The Middle Ground

¶ … Ground

Through the up-close and personal examination of a particular place during a particular time period, Richard White (1991) is able to open the eyes of his readers and show them a different way to think about history. There are long-term dynamics in history that a lot of people fail to consider. They see the historic event, or read about it, but they do not stop to think about the greater implications of that event. The human interactions that can be sparked by something are forever changed by significant historical events, and it is sometimes not until months or even years later that people completely begin to realize that. White (1991) should take great pride in his work, because he has shown that there is a very different way to look at history -- and the fresh perspective can shed a lot of new light onto issues that were previously looked at and then mostly ignored, even by historians.

American historians do a lot of difficult, painstaking work to piece together everything that has happened in the past. As they do that, there are issues like environment, disease, gender, and race that can and should be examined. Over the last couple of generations, more historians like White (1991) have focused on looking at history in a new way, and that has allowed them to take what would be otherwise seen as an irritating spirit of political correctness, remove it from ideology, and examine it in a new way. This gives a fresh perspective to old information, and shows the primary evidence to often be something other than what it was first thought to be. White's (1991) book is a very good example of that type of examination of evidence.

One of the best things about White's (1991) work is the selection of primary resources. He spares no expense, in a manner of speaking, to find the primary sources that are really needed for this type of work. That is good news for those who follow this type of work, and for those who like White (1991) in particular, because it means that there are few questions as to the authenticity of what he has to say. A historical work without primary sources would have little to no credibility. While secondary sources do have value and can be used, backing up the majority of the information in a book with primary sources is by far the best and most realistic choice. It was clear that White's (1991) background as a lover of history and a writer indicated the importance of proper citation.

In the book, White (1991) is very detailed about the territory he is discussing. It is a triangle of land that is bounded by the Great Lakes, the Ohio, and the Mississippi. The history of that area between establishment of a French hegemony and the defeat of Tecumseh is the main focus. White (1991) paints a very clear picture of it all, as well, from the events to the characters to the landscape. All are vivid and clear in the imagination of the reader based on what White (1991) has to say and how he talks about everything that he believes to have taken place there. Under all of that, there is a theoretical angle that he brings to the table, and it is one that most other historians have really said very little about.

There are many participants in the world that White (1991) describes. There are traders, colonial officials, prophets, chiefs, women, missionaries, and warriors. According to White (1991) these people all had to continually construct the rules of a 'game' of sorts. The traditions and cultures these people had were not capable of handling what was happening on their own, so they had to all work together to play this game so that they could reach some kind of conclusion they all could accept. The natives and the Europeans did not just discard the cultural baggage they still carried with them, however. Instead, they used what worked from their own cultures and then took what they needed, wanted, and liked from the other cultures that they were surrounded by, in order to find something that worked for them and for the situation that they found themselves in.

They took these things and refashioned them for their own purposes, so that they could make use of them in a way that would offer something to everyone involved. Because of this, new cultures actually developed and became ingrained in the people as the years went along. Under White's (1991) careful scrutiny, people who would have otherwise been called something specific, such as 'trader' or 'native' or 'father,' actually become much more, because society becomes much more. There are symbols and terms that are mutually forged and mutually misunderstood by a lot of people during that time period. These symbols and terms shifted and changed and eventually became more solid, but this took time -- and most history books ignore the changes that the people actually had to go through to get from where they were to what they have become.