110: David Delaney's Race, Place and the Law

In Race, Place, and the Law, 1836-1948, David Delaney shows how race, place, and the law are both socially constructed and mutually constitutive.  Working primarily from the legal history of racialized landscapes in the United States, he argues that law was critical to the shaping of these landscapes because it considered itself abstract but was intimately involved in constructing geographies of power.  Lawyers and judges ratified property lines and interpreted and upheld boundaries.  Thankfully, as he shows, the same supposed abstraction that gave the law authority to create racialized landscapes also gave it the power to destroy them.  Delaney thus complicates the role of the US legal system in the construction of racialized landscapes of power that affected (and still affect) all Americans.

Delaney argues that racism from 1836-1948 was spatialized, or enacted on and through the landscape, and supported by the legal system.  Spatialized racism changed dramatically over time, however.  Before the Civil War, it generally took the form of white territoriality versus black mobility - as evinced, for instance, in cases where 

36: Virginia Anderson's Creatures of Empire

In Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America, Virginia Anderson argues that in seventeenth-century Chesapeake and New England, domestic animals put English settlers and Native Americans into close contact and thus actively shaped the history of early America and settler/ native relations.  By putting livestock at the center of early American history, Anderson contributes to a growing body of literature in animal studies, which, like environmental history, decenters human historical agency by elevating the broader environmental context.  Because colonists and Indians related to animals very differently and because these relationships had a huge impact on the landscape, focusing on animals also allows Anderson to investigate the imposition of one worldview over another in a holistic way.

Anderson divides her book into three sections: a discussion of the many ways Algonquians and English settlers thought about different kinds of animals at the beginning of the 17th century; a history of the introduction of livestock into the Chesapeake colonies and New England and the development of regional husbandry practices; and a comparison of two near-simultaneous conflicts in the 1670s, Bacon's rebellion and King Philip's War, with an emphasis on the relationship between disputes over livestock and the outbreak of violence in both regions.  Building on Bill Cronon's Changes in the Land, she argues that the English settlers sought to turn the New World into England, which included imposing their view of animals as property on the landscape and on Native Americans.  There were regional differences: Chesapeake farmers, with tobacco as their cash crop, let pigs and other animal run free and go semi-feral; New England farmers, who had to deal with colder climates and rocky soils, ran family farms rather than large plantations, and kept a closer eye on their herds.  However, in both regions, Native American responses to new animals and practices ranged from cautious acceptance of pigs (which seemed like deer or dogs) to outright rejection of environmental destruction by animals.

In some ways, this book is a continuation of the spatial turn in American Studies: English attitudes toward animals were closely linked to their attitudes about property, and Algonquian attitudes toward animals were linked to their more holistic view of humans, animals, and the environment, so disputes over animals spatialize and materialize conflicting worldviews.  By broadening the concept of agency to include environmental and non-human actors, it also presents a more contextual (and thus possibly more complete and less biased, or at least differently biased) history of early America.

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.