Prize Reflections

2000 Western History Association Published Prizewinners:

A Place at the Center

Annette Atkins

The first time I visited California, I flew from Minneapolis into LAX and into another world. It wasn't just the international--non-blonde--look of the people in the airport, but the guy I saw from the shuttle bus who wore, halo-like, a pyramid rigged out of metal tinker toys with a crystal hanging from its center directly over his head. Lots of other things were more familiar--SUVs, McDonald's, and Best Buy--but the pyramided guy, the palm trees, and the perfume of oranges, the shock of a place so different from my own--these I hadn't expected.	1
Reading this year's WHA prize-winning books and essays, I had something of that same feeling. Lots of the landmarks are familiar--gender, race, power relations, demography, popular culture--but in a distinctly western intellectual landscape. I don't just mean that these topics are all located in the western part of the United States (they aren't), but in an intellectual landscape particular to western history (and perhaps reflective of the West more generally) that's defined by four main contour lines: Place is Everything; The West is America Only More So; Diversity is Us; and Ideas Matter Here, Too.	2
The central fact of these books and essays is how much they care about place. For western historians place is not only a location. It's an actor.	3
The major history organizations in the United States include only two regional groups: the southern and the western. Historians of the East don't have a regional organization because they don't define their work as regional. It's American. They don't ask how the Battle of Lexington was eastern. Midwest historians often deal with location as accidental or incidental (and, I suspect, secretly fear that with the exception of Populism the really important things happened elsewhere anyway). Even southern historians, who do define themselves by region, focus more on a way of life than on place. For western writers, including historians, however, place is an explicit and central category of analysis and understanding.	4
For a test, try this out. Set Wister's Virginian in Illinois, Cather's Antonia in New Orleans, Steinbeck's Joads in Maine. The stories collapse. Place makes these stories what they are, perhaps even more powerfully than do their human characters. Similarly, when Steven Avella looks at Catholic boosterism, he argues that Catholic leaders behaved in the way that they did because it was Sacramento. He describes Irish- Catholics in mission-style churches and explains, as they themselves understood, their strong assimilationist tendencies in geographical more than ethnic terms. They were assimilating in this not just to America, but to California. Brian Cannon, too, in his essay on the rural cooperatives and the New Deal, shows that westerners framed and understood and responded to the New Deal in a particularly western way. A therapist friend of mine insists that if the world doesn't fit our preconceptions, we'll distort our vision before we change our ideas. Westerners expected to see the federal government overpower the local governments and--whatever actually happened--that's what they understood. This was (is?) a western idea.	5
"Westerners," Cannon concludes, "have not been the passive objects of state power," despite what both activists and even some historians have argued (p. 135). Cannon insists that it was not a case of the bad, powerful eastern-based government and the abused, disenfrancised westerners, but that in the West--as in other regions--"the New Deal empowered westerners rather than deprived them of their initiative or agency" (p. 160). They just didn't--perhaps couldn't--see it at the time.	. . .