62: Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land

Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth, is an American Studies classic.  In it, Smith both explains and justifies the American Studies myth-and-symbol method as the way to access and interpret American culture, and he applies this method to a study of the myth of the American West.  He argues that the difficulty of the myth of the American West, which is actually a subset of a larger agrarian tradition coming out of Jeffersonian democracy, is that it "accepted the paired but contradictory ideas of nature and civilization as a general principle of historical and social interpretation."  In other words, American culture comes out of an unresolved tension about what to do with the machine in the garden.

For Smith, myths and symbols are larger and smaller units of the same thing: "an intellectual construct that fuses concept and emotion into an image."  Further, these images are not just the world of a single mind; they are collective representations, symbols pointing to a particularly American worldview.  This worldview itself has a history, and analyzing its various incarnations in connection with their historical context helps us understand it.  In other words, myth and symbol is of necessity interdisciplinary, because it situates literary analysis within history.

48: Richard White's The Middle Ground

In The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815, Richard White argues that the French and Native Americans negotiated a middle ground in the Great Lakes region; unlike in other parts of the country, colonization here created a region characterized by negotiation among groups with relatively equal power.

For White, "middle ground" has two distinct meanings:

• A productive "process of mutual and creative misunderstanding;" this includes both sides' willingness to justify their own actions in terms of their partners' perceived cultural expectations; folks who sought out similarities between their culture and their partners' culture; and the understanding that even the most tenuous cross-cultural similarity can be used in negotiations if both sides accept it.
• A "quite particular historical space that was the outcome of this process:" the Great Lakes region, aka the pays d'en haut.

Because the middle ground is a spatial metaphor, it's possible to conflate the process of creative misunderstanding and the physical space, so that the Great Lakes region becomes the product of two cultures that have roughly equivalent power, a historically-specific place where creative miscommunication between Europeans and Native Americans created new, hybrid cultural forms.

White is careful to characterize this middle ground as a place constituted not by violence and bloodshed but by adaptation, compromise, and mutual respect.  He is also careful to link it specifically to the Great Lakes region, because he derived it empirically there via oral and written histories and archival sources.  However, he does allow that the process of the middle ground might be transferable to other regions, as long as these other regions include a rough balance of power, a mutual need or desire for what the other possesses, and an inability for either side to force the other to change because neither side is bigger or more powerful than the other.  The space of the middle ground might be transferable as well, so long as it includes an infrastructure that can support and expand the process.

With this study, White makes a number of important interventions.  He turns culture into a spatialized process; he considers the possibility of a frontier as a space of mutual understanding and negotiation, where hybrid cultures are created; he recognizes the agency of Native Americans in shaping the middle ground, and uses oral histories with the descendants of these tribes to understand the memory of this process; and he shifts the development of American culture from New England to the Great Lakes region.  And rather than assume rational, perfectly informed actors, he acknowledges and even appreciates that "biased and incomplete information and creative misunderstanding may be the most common basis of human actions" ever.

35: Patricia Limerick's Legacy of Conquest

A Westerner studying at Harvard, Patricia Limerick wrote The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West with three main goals: to knit together the Old West of frontiers, cowboys, and conquest and the complex, 20th century west into a coherent history; to warn against the dangers of the narrative of Progress for the West, environmentally and culturally; and to finally overturn the Turner thesis and shift the focus of Western history from the frontier-as-process to the West-as-place.  She achieves these goals by synthesizing existing scholarship in a variety of historical subdisciplines, including urban, social, business, labor, Chicano/a, Indian, and environmental, and by taking the West's many regions and perspectives into account.

Much of the book, then, involves dispelling myths of the Old West by retelling the history of the West from a variety of perspectives.  Limerick investigates the ideology of Western independence, which can only exist in a national and international context; real estate and property as the emotional center of Western history; and writing mining as labor history.  Most importantly - she spends the second half of the book writing a history of the West from Native Americans' perspective.  While she pulls from Native sources somewhat, her main strategy is to read Anglo sources from a Native American perspective; the result is a portrayal of resentful  people reduced to dependency on a single centralized agency, choosing rationally from among a dwindling number of opportunities.

With this new, synthetic history of the West as a place instead of a mobile frontier or a cowboys-and-indians fantasyland, Limerick argues that the West is a "place undergoing conquest and never fully escaping its consequences," and that "Western history has been an ongoing competition for legitimacy - for the right to claim for oneself and sometimes for one's group the status of legitimate beneficiary of Western  resources."  In other words, the West has long been shaped by a competition between different ethnic groups for property rights, even as the Western frontier functions as a kind of creation myth for white America.  This book thus complicates American narratives of Progress and manifest destiny even as it reclaims the West for historical study.