Sign Up Now
Get instant access to over 1 million+ study documents
OR
Already registered? click here to login
By creating your account, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and student honor code.
This view, however, fails in Limerick's mind, to adequately show how we can directly trace our current social, economic, and political order to Jamestown, Salem, and the Louisiana Purchase. "White Americans saw the acquisition of property as a cultural imperative" (Limerick, 55). How has that changed either before or after? Isn't that the justification used by the Virginia Company when establishing Jamestown? Isn't that the same as Sam Houston's justification for the subjugation and annexation of Texas? Isn't that the same as our ongoing destruction of the environment to create homes, shopping malls, and warehouses? Manifest Destiny existed in the European mindset even before the phrase was coined. Thus, Limerick observes that we have to see our history as part of that same kind of continuity of intent.
Indeed, Limerick promotes a moral significance on the history of the American West rather than a focus on specific dates and specific events. Her view is to see all dates and events as part of a continuity - they string together without grand design, but are clearly guided by the common and natural White European tendency to see the world as resource to be owned, beaten into...
This means that Limerick's view includes all the warts and failures associated with the West and our ongoing history - our Presidents have long made mistakes of grandiose nature, institutions have always failed, and the military has been used for ill-gain purposes since the founding of the nation. Thus, it is the continuity of character, and not the specific events, that makes the American West's history so unbroken.
Limerick succeeds amazingly well in showing us that understanding the people, their decisions, motivations, and their institutions is really the history of the American West.
What happened in 1865? A war ended. Why did it end and what did that mean? Ask the people, the government, and the social systems that participated. Limerick sees no unifying patterns of dates and events leading inexorably forward to create today, she sees instead the history of failures and successes that continue to shape how America interacts with itself and with others.
References
Limerick, Patricia Nelson. The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. New York: W.W. Norton, 1987.
American West United States became one of the most industrialized nations and sought to grow its industries at an alarming rate. For this purpose, the western part of United States, which had not yet been discovered, was subjected to massive development, economic growth, formation of industries and allowing settlers to move towards the west. Railroads played a significant role in contributing towards the development and urbanization of America's West. The goal
The relationship they had with one another included a fair division of land, and a good balance of trade. Unfortunately, after the settlers learned what they needed from the Native Americans and took what they could from them, they no longer had any use for the proud people whose land they had invaded. The relationship between the settlers and the Native Americans began to change as settlers learned to do
It may have seemed to many that Stegner was simply expressing a bitter lament or was being a naysayer, but in fact, what he predicted is actually quite close to the truth. The West is being settled as an insane rate, and there is simply not enough water to continue this growth. Certainly, there are other issues that make up the West, from its complex history to its varied
It is the obsession for independence, in Stegner's view, rather than a real need for being mobile that is driving the Americans in general, and the Americans from the West to keep moving at all costs. To illustrate the idea of their inability to escape their own fate, Stegner uses the example of Wister's novel, the Virginian, whose hero, named after the region he comes from, although acting only
American Expansion American Territorial Expansion: The Louisiana Purchase American territorial expansion was the top priority of Washington DC for every decade of the 19th century, including the Civil War years. The new territory all came to Americans through treaties or conquest, and thus promoted the isolationist "Manifest Destiny" prerogative of strengthening the American continent. The earliest and largest territorial expansion of the 19th century was the Louisiana Purchase, doubling the size of
American Civil War/Sioux Indians Cowboys and Indians in Hollywood: The Treatment of Quotidian Life of the Sioux People in Dances With Wolves The old Hollywood Westerns that depicted the heroic cowboy and the evil Indian have past; they no longer sell out the movie theaters and are inundated with critique instead of cinematic favor. In the last thirty years, new Hollywood has attempted to correct this revisionist history, as embodied by Kevin Costner's "Dances