Way back in May, as I planned this transcontinental voyage, Carol Higham, adjunct assistant professor of humanities at Davidson and a good buddy, piqued an academic interest in my yen to, as Horace Greeley is purported to have said, "Go West, young man." Okay, I'm only somewhat young, and Greeley is not the original author of the quote. The important thing here is that Carol told me about her new Western U.S. history textbook, Conquests and Consequences, co-written with William H. Katerbery of Calvin College. Even more important, she brought a laser-printed galley proof to my office, for me to pack along in the trunk of my Comet. I could picture the stack of sheets blowing off a campsite picnic table in Colorado, so I paid Central Services in the college union a buck fifty to wiro-bind it.
One of many illustrations that enliven the pages of Conquests and Consequences is "Geronimo in a Cadillac"---a Native American harbinger of my own journey west as "WASP in a Mercury"?
So I had this tome in my trunk for the whole six weeks, with the best intentions to study on it while actually on site of some of the places discussed. Carol was very understanding when I returned to Davidson without having cracked it. It just didn't happen. The road was providing my own little chapter of history in the making, and it was all I could do to keep up with that. Now that I have more suitable time and place to crack it, the book is adding whole new layers of meaning to my own trip, in retrospect. So all's well that ends well.
The idea for Conquests and Consequences is a little different than the history books I remember as a student. Carol and her co-author present their work as one voice in the ongoing scholarly debate and discussion of history---well-informed disagreement encouraged! There's an emphasis on diversity, not for its own politically correct sake, but because, well, history is more diverse than a lot of mid-20th-century textbooks presented it. In fact, the idea is to use the basic text as a core from which other authors can complement and expand perspectives, with satellite texts under the aegis of the same publisher, Harlan Davidson, Inc. The satellite texts will present a number of different perspectives, including those of women, African Americans, religion, water, and the environment.
So, coming soon to a classroom near you, an innovative approach to answering age-old questions about what is now the American West, such as (from the preface): "How have diverse societies and empires shaped and reshaped the region over the centuries? In the American era, has the West been more of a colony or a region? When was the American West a colony? When exactly did it become a region? Is it today a national and international center of power in its own right? How does the concept of the frontier function in the West?"
It was the conclusion of the preface that caught my eye in a way that it only could have been caught in hindsight on my own trip West. Their conclusion is applicable, in its own way, to my trip and this very blog: "It has been an exhilirating experience, both daunting and fun, to step out of our familiar areas of expertise and the relative privacy of the classroom and write a survey textbook. All errors of fact and foolhardy interpretation are, of course, of our own making and responsibility."
I could not have said it better myself.
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