Going West and Ending Up Global

Patricia Nelson Limerick

Steering clear of provincialism, Western American historians can play a central role in comparative studies of processes of colonialism and imperialism, locating the region in the big picture of world history.

I feel honored, and enormously lucky, to have had the opportunity to serve as president of this organization, a privilege that migrates to Jim Ronda at the end of the banquet this evening. Along with this office, I believe I will give him the task of deciding how to summarize the last two decades in the Western History Association, because I have not experienced anything that I could classify as success in that quest. The field is, heaven knows, lively. The convention program is filled to abundance with enlightening presentations. Many of the quarrels that preoccupied us a decade ago have become obscure and arcane and blessedly irrelevant. In times of such organizational well-being, those of us who have become, by the weirdest of alchemy, middle-aged establishment figures seem to have one danger left to guard against, and that enemy is in the form of lethargy and enervation known as "complacency."	1
My talk today has to do with an antidote to complacency that has helped me ward off the syndrome effectively. By team-teaching comparative history courses, as well as interdisciplinary regional studies courses involving the natural sciences, I have been able to stay productively and sustainably unsettled and ill-at-ease. Apart from my individual case, the fear felt by some--that a regional focus on western history would make the field parochial and self-preoccupied––has simply not been realized. We have not become narrow, in part because the independent members of the Western History Association continue to practice many varieties of western history, some regional, some not. (Some have been so self-determined and so defiant of Trans-Mississippian restraints as to continue to study Kentucky! Illinois! and even New England!) And, just as effective in averting provinciality, the region of the Trans-Mississippi West has provided exactly the right foundation for comparative and interdisciplinary work. One can, personal experience shows, begin as a western American historian, and end up attending closely to global processes, from international patterns of colonialism to planetary implications of climate change. The American West affords the historian a key of admission to some of the best and most thought-provoking conversations going on in the world today.	2
Still, this antidote to complacency comes with annoying side effects. A few days ago, I ran into a colleague at the University of Colorado who told me that he had spent the weekend trying to catch up. This was not an easy matter, he said, because his "list of 'things to do' had become a two-volume set with an index." I know how he feels. While the prosperity of the field of western American history is, indeed, wonderful, there are days when I wish it could prosper a little less vigorously. These are not only times of great scholarly productivity in western history; they are also wonderful times for discussing history with an engaged public audience--albeit, on occasion, an engaged public audience with an attitude. But this happy state of affairs does make for a life in which one is forever running late, and forever apologizing for being late. It doesn't help the situation that, in the spirit of the title of this talk, "Going West and Ending Up Global," western American history is now in kind of a Darwinian struggle for my attention, as I work more and more with historians in other fields, as well as with environmental scientists. Like that of my burdened colleague in Boulder, my own list of tasks has become a multivolume set, and yet, by Library of Congress classifications, its multiple volumes are scattered throughout the stacks, from African and Middle Eastern history to limnology and atmospheric chemistry.	. . .