidarity, the anti-communist Polish trade union. (Image courtesy of the Museum of the American West collection, Autry National Center, Los Angeles.) Copyright © 2006, Organization of American Historians
TI - Returning the West to the World
JF - OAH Magazine of History
DO - 10.1093/maghis/20.2.53
DA - 2006-03-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/returning-the-west-to-the-world-LOhBYJuEFS
SP - 53
EP - 60
VL - 20
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
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