Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West - Softcover

Limerick Ph.D., Patricia Nelson

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393321029 ISBN 13: 9780393321029

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001

Synopsis

"Patricia Limerick is simply one of the best writers alive."—Garry Wills

In Something in the Soil, Patricia Nelson Limerick travels far outside the usual academic circles to bring Western past and Western present into a spirited union. Whether her topic is the rapid growth in the West today, the patent awfulness of most academic writing, or struggles over the standing of the "Great White Men" of the region’s past, Limerick operates on the principle that history is an active presence in the West, layers of collective memory that are, quite literally, "something in the soil." Enlightening and always witty, this wide-ranging collection of essays and arguments from the New West’s landmark historian offers an artful journey into its dramatic past and contentious present.

About this title

About the Author:

Patricia Nelson Limerick is a professor of history and chair of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

From Publishers Weekly:

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0393321029
• ISBN 13: 9780393321029
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384