Review

This work is a volume in "The Human Tradition in America" series, a series that compiles minibiographies of notable individuals in various eras or, in this case, regions that have influenced American history. The editors have selected biographies written by a number of western scholars on thirteen diverse individuals that putatively represent a cross-section of western American history. Among these are early western feminists, African American and Native American politicians, William O. Douglass, the renowned supreme court justice and indefatigable environmentalist, and Harvey Milk, the openly gay San Francisco city supervisor who rose to notoriety in the late 1970s only to be assassinated in 1978. The editors offer summaries that open each biography and include a smattering of drawings or photographs of each individual. The volume begins with an introductory essay on the newly reinterpreted significance of the West in American history.	1
Scholars who are part of the "new western history" as it has been called, have sought to eschew older, heavily mythologized (mostly Hollywoodized) versions of the western past by placing much greater emphasis on themes of cultural conquest, environmental exploitation, the centrality of the region to American history, and of particular importance to the subject matter of this volume, the ethnic diversity of the region. Nowhere else in America did so many cultures collide, contest with each other, intermingle, co-exist. As most American historians know well, western history, due to the efforts of Frederick Jackson Turner, Walter Prescott Webb, and others had once been a dynamic and vibrant field, attracting some of the best and brightest young minds in the first several decades of the 20th century. However, by the middle and late decades of the century it had increasingly become something of a scholarly backwater, conveniently disdained and dismissed by eastern-based scholars. Even at the University of Montana, about as west as one can get, I remember several of my professors scoffing at western history as "cowboy and Indian history." By the late 1980s, however, western history experienced a renaissance, and one of the main lures of the new scholarship has been its emphasis on the ethnic and cultural diversity that gives the West its unique identity in American history. As such, this volume represents the multivocality of the place. As the authors state at the outset, "these actors...range from an eighteenth-century Spanish borderlands historiographer to a late-twentieth-century San Francisco gay activist-cum politician. Their lives coincided with dramatic turning points in American history.... What made [their lives] distinctive was the shifting pattern of mixing and interaction in a much divided space." (xx).	2
There is an interesting pastiche of individuals profiled here and the authors almost strain to make sure every group is represented. It is unclear, however, how well these voices (and by extension this book) could be integrated into a university or college curriculum (the targeted audience). They are not first-person narratives of the conditions that each individual faced in his or her respective western experience. Nor is there really much unity to these voices; it is a "fragmented unity" if anything, to quote from western scholar Allan Bogue. Best that teachers use this material as supplements to discussions about western diversity or specific case studies of, say, the evolution of western feminism (using the example of Eliza Hart Spalding, a contemporary of fellow missionary, Narcissa Whitman) or of the western economic territories that late nineteenth century African Americans carved out (using the example of Henry Ossian Flipper, the first black editor of a white-owned newspaper). The concluding essay on gay activist and politician Harvey Milk, could certainly add a special pungency to any discussion on modern western politics because his career mirrors the modern development of the gay community in San Francisco, one of the West's historically most important cities. In short, there may be a little bit of something for many in this volume, much like the history of the American West itself.The most notable contribution of The Human Tradition in the American West is that it offers teachers alternative voices and viewpoints in teaching the history of America's most diverse region.	3
Montana State University-Billings Keith Edgerton

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