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Book Review
| The Borderlands of the American and Canadian Wests: Essays on Regional History of the Forty-ninth Parallel. Edited by Sterling Evans. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. xxxvi + 386 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, index. $49.95 cloth.
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| Few political boundaries make less ecological sense than the forty-ninth parallel between Canada and the United States. Without wavering, the border slices relentlessly across the grasslands, forests, and mountain ranges of western North America. In the early twentieth century, the two countries marked the border on the land by cutting a swath eighteen-feet wide and hundreds of miles long. Apparently, posting signs was just not good enough. |
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Historians and geographers heed the border far more than animals and plants do. Far too often, the border has served as a wall impeding attempts by scholars to write histories that address processes or places that cross the border. Or so argue the contributors in Sterling Evans's edited collection, The Borderlands of the American and Canadian Wests. To varying degrees, the contributors want to dismantle this barrier dividing historical scholarship, and more generally, strike a blow against the tyranny of national-oriented histories. |
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While the collection addresses a number of topics, environmental historians will find the chapters and sections about natural resource matters of most interest. In these chapters, as in the ones on non-environmental topics, the authors adopt one of three approaches to "forty-ninth parallel history" (p. xxxii). Continental approaches examine regions of western Canada or the United States as regions, such as the Northern Plains, that extend beyond the border. (The continentalist approach is similar to what historian Dan Flores has elsewhere called bioregional history, an approach familiar to most environmental historians.) A comparative approach analyzes similar processes and topics on both sides of the border. Finally, the borderlands approach places the border itself at the center of analysis, as something with "agency in history" (p. xxxii). In a sense, a borderland area becomes a region of its own, where people on both sides of the line share an identity and a common but often contested history. |
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