The history of the American West needs to be rewritten

Not long ago, historians of the American West joined their artistic brethren in celebrating what we now consider the "Old West." For historians and artists, the "Victory of the West" was a glorious achievement that heralded the victory of "civilization" over "barbarism." In fact, according to traditional scholarly wisdom and orthodox artistic vision, the conquest of the Indians, the march of destiny, is what makes America great and what makes Americans special. In recent decades, however, most historians and many Americans have rejected this view. New research shatters cherished fables about the Old West, strips the romance from the West's history and unearths the human toll and environmental cost of American expansion. These explanations of how the West disappeared offer little in the way of glory, but they emphasize the barbarism of American civilization.

The de Young Museum’s exhibition, “Ed Ruscha and the Great American West” and its section, “The Wild West: Pacific Plains” at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor invites us to take a closer look at the celebration and its die. In many ways, this revision of American Western art parallels changes in the content and meaning of American Western history. In art and history, long-standing and powerful myths have been lost as themes have broadened and contemporary perspectives have shifted. The American West: A Very Short Introduction (A Very Brief Introduction)

Authoritative, clear, and wide-ranging engagement with issues of environment, people, and identity is the myth of the American West. The complex fusion of peoples, politics, and cultures that decisively shaped the history of the American West becomes a key interpretive thread through this brief introduction. As early as the 19th century, purchases and celebrations of territorial expansion were commonplace among American historians. Theodore Roosevelt acknowledged in his multi-volume book The Triumph of the West and other historical works that bloodshed was not always "pleasant," but he considered it a "healthy sign of the vigorous strength" of the American people. As president of the American Historical Association and President of the United States, Roosevelt said joyfully: "It is our destiny to annex all the lands of our neighbors who are too weak to resist us." He believed that "for the benefit of all mankind, the American people should ultimately annex the Mexicans drove them out of the sparsely populated northern provinces” and took away Indians from other parts of the West.

Popular in Roosevelt's day, it was contemporary Frederick Jackson Turner who proposed this interpretation that gained lasting scholarly appeal. Most prominently, in his 1893 article "The Importance of the Frontier in American History," Turner assigned a central place in American history to westward expansion. He believed that this not only expanded the country's territory but also illustrated the individualistic and democratic nature of its people and institutions. In Turner's view, the process of moving westward separated Americans from their European ancestry (in Turner's imagination, the term "American" referred only to people of European ancestry). From what Turner and his contemporaries called the "Great American West" then emerged American exceptionalism and the roots of American greatness.

Later historians of the American West took their cues from Turner's "frontier theory." Some echoed this. Some people extended it. Someone modified it. During the first half of the 20th century, however, few attempted to challenge Turner's belief in the fundamental importance of the frontier to American development, and few questioned the increasing extent of American western expansion.

Things have changed over the past half century. *** The Vietnam War and the spread of the various civil rights movements "Westward expansion is good for the country and good for everyone involved." This assertion placed Western art and Western artists in the service of destiny, a guiding principle for painters, The sculptor's ideology, and the photographer's attempt to cover up "the problems caused by the westward expansion",

The "West is Beautiful" exhibition was quite controversial. Some visitors confined their vitriol to the gallery's porch. Others vented their anger in opinion pieces. In response to the uproar, several members of Congress called for the museum to be revoked for allowing such desecration of Western art. That campaign failed, but a planned national tour was cancelled.

In terms of publicity, by far the most influential was the change in views about the history of the American West registered in the movies.

The social trends of the 1960s rewrote Western history, reinterpreted the meaning of still images, and dramatically subverted the art of film. For decades, the "Western" dominated Hollywood. "Epics" and "Westerns" filled movie theaters from the 1920s to the 1950s and dominated American television in the 1950s, but in the 1960s the traditional, heroic Western began to lose its popularity attraction. Much less is produced. Those conventions of the genre, about heroes and villains, righteous violence and remarkable fate, are often subverted. In Sergio Leone's The Good, The Bad, and The Uggy (1966), Sam Peckinpah's The Savages (1966), The Wild Bunch (1969), Arthur Penn's Little Big Man (1970), and Robert Altman's McCabe and Miller McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) and other landmark films. However, it can be said that the reversal of traditional Western roles did not reach its peak until 1991, when "Dances with Wolves" won eight Oscars. At the box office and at the Oscars, Dances with Wolves reigned supreme, but the best historical scholarship of the past 25 years has been more than just the subversion of ancient myths about the Old West. An important direction is to cut back and connect what happened in the American West to other parallel places and processes. Historians of the American West depart from Turner's assertion that the frontier separated the United States from its European roots, instead emphasizing a single institution between the United States and other "colonialisms," "settler colonialism" The construction of has become key to situating the American experience within a broader global context. Further stripping away the uniqueness of the American West, historians have adopted the lens of "ethnic cleansing" or worse, "genocide," "in order to understand the expansion, widespread displacement, and sometimes destruction of indigenous peoples in the United States." .", "KDSP" is the most shocking piece of Western history written in the past 25 years, confronting the complexities of the past and present. This starts with recognizing how deep the past is, understanding a history that began long before the West was American, and understanding the diversity and vitality of Native Americans before the arrival of European settlers. From archaeology and other sources, historians have now uncovered a rich pre-colonial world and complex societies that continued to exist after Indians encountered people from Europe and Africa, weaving a story about indigenous peoples and a fascinating new understanding of how newcomers meet and integrate.

Freeing indigenous peoples from the condescending gestures of New Age romanticism and transforming them into ever-peaceful, perfect ecologists, the new history shows that Indians were not only responsible for European colonialism, but also Expanded in some parts of North America. The best of these recent Western histories detail how long-term interactions led to racial crossover and ethnic cleansing. Most obviously, this exchange produced mixed-race offspring, but historians have also traced widespread exchanges of cultures that led to mixed-race. This fusion has been a hallmark of American Western culture in the 20th century, and now in the 21st century the history of the American West, like the art of the American West, is no longer what it used to be. No doubt many people lament these changes, nostalgic for the myths that Western history (and Western art) once celebrated. But if we are to understand the multifaceted development of the West and figure out how we can live together and sustainably in this region, we don't need one-dimensional stories. Instead, we need to respect the history and art of the past, as historians and artists must do, and also challenge the wrestling with our complexities