UA Scholar Featured In National Periodical

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - Elliott West, professor of history in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, is among a group of distinguished historians featured in the July/August 2000 issue of Books & Culture.

A special section devoted to exploring the question "What's So New about the New Western History?" includes a review of West's The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado, winner of the Francis Parkman Prize, the Pen Center West Award, the Ray Allen Billington prize, and several other awards.

In the section, Editor Lauren Winner contends that since the 1960s, scholars known as the New Western Historians have increasingly viewed the American West as a distinct geographical region rather than as the fabled mythic frontier peopled by greedy Easterners or Noble Savages, images that became common stereotypes in popular culture. She notes that economics, capitalism, and conquest were among the more prominent themes for these "new" historians, whose work is now several decades old.

In reviewing The Contested Plains, James Ronda, the H.G. Barnard Professor of Western American History at the University of Tulsa, writes that "We are brought face to face with real people — and West always names the names — whose complex lives remind us that no choice is simple and all blessings are mixed." He praises the book as "luminous," calling it a work "that is at heart a meditation on nature's limits and the human condition."

In turn, West reviews the work of Mark Fiege, Irrigated Eden: The Making of an Agricultural Landscape in the American West, in which Fiege guides the reader through the country between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada. It is a region, West writes, that is "arid, largely treeless, witness to nature's most extreme crankiness."

West, who says he has learned much from both the traditionalists in his field as well as the new historians, is committed to taking a fresh look and asking new questions about what seems familiar in Western history. He is currently working on a history of the West from the Civil War until 1900 as well as a history of the famous Sioux War of 1876 and the Nez Perce War of 1877.

"It is Contested Plains that has catapulted Elliott to the forefront of Western history," said Jeannie Whayne, chair of the history department. "While he is firmly planted in the facts of history, he is not afraid to be innovative in his presentation of those facts."

Information about Books & Culture can be found at http://www.booksandculture.com