Well, maybe it's not so new any more. Sometime in the late 1980s, the "New Western History" became a widely circulated term of approbation or abuse, depending on the observer's perspective. From the cheering section, we heard that the New Western Historians—scholars such as Patricia Nelson Limerick, Richard White, William Cronon, and Donald Worster—were boldly reshaping a field of study that had long been captive to the potent national mythology. Hecklers said that this was merely another manifestation of the trendy revisionism everywhere apparent in history these days.

Both sides were wrong, and both were right. The cheerleaders exaggerated the deficiencies of the "Old Western History"—a habit that continues even today. On the other side, the naysayers underestimated both the ideological diversity and the achievements of this new scholarship, which is far richer than its critics allow.

In fact, the New Western History is now decades old. In their introduction to Researching Western History: Topics in the Twentieth Century (Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1997), Gerald Nash and Richard Etulain list five ways in which the study of the American West changed significantly between 1960 and the end of the century. First, most Western historians in 1960, still under the spell of Frederick Jackson Turner, wrote about the West primarily as a frontier—a frontier that shifted repeatedly with westward expansion—and concentrated almost exclusively on Western history up to 1890 (the year in which the U.S. Census director officially proclaimed that there was no more frontier in America). In the decades since, the emphasis has shifted markedly to the West considered as a specific geographical region, like the South, and to the century after the closing of the frontier.

It is important to add that for many New Western Historians, this was not merely a change in orientation toward a regional perspective but rather a conscious rejection of the notion of "the frontier." Patricia Nelson Limerick has said that if she accomplishes nothing else in life, she wants people to think twice before they use "the f word." Frontier, Limerick and others have argued, implies unsettled, uncivilized land just waiting to be filled up by white folks. But the West had been inhabited by people with their own civilizations long before any Anglo settlers got there. The title of Limerick's influential 1987 book, The Legacy of Conquest, sums it up: Western history, she suggests, should be envisioned not as frontier-settlement but as conquest. She emphasizes conflict and exchange between Native Americans and Anglo settlers, rather than seeing the West as a tabula rasa where white Easterners simply established replicas of institutions from back home.

Second, in 1960—when the Western was still flourishing as a genre, though its death would come very soon—"only a few scholars," Nash and Etulain note, "conceived of the West as a figment of the imagination, a West enshrined in myth, literature, art, music, and popular culture." The myth was still alive in 1960. But in the decades since, the work of "a veritable small army" of scholars has been devoted precisely to the West as a figment of the imagination—and to the consequences of such imagining.

Third, in 1960, few Western scholars focused on environmental themes. Today, that is a major category of the New Western History—a consequence not only of the growth in environmental studies generally but also of the shift, noted above, toward regarding the West as a geographical region, a place where certain experiences are common. The West is arid or semi-arid, forcing farmers from Idaho to California to spend more time worrying about rain than, say, a farmer in Massachusetts or Georgia. The West looks to the Pacific Ocean as much as to the Atlantic. More land in the West is under federal control than in any other region. And so on.

Fourth—though here the difference between the Old and the New is sometimes exaggerated—the cast of characters and the perspective of the telling changed. If, in the Old Western History, the leading roles were generally accorded to white men charging across the continent, the New Western History paid more attention to the other people who lived in the West: Native Americans, white women, Hispanics, the Asian American immigrants who worked the railroads, the African Americans who headed West after the Civil War. Indeed, many scholars have tried not only to include Native Americans in their writing, but to retell the entire story from the perspective of the conquered people, rather than the conquerors. How, exactly, did white Easterners go about dispossessing Native Americans of their land? To what extent have Native Americans and other minorities retained power and cultural influence in the West? Like historians of slavery, who, in the last 30 years, have tried to show the ways slaves resisted their masters and contributed to the shaping of Southern society, historians of the West now envision Indians not as a passive group that was massacred, but as agents and actors in their own right.

Finally, Nash and Etulain note that while in 1960, "almost no one seriously delved into the development of cities in the West, by the end of the century a growing cadre of scholars had demonstrated that urban clusters rather than the frontier had defined much of western society and culture over a long span of years."

This last observation can be connected with another theme in the New Western History; a strong emphasis on economic history, much of which undercuts the fabled "rugged individualism" of the West. Richard White and others have shown that the economy of the West has been disproportionately dependent on the federal government, especially after World War II, when the federal government poured dollars into Western military bases and industry. But what about the hearty, self-reliant yeoman farmer, earnestly tilling his 40 acres? A myth, says Donald Worster: "[F]armers in the West were some of the first agribusinessmen on the planet."

The development of capitalism is indeed a fruitful organizing theme for Western history—especially since it connects the West to one of the overarching themes of U.S. history, the transformation of an agrarian nation dependent on slave labor into the leader of a global economy based on consumer capitalism. But in focusing their attentions on questions of money and labor, the New Western Historians have by and large overlooked religion.

This is a glaring omission, given the West's notoriety as a fertile ground both for new religious groups and for new variations in established religious traditions. Consider, for example, the Azusa Street revival, the formative event in modern Pentecostalism; the growth of American Buddhism on the West Coast; and the California origins of groups such as est. Both Campus Crusade for Christ and the Jesus People movement began in California as well.

There are notable exceptions to the New Western History's neglect of religion. Laurie Maffly-Kipp's Religion and Society in Frontier California (Yale Univ. Press, 1994); Peggy Pascoe's Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874-1939 (Oxford Univ. Press, 1990), which examines Protestant women in the West; and, of course, studies of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, such as David Bigler's Forgotten Kingdom: The Mormon Theocracy in the American West, 1847-1896 (Utah State Univ. Press, 1998). Signs point to in creased attention to Western religion: Ferenc Szasz gives us a taste of his forthcoming book in this issue (see "Rattlesnake Derbies and Pink Teas"), and in her new book, Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West (Norton), Limerick devotes four essays to religion.

Here we learn that Limerick, a native Californian whose father is a lapsed Mormon and whose mother is a lapsed Congregationalist, grew up sometimes attending a Baptist church. Limerick's story contains one reversal of a familiar pattern—she attended church in order to irk her parents, whereas most kids rebel by skipping church—but it is nonetheless predictable. One day, a black woman showed up at Limerick's all-white church, and, after the service "the minister told her that her church was on the other side of town." On that day, writes Limerick, "my rebellion ended."

Limerick's distaste for the church has shaped her academic approach to religion. She paints the church largely as villain: The church was not simply segregated, she writes; "it was often a matter of the active use of the church as a social institution to maintain racial separation and inequality."

But if Limerick has little interest—personal or scholarly—in organized religion, she is keen on "disorganized religion": "My father and I," she writes, "remain post-Mormon and unchurched but nonetheless driven by convictions of right and wrong." She occasionally en vies her believing friends, she says, but then she remembers that she is "a member of a battered, disorganized, but still pretty bright, believing band of my own, churched and unchurched, composed of all races and backgrounds—people who hold onto a faith that fairness and justice might someday prevail in this region and nation." This attitude, she adds, is representative of Westerners—Mormons, Indians, and missionaries aside, the West tends to be the most unchurched region of the country.

Limerick, arguably the single most influential scholar of the American West, tends to drive research: many a graduate student may pick up Something in the Soil and decide that religion is the next avenue New Western Historians need to explore. One hopes they might marry Limerick's interest in "disorganized religion" with careful attention to all that the church, for good and for ill, has accomplished in the West.

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