David J. Weber, Richard White, Elliott West, Elizabeth Jameson, Mary Lee Spence and Howard Lamar | A Southerner at Yale Views the West: A Roundtable on the Work of Howard Lamar | The Western Historical Quarterly, 36.2

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David J. Weber, Richard White, Elliott West, Elizabeth Jameson, Mary Lee Spence and Howard Lamar | A Southerner at Yale Views the West: A Roundtable on the Work of Howard Lamar | The Western Historical Quarterly, 36.2 | The History Cooperative

A Southerner at Yale Views the West: A Roundtable on the Work of Howard Lamar

These essays, to assess and honor the work of Howard Lamar, grew out of a special session at the Western History Association's (WHA's) annual meeting in Fort Worth in October 2003. Katherine Morrissey, University of Arizona, extended invitations to the panelists, taking care that none had earned their doctorates under Lamar's direction. The essays observe the order in which they were presented at the WHA meeting. They are followed by Lamar's response (building on his extemporaneous remarks in Fort Worth) and a selective list of his publications.

Introduction

DAVID J. WEBER

THE ESSAYS THAT FOLLOW HONOR one of the most remarkable historians of the American West, Howard Roberts Lamar, and celebrate his profound impact on the field. As teacher, scholar, editor, and advisor he has fostered and shaped the study of western America, and this southern-born historian has done so from the unlikely vantage of New Haven, Connecticut. For close to a half century, Howard Lamar taught history at Yale University, with its extraordinary library holdings in western Americana. He began there as an instructor of history in 1949 and advanced through the ranks to the distinguished William Robertson Coe Professorship of History in 1970. Along the way, he assumed a number of burdensome but essential administrative duties, including stints as chairman of Yale's large and vigorous history department (1967–1970), dean of Yale College (1979–1985), and president of the university (1992–1993), before retiring in 1994.	1
As a teacher, Howard directly influenced generations of students through his popular graduate and undergraduate courses. Even while serving as dean, he maintained his strong commitment to teaching. For the first time in living memory at Yale, the dean taught an undergraduate lecture course. His class on the American West began at the unpopular hour of 8:30 in the morning, but drew so many students that even the Wall Street Journal took editorial notice of this academic entrepreneur. Graduate students, too, continued to receive Howard's attention during his deanship; fifteen completed their doctoral dissertations during those six years. All in all, over sixty students have earned doctorates under his direction. In 1992, some of those former students honored him with a thinly disguised festschrift: Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America's Western Past (New York, 1992).	2
Through writing that asked new questions and suggested new directions, Howard Lamar has also taught many of us who did not study with him. Initially, he contributed to our growing understanding of the major role played by the federal government and the politics of colonialism in the development of the frontier—an understanding that challenged prevailing assumptions about frontier individualism and self-reliance. His Dakota Territory, 1861–1889, and his magisterial study, The Far Southwest, 1850–1912: A Political History of the Territories of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah, became models for subsequent explorations of the relatively neglected subject of territorial politics. In numerous essays he has examined a wide range of topics, from American Indian policy to the cowboy, and from ethnic labor to the historiography of the West. Like his books, Howard's suggestive essays are studded with insights and draw connections between specific and general, past and present. His broad view of context and pattern make his work essential reading for those following him. No student of the Indian trade on the frontier, for example, can ignore Howard's extended essay on The Trader on the American Frontier: Myth's Victim, in which he sets his sights on the murky span between what actually happened in the past and what we suppose happened. Specialists on frontier processes, to take another example, have found their horizons extended by the sweeping vistas that he and Leonard Thompson offered in their introductory and concluding essays in The Frontier in History: North America and Southern Africa Compared.	. . .

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