PRIZE REFLECTIONS
2001 WESTERN HISTORY ASSOCIATION
PUBLISHED PRIZEWINNERS:
THE NEXT WESTERN HISTORY

STEPHEN ARON

FOR MORE THAN A DECADE, debates about the New Western History have stirred and steered our field. These have given us a familiar set of oppositions between old western history and new. The old western history venerated Frederick Jackson Turner; the new condemned him. The old drew its significance from the frontier; the new heralded the centrality of the region. The old celebrated the triumphs of westward expansion; the new catalogued the environmental costs and human casualties of colonialism and capitalism. The old spotlighted the rugged individualism of white male pioneers; the new accented the preeminence of the federal government and peopled the West with a diverse multiethnic cast.	1
The spilling of words in the battle between old and new western histories (and in the struggle to define the scope of the new) has enlivened this and other journals, but many readers would likely agree that the time has come to put aside these disputes. To their great credit, the ten publications awarded prizes in 2001 by the Western History Association point the way to fresh understandings on which the next generation of western historians may profitably build. Transcending stale debates and false bifurcations, the new millennium's first crop of prize-winning articles and books glimpse at a twenty-first-century western history that is informed, but not imprisoned, by the intellectual ferment of the late twentieth century. Rather than rehashing questions about place versus process, the next western history, as evidenced here, recognizes that no single spatial scale or interpretive framework can capture the complex history of the American West. Embracing the many peoples who have vied for occupancy and opportunity on the North American continent, the next western history also moves beyond separate multicultural strands to grapple with the entwined intercultural legacies of conquest and cohabitation. Above all, the next western history eschews simple inversions. Instead, these prizewinning pieces offer up paradoxes and possibilities, the better to interrogate what we remember and recover what we have forgotten.	2
The American West: A New Interpretive History, winner of the Caughey Western History Association Prize, affords a superb starting point for the next generation of western historians. Departing from recent regionalist treatments of the western past, authors Robert Hine and John Mack Faragher, instead, echo Frederick Jackson Turner in insisting that all of North America was once a West and in restoring frontier as the cornerstone of their interpretation. But theirs is not your father's frontier history-not least for the attention that it pays to the expectations and experiences of mothers and daughters of diverse origins. In the hands of Hine and Faragher, North American frontiers emerge as zones of intercultural minglings. From the Caribbean to Canada and from the Atlantic to the Pacific, they illuminate how cross-cultural encounters resulted not only in destructive violence, but also in a blending of ways and a blurring of distinctions. By recapturing this forgotten history of collusion and setting it alongside the more familiar history of collision, Hine and Faragher reformulate the frontier concept "to match the needs and aspirations of a new century" and make the study of the American West critical again to understanding "our common past" and "our common future." 1	. . .