Historiography of the American West PDF

LOOK AT THE QUOTES ON AMETICE Historiography of the American West Frederick Jackson Turner who in 1893 published the ‘frontier’. Because the frontier moved west, it is each time further away from Europe, he saw this frontier as americanising the american population making it...

LOOK AT THE QUOTES ON AMETICE Historiography of the American West Frederick Jackson Turner who in 1893 published the ‘frontier’. Because the frontier moved west, it is each time further away from Europe, he saw this frontier as americanising the american population making it more and more further from the europe culture. They were more American than the ones living in Boston for instance. ‘Nothing works for nationalism like intercourse within the nation’; the fact that the settlers came from the eastern coast, moved west, exchanged with other group of people had accorded to him shaped american spirit and nationalism : "The promotion of democracy here and Europe, as has been indicated, the frontier is productive of individualism". No one was taking care of people who had to face hostile things. The frontier individualism promoted democracy because everybody more or less had the same rights. Presidents can be tempted to reward close friends, people who have founded their campaign, not only people who are loyal but all kinds of people. It is called the spoil system. It is seen as a failure. He recognises failures from the frontier. Ray billington, whose book ‘the frontier thesis valid interpretation’, questioned the validity of turner’s analysis. In the following years the interest in the west started to fade away, and those teaching have not find many books to discuss, the image of Indians and cowboys would be there forever because historians were not interested in having a new approach to the west. It changed in the late 80s, Patricial Limerick, Donald Worster ‘the legacy of conquest’ in 1887, was a seminal book for this new historiographical movement, for the first time the west was named as a place and not as a frontier. if you go to the south you find black and white, in the west native american, chinese, hispano american… it is unique in the history of the US. So limerick emphasized the interaction between men and women, women living in the west was not like living in boston, it was different and also interactions between ethnic people, crooks and virtuous people, all those who came west had no fortune. not everybody was nice, courageous nor honest.This interaction has continued, never stopped, today immigrants mostly go to the west. It is there that you have the most of the problems raised by massive and unauthorized immigration. Collectively western historians have been more fair to the non winners, they have recognised waste, exploitation of immigrants and they have not assumed the superiority of the missionising european that is mostly anglo saxon race. All the so-called new western historians did not really believe in the greatness of democracy found in the west, they denounced the abuse and also even in the society where several groups met, that one group in particular tried to exploit the others or to make it better than the other. They are re-writing the story of the occupation of North America and its development in the past few centuries because what they wrote about the west can also be written for canada. It is this region of exchange and circulation in which some always try to make it better than others. the first ones to denounce the brutality against american indians and hispanos in the first stage of the so called conquest. According to a very recent book by Jason Pierce its ‘making the white men’s west’, being white mattered in the west and confirmed status giving them easier access to powerful positions; We are far away from Turner’s point of view over the Frontier. Amy Bridges who wrote in 2015 Democratic beginnings: founding the Western States, showed recently how constitutional convention (each territories applying to the be in the US had to make that to make sure that they follow the US constitution and to have their own little constitution), the US being a federation you had several layers ; the top one, the state level (each state have their own little government) and the local level. Each state has their own law and judiciary. These constitutional conventions were erected to make sure that the state constitution would not be in contradiction with the federal one. These constitutional platforms especially in California or Oregon served as a platform to americanise the region. The fact that the states were not free to draft any state constitutions, they were constrained by the federal system contributed to americanising the whole country in spite of different populations, climate… According to bridges and piers these also served to assert white supremacy over cultures already in residence that is mainly native americans culture and hispano culture. Both of them, and it is a recent movement show that from day one the newcomers (people from europeans origins) tried to impose their own racial supremacy over their own group. This point of view is pretty common in recent historians. In addition, railroads did participate in bringing deeds and transportation means for merchandise goods, and also for human beings. It contributed to transforming the region and bringing settlers more massive than with simple horses and contributed in having the west participate in the economy of the nation. Railroads were key to the americanisation of the nation and to being a cement for the nation, a nation that was pretty dislocated (US but with a civil war between the north and the south and the west being part), it efficiently made the west part of the nation. The land along the railroad tracks was extremely valuable back then because it meant that you had transportation at your hands and had access to more goods. This was the beginning of settling the west in areas where they were nothing. The railroad companies were interested in having people that would make the land prosper, know how to farm the land and for this they would chose the ones who would be allowed to live on the lands when they still belonged to them and would chose people that were europeans or mainly white ‘community that were rural, protestant and whites’ even in the west were it was not natural at all. It shows a West that is far away from the west celebrated as a melting pot, with a democracy forced to live together. We have a totally different picture of actually white people trying to establish the hierarchy and order they experienced in the east of the country or in europe. Another point also is that the environment is central to the study of this region. Rothman who wrote an article on the environmental history of the American west ‘all settlers encountered a west that appeared unfamiliar, foreign, challenging and sometimes daunting’. Among other two historians ; Donald Worster and William Cronon have contributed to shaping the field of western environment study showing the impact of the environment on everything : institutions, culture, values. And among all natural elements there is an emphasis on water, the West especially the South West is very dry, you have desert and having access to water is absolutely crucial; Altogether, the new leaders of the so called new Western history provide an alternative to the triumphalist interpretation of frontier history and therefore also an alternative to American history; it is not only a story of heroes, cowboys and people defeating the bad. They can be seen as a very long historiographical institution which is anti-imperialism that is re-writing the history of conquest, whether it is a foreign conquest or a domestic one. - The marxist view says that the US didn't need colonies because they had their own conquest of territories to do. The concept of new western history itself is much debated, many historians are saying that actually that the environment was taken into account much before, some were interested in minority groups… Other historians include the American West as part of global history, to not look at the Us but as the US in the world and interactions between the US and the rest of the World. They study the global convergences and circulation in the global context of empire and global circulations. The New Deal In 1929 a severe depression hit the United States but also other countries in the World. The President at the time was Hoover. Because the US population really was drowning in poverty, in 1932 a democrat, Franklin Roosevelt was elected president trying to reassure the population, in his inaugural address he said ‘the only thing you have to fear is fear itself’. He came into power in March 1933, and starting from there he started new legislation. All this was decided in the federal government even in economic and social affairs which is unprecedented, the US was a really laissez-faire country, with traditionally very little or no intervention from the federal government. Usually everything about the economic and social sphere is left with the private sector or with the local level. It was the first time a president really had decided to create jobs, to build electricity systems… The big historiographic question whether it was a revolutionary policy or just measures that only aimed at saving the american capitalist system? Some people and a few historians, not that many, accused Roosevelt of being a socialist (number of conservative) so was it a socialist policy or just a reformist policy that failed to go all the way through. Even during the New Deal there were vivid debates in congress and within the states, and after the end of it when historians started to write the history of it they had very different approaches to what Roosevelt achieved. The first movement would be the progressive school : progressives are the left wing of the democratic party, according to the historians belonging to this school, many wrote after the New deal in the late 40s and saw it as the continuity of the liberal heritage (wants government intervention to improve daily life). Speaking of this liberal heritage we can remember that in the US there is a constant tension between liberalism and conservatism which generally also is close to laissez-faire.for the progressives the new deal was an important step forward in the struggle against monopoly and privilege and according to them it was continuity because the very first measures had been instaured by Jeffersonian and Jacknsonnian democracy, then populism of the late 19th century with the creation of the people’s party which tackled the issue of those below the social ladder, and finally the progressive period of the beginning of the 20th century with Theodrore Roosevelt. According to these historians the New Deal is to be seens of the continuation of the long traditions existing since the beginning of the US, and it is not brand new. In 1947, the historian Lewis Hackler considered the New Deal as the Third American Revolution. and the new deal is a counterpoint to laissez-faire. The very important measures that constitute the new deal were all taken in the first hundred days, never in American history had so many reforms decided in just three months. This also characterized this New Deal and unprecedented activism. Arthur Schlesinger Jr, Frank Freidel, William Leutenberg : respect for democracy because according to them it was the only alternative to authoritarian government. The Conservative School: these writers are generally close to the republican party and emphasized that the New Deal limited personal freedom and personal growth which is in contradiction to the American values. Some of them went as far as asking if the New Deal was unamerican, because it is not in the tradition to have so many decisions made by the federal government. And all the public works that Roosevelt made, created a deficit and according to them it didn't follow the american values. The federal government should be non-existent for them, and everything should be within the state. You don't have a lot of really conservative historians but you can find journalists like Milton Friedman, Elliott Rosen.. They are seen as conservative intellectuals. Consensus School: one of the leading figures being Richard Hodstenter, was that the only cure was wages regulated, public works, working hours.; for him the New Deal was not a philosophy of idealism or moralism but a pragmatic response to a given problem. He criticized FDR for being too pragmatic and not going more. McGregor Burds, Ambivalence of the New deal between rational planning and anti monopoly measures. For them it was not very clear, all historians today agree that Rosevelt acted according to circumstances and had no plan, road map and he was trying to make something work. Historians of the new left points to the lack of consideration for minorities, he tried to do as much as he could for the working class in general of all racial categories but he did not do anything for blacks. But the democrats would not have accepted anything about minorities, it was the time of segregation, if Rosevelt had done this they would have voted against him in Congress, he was stuck by the Southern Democrats.The priority was to get the country out of recession and then came WWII, so the end of segregation was not a priority for Rosevelt and his government. Luthenberg had already pointed out that shortcoming. Roosevelt had not done enough for the country and had just been content with saving, maintaining the system without changing it radically. and even the depression, even historians say that the New Deal did not solve this nor redistribute new income, what saved the country was WWII. Thomas Ferguson, says that the New Deal is a pure product of the project of capitalism, the republicans accused Roosevelt to be a socialist. These new left historians thought that “the new deal was a politically successful non revolutionary response to a situation that had revolutionary potentialities.” The New deal had failed on many points, there was no new employment before the war, there was no wealthness distribution, the welfare state that he started was very narrow, no progress on the question of civil rights and the New Deal reinforced economic struggles. All the problems that the US had in the 60s were the direct consequences of that. James MacGregor Burns and Paul Conkin, ….. Recent historians have tended to focus more on history from below, not from the government but on the impact of deals on people and on regional studies. Elvaire,Badger, Milkis thinks that FDR did his best to try to impose a liberal reform as best as he could. These historians and political scientists denied the fact that there was any revolutionary potential in the US in the 30s, and instead of blaming Roosevelt for the limits of the New Deal they tried to look at the political and social context of the 30s to find the context of the results of the New Deals. He did the best he could to impose liberal reforms in a country which despite depression remained deeply conservative.In other words FDR was characterized by his desire to break with the past to think and act anew but in a very conservative country.Tends to compare the New Deal with depression’s answers in other countries. The comparison with Germany or Italy showed that the democrats' states were preserved. with economic conditions that were pretty much the same, two countries moved to dictatorship while the US protected their government. Traditionalists, then revisionists and then the recent ones. Forgiven, attacked, and moderated. The Cold War Who won this War ? Who ended the War ? We cannot say that there was no substance to the American fears about the Soviet Union. Melvyn Leffler, he thinks that the Americans probably exaggerated the soviet threat, overreacted. Beyond fears and overreaction there was an intention of domination from the US. According to him president truman, Acheson (who) and Kennan (who) had prejudices and interests (look at the quote on ametice), we can wonder if actually there were not several cold wars emerging at the same time, one in europe, in asia, africa, latin america. Was it one big cold war or was it a succession of mini cold war that reacted to each other The main turning point was in 49, when the soviet union had its first successful nuclear test, nobody imagined that it would come this fast, and what if they were going to ally with China? They failed to differentiate real communist and soviet puppets. Zubak and Pleshakov thought that it was Stalin’s insecurities that led to a total collapse of relations between the Soviet Union and Western countries. John Lewis Gaddis wrote a very famous book in 97 after the cold war, called we know know, which emphasizes the answer from the US to the soviet union, and its fears are not hidden behind the idea of domination. Who won the Cold War ? Triumphalist school believes that the US won due to the collapse of the soviet union as the direct result of the pressure put on it by the Reagan administration and by its aggressive use of cohort actions. (Weenberger) Another school believes that Reagan threatened so much with a nuclear escalation that the Soviet Union gave up due to the fear of a nuclear war. Beth Fisher, says it is reagan that changed the tendency of the cold war and allowed peace to come back after thanks to the nuclear weapon: the nuclear fear caused Reagan to stop being so aggressive and helped him smothered the conflict, the so called reagan reversal and so,n not the defense build up. It is still thanks to the Reagan initiative. The great leader school says that the soviet union was facing many serious systemic crisis which required substantial political and economic reforms if a complete collapse was to be avoided, he needed to end the cold war and reduce the strain on soviet economic involvement, in order to save the soviet union from inner collapse. If he managed to have a better relationship with the West, maybe the West could help him with its economic reforms. According to this school represented by Garthoff who was in Reagan administration, he thinks that the end of the cold war came from the soviet because Golbartchov decided to reduce the military build up and expenses and to be more open to the west and particularly the west that finally the cold war came to end, much more so than the Reagan administration, not necessarily to win the cold war but for domestic reason; All the leaders of the time Reagan Bush father, Gorbachev, all had an important role to play because they were willing to pivot. Reagan was willing to change, he started his first term by calling the soviet union the evil empire, and during his second term his relationship with the soviet union was smoother until the actual end of the conflict. “Why do you want to be president?” he answered, “to end the cold war”, but how ? He admitted that he wasn't sure but that there must be a way. He had an ideology that he wanted the end of communism and the end of the cold war, but he was open to all kinds of ways. John Graham Wilson wrote a book called the triumph of improvisation that argued that these leaders discovered rather than designed the route that led to the end of the cold war. On the one hand, a rhetoric that was extremely offensive (evil empire) and in contrast a lot of flexibility in action, Reagan even becoming a good friend of Gorbachov. According to Wilson this latest was ‘the most important individual in the history of the cold war’, it was Reagan optimism, Gorbachov economic ideas, and their commune idea of avoiding a nuclear conflict that helped the end of the cold war. Structural neorealism school: embodied by K. Waltz said that the cold war was the consequence of bi polarity, having two superpowers at the same time, which meant that if something change in this, if one becomes much weaker than the other, then that would be the end of the cold war or if a great third power like China,could rise to an equal statue this would also end the cold war, because it would become unipolar. Clearly the cold war is the result of bipolarity between the two world powers. Oral History In archives there is no interaction, the text is stable, it may not be objective but it cannot be modified. The oral interview is different, if you interview somebody, even the same person, two or three times you will never have the sale content, for a variety of reasons. If you come back to a series of interviews, let’s say five you will see that maybe the second or thief time he or she will come back to what they said the first time. Oral sources are not stable, it doesn't mean that they are not reliable though. Memories are always distorted, you will always miss something, not because you do it on purpose, but because that is how it is. Telling a story has different mechanisms, the first would be construction or reconstruction, you write the story, you explain it and if consciously or subconsciously you sometimes reconstruct it. Then there is extrapolation when the experience is generalized, this is why meeting different individuals is important. You also have re-hierarchisation, to change the rank of importance of the events, according to your experience. The fourth mechanism is immediacy when historians have difficulty to stand back from the object of the study. You cannot rely on one testimony, you have to have many, sometimes more than hundreds. In order to have clear ideas of what really happened. when you recount the fact you may distort them.Some saw johnson as a hero, and the ones who lost their families because of the vietnam saw him as the responsible for the launching of the vietnam war. they realized that the way Johnson was seen was not balanced, there were several groups that it was their suffering or on the opposite their happiness that colored their memories. Emotions can distort facts. The risk is high that the witness Edmund Burke, a british philosopher, in 1790 as well as more recent political scientist, have emphasized that reason alone could not cement a community and that affective links have to be respected. two political scientist emphasize that at the time of the vote for proposition 13 for california (in the western state every two years during a general election you always have a sort of referendum on one or two questions: initiatives or propositions) and this one back in 1978, was (people complained about paying too many taxes) ‘would you like lower taxes and fewer public services or would you prefer more taxes but more public services’, and the net answer to this question was lower taxes, but during the campaign passions were unleashed especially anger at the federal government, anger at the bureaucrats.. and emotions went far beyond the simple question asked during the vote. When citizens react very strongly is it because the problem is outrageously painful or is that because there is so much emotion in the issue that their response is extremely emotional and more violent than the issue itself. George Marcus who wrote the sentimental citizens, says that whether good or bad emotions share some common features. Unlike reasons and judgement which could be debated and tested, emotions are problematic. While unbiased citizens should examine a political decision from the broadest angle possible, and its effect on each one and the whole country, actually a lot of people tend to make political decisions or to choose their votes according to their own personal interest. Madison, in the federalist paper, emphasizes that even if attachment to the government and alliance to it originates in emotion, citizens tend to favor themselves, their religions, their interests. Hence, bias loyalty (loyal to a government because it is good to you and small community interest), and the founding father were so much afraid of the mob (uneducated people who reacted under the guidance of emotions), this is why until the very beginning of the 20th century, senators were not elected by voters, but by a body of higher electors. It came to an end at the beginning of the 21th century and now they are elected by all voters. But even today the American president is not elected directly by the people but by big electors. It derives from the fear the founding fathers had from the mob, they totally distrusted citizens and preferred to give them a minimum of voting power at the time, only for the representatives. Reason does its work under the initiative and guidance of emotional processors. roosevelt and the 1992 campaign, in his inauguration speech, it was a time of extreme depression, and he said ‘we have nothing to fear but fear itself’, he was the first president to intrude into american homes with something that has remained with the so called fireside chats. he was at the white house and he was speaking out to people, he was having a conversation and people could listen to their presidents. If we focus on fear and anger, a lot of American presidents tried to manipulate that in order to obtain popular support for a war they wish to conduct. it started way back with James Pock in 1846 with mexico when he claimed that mexicans have penetrated unto the US territories and had attack US citizens, and it as this fear of violence from Mexico that convinced a lot of legislators to favor the war, then at the turn of the century, Mackinley as well the whole US press, to justify the US military intervention against spain, convincing that it was necessary to start this war. FDR also manipulated the fear nazism inspired to start a naval war against Germany, Truman used the many tensions of the Cold War to justify US interventions in Korea, he was supported by Congress for his Truman Doctrine. These leaders did not make that up, but they knew how to use these emotions to convince voters and legislators to get along and to start these wars, of course it was a real fear and the same kind that was used by GWB to start in Afghanistan and to start the invasion of Iraq to get rid of Husseim. All the fears that were present in American History, like the puritans afraid of the Salem Witches. Racial relations with the White Southerners maintaining slavery because they were afraid of freed black, and the fear of Japanese during WWII that led US authority to deport them in some sort of camps out of california. With Trump fear of all immigrants that takes back from the 18th century, the anti immigration laws, a fear of terrorism… starting from fears a government can use it and tell a population lies or exaggerations to make them accept everything. To what extent is it manipulation, exaggeration or the truth? As a whole rulers and officials know how to play on fear and manipulate it to have their policy accepted. But fear can protect you from being overconfident. Without fear you might not be careful. Occasionally fear can also lead to hope.