Early Reflections on Teaching Western History

David M. Wrobel

My experience, though brief, has been marked by some quite memorable moments.  I recall one student, intrigued by the fact that a Londoner (of partly Polish extraction) was teaching American history, remarking, “you probably know more about American history than some Americans.”  I certainly hope the student was correct!  The student was further fascinated by my focus on the West.  Coverage of colonial history by a “Brit,” one imagines, would be understandable, but the West (that ostensibly “most American part of America”) seemed an especially unusual choice.  These reflections, though based on limited experience, are useful because so much attention has been paid in recent years to the matter of writing western history and comparatively little to the matter of teaching it (3).

The two institutions in question are The College of Wooster in Ohio and Hartwick College in upstate New York.  Twice, at each of the colleges (from 1991 to 1994), I taught a class entitled “The American West: Myth and Reality.”  Incidentally, on its maiden voyage, the course was incorrectly listed in the catalogue as “The American West: Myth and Realty.”  Some of the students seemed to feel that given the cover of Patricia Nelson Limerick’s seminal work The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (an image of a crowded land office, which appears again on the inside cover, and a third time in the main body of the text), the incorrect listing might be entirely appropriate (4).  The course began as an outgrowth of my doctoral research.  I had started back in 1986 as a masters student at Ohio University, exploring the theme of concern over the perceived closing of the American frontier in the period before the official end of that amorphous entity, 1890.  A seminar paper grew into a masters thesis treating the same theme in the late nineteenth century, and then into a doctoral dissertation, tracing the theme through the New Deal era (5).  I decided to take advantage of the flexibility in course offerings that the liberal arts college environment often affords, and I proceeded to develop a course that would address the issue of the West’s place in the broader national consciousness (perhaps as amorphous an entity as Turner’s frontier).  This was in the spring of 1991. 

In working up this course I needed to pay special attention to my lack of formal training as a western historian.  In graduate school I had focused on American cultural/intellectual history and still think of my work on the West as a history of ideas rather than standard western history fare.  I had taken no courses in the history of the West, though Ohio University had offered a class on the “History of the Westward Movement” (6).  Still, I had immersed myself quite fully in the field as I researched my dissertation topic.  During that time in graduate school Limerick’s The Legacy of Conquest (1987) had appeared and the field of frontier/western history seemed more exciting than it had for some time.  It became apparent that there was a chance here to utilize the prevailing contentiousness in the field to disprove the notion, common among many of my colleagues, that undergraduate students cannot “handle” historiography.

The dissertation was close to completion (I had left graduate school ABD to take up the temporary appointment at Wooster), and I was chock full of historiographical, bibliographical, and biographical details.  Fortunately, I also had some ideas about how to structure a course on the West.  I decided that an upper division class, meeting twice a week in a fifteen week semester, afforded me the flexibility I needed to structure the course thematically.  I divided the course into three segments: “Historians and the West” (or historiography); “Myths of the West” (in art, literature, and film); and a case study of “The Twentieth-Century West” (with particular focus on environmental issues, and Federal-Indian relations). 

The course began with Turner and Theodore Roosevelt; examined the frontier thesis a little; jumped forward almost a century to Limerick and the “New Western Historians”; and then tried to traverse some of the historiographical territory separating the “frontiersmen” from the “regionalists,” the “triumphalists” from the “tragedians.”  The class read Roosevelt’s prefatory remarks and a chapter on the rugged, hardy frontiersmen from The Winning of the West, along with Turner’s 1893 paper, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” and discussed their initial reactions to these writings.  In the library they tracked down scholarly responses to Turner’s thesis, and we reconvened to reconstruct the various attacks and defenses of Turner’s essay.  This was only the third day of class, so I didn’t feel overly constricted by Turnerian bonds.  The class actually seemed to enjoy exploring the strengths and weaknesses (they found mostly the latter) of Turner’s thesis and the key points of the old Turner-centered debates.  Was he original?  Did the frontier really produce democracy, or nationalism, or individualism?  Did the frontier work as a safety valve?  Why didn’t he define “frontier” more clearly?  Some class members were partially won over by Ray Allen Billington’s attempts to salvage and reformulate the Turner thesis in America’s Frontier Heritage (7).  The students showed themselves able to handle historiographical issues.  They understood, for example, why it was easier to attack the Turner thesis in the cultural context of the 1930s than it had been in the previous decade, and they certainly understood why the thesis is currently being subjected to far more heated criticism.  In their initial discussions of Turner and Roosevelt the students preempted many of the questions that have occupied generations of well-known historians. 

With this much done, the class proceeded to read the first half of Limerick’s The Legacy of Conquest—”The Conquerors.” Reactions were mixed.  Some students were in full agreement with Limerick’s arguments feeling she had breathed fresh air into stale territory, some found them overly negative, but all in all they were fascinated by this fast-paced narrative and eager to discuss it.  With firsthand exposure to the “New Western History,” the class examined reactions to the revisionist school in U.S. News and World Report, Larry McMurtry’s piece in the New Republic, The New York Times, USA Today, and, a nice regional touch, the Cleveland Plain Dealer (8). 

Again, student discussion of the “New Western History” (as had been the case with Turner) was insightful and followed the general lines of recent debates with questions.  Is the “New Western History” really all that ‘new’?  Is there nothing positive in the story of the West?  Do the “New Western Historians” define the West as a region any more clearly than Turner defined it as a frontier?  Why do some people find the “New Western History” so difficult to accept? 

The students’ insightfulness was further evidenced after they had viewed Kevin Costner’s Dances With Wolves (1990) and Little Big Man (1970) starring Dustin Hoffman.  In discussing the two movies, members of the class pointed to some “New Western History”-like strands in Costner’s multi-Oscar winning movie, but concluded that its chronological predecessor (by roughly two decades)—Little Big Man—was far more reflective (or preemptive) of the revisionist genre because of its effective and extensive use of irony.

The long and short of this discussion of the first segment of the course is that historiography is interesting to undergraduates, especially when the debates are as vital as those in the field of western history right now.  These debates cut to the very heart of the current issues of debate on American college campuses—race, class, gender, the environment—and students realize this.  They wanted to read the most current articles in the field.  To hear undergraduate students bemoan the absence of a scholarly journal—the Western Historical Quarterly in this case—from the holdings of the college library was, in a very strange way, gratifying, even though I also griped about this gap in the collections.  Students borrowed my materials, ordered pertinent articles on inter-library loan, and managed to get by.

I began the second segment of the course, “Myth and Reality,” with more trepidation (I had expected the debates over Turner and the “New Western History” to be lively, despite the warnings of my colleagues to avoid historiography like the plague).  In this segment I stuck myself with the thankless task of making sense myself and hoping the students did too of the myths of the West (some would charge that early exposure to Turner and Roosevelt had already got the class off to a good start in the myth department).  Fortunately, I had a few useful guideposts for this segment of the course.  First, the students watched William H. Goetzmann’s and William N. Goetzmann’s six-part video series “The West of the Imagination” and read the accompanying text (9).  While a few students commented that one or the other (book or videos) would have sufficed, the great majority seemed to enjoy the double coverage of such unfamiliar territory.  Our discussions of western art also benefited from the extensive media coverage that the Smithsonian’s “West as America” exhibit (March 15-July 7, 1991) was receiving.

In the “myth segment” of the course we also tackled Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land (10).  Smith’s seminal work proved to be a good introduction to the topics of construction, elaboration, and dissemination of myth.  Each member of the class presented an oral synopsis of a segment of the book.  Unfortunately, the book proved overly difficult for some of the students, and I have since abandoned it as a text in the course.  The class also utilized a recent issue of the Journal of the West devoted to the topic of western myth and reality that includes good coverage of the western movie genre (11).

The final part of the course on the twentieth-century West was very closely tied to the previous segment on myth and reality.  We began with Pare Lorenz’s short film The Plow that Broke the Plain (1936) and then tackled John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (movie [1940] and novel [1939]) which the students seemed to thoroughly enjoy (12).  Next we discussed the second half of Limerick’s The Legacy of Conquest, “The Conquerors Meet Their Match,” Robert Athearn’s The Mythic West in Twentieth Century America, and Malone and Etulain’s The American West: A Twentieth Century History (13).  I wish I could report that the readings I have listed proved insufficient in satisfying the students’ limitless hunger for knowledge.  While a few class members did work their way through just about everything on the list, the final flurry of two and a half books, a final paper, and a take-home final exam proved a little too much (the students also wrote a paper in each of the first two segments of the course and gave a number of oral presentations).

In this last segment we explored Federal-Indian relations and environmental concerns, and our discussions landed occasionally on the theme of race relations in the West and western women’s history (areas with which I am only beginning to properly acquaint myself).  Discussing the second half of The Legacy of Conquest in the final segment of the course also served the purpose of bringing the course back to historiographical issues in the final week. 

As it turned out, I was pleased with this first pedagogical foray into the field of western history.  Nonetheless, there were numerous kinks to iron out, and I had the opportunity to do so the following spring.  I wanted to enlarge further the historiographical component of the course and provide more extensive coverage of some of the fields I had only skirted the first time around—most important, western women’s history and race relations.  To facilitate these ends I added two books to the course: Gerald Nash’s Creating the West, for historiographical coverage; and Clyde Milner II’s, Major Problems in the History of the American West which covers just about everything (14).  From the original required-reading list I retained the works by Limerick, Athearn, Goetzmann and Goetzmann, and Steinbeck.  But the most important addition to the course turned out not to be a book but a pedagogical exercise.

As a Graduate Teaching Associate (and doctoral candidate) at Ohio University I had taught my own classes, lecture-oriented courses to quite large numbers of students.  At Wooster the students were more accustomed to interactive, seminar style, discussion-driven pedagogical approaches, and I was learning to become a facilitator as well as a lecturer.  I understood that this was a transition I needed to make.  I recall what one student remarked on a teaching evaluation from the previous spring:  “Wrobel asks lots of good questions and proceeds very quickly to provide us with lots of good answers!”  I was full of questions and answers, but sorely lacking in patience.  It had not yet dawned on me that a few seconds of silence is not necessarily a terrible thing in the classroom.  I had been reflecting on this material for half a decade, and the students for only a few weeks, and they needed a little more time to think than I had been giving them.  The solution, I surmised, would be to involve them more fully, more personally in the class. 

The previous spring students had delivered oral presentations on their papers, on works of western art, literature, film, photography, and had delivered chapter synopses and evaluations of aspects of the course readings.  In short, the students had made extensive oral contributions to the class, yet I sensed they could do more.  About four weeks into the semester, I passed around a hat (not a cowboy hat) and each student picked out the name of a western historian.  I announced that we would be reconvening for the last few weeks of the semester as members of the Western Historical Association (past and present) and each member of the class would have to become familiar with the work of the figure they had picked.  Here would be a unique opportunity for Fred Turner and Ray Billington to address their detractors, for Larry McMurtry (the token non-historian) to berate the negativism of the revisionists, for the revisionists to admonish the narrowness and Eurocentrism of the “triumphalists,” and so on.  Similarly, here was a chance, indeed a rare opportunity (from the student perspective), for me to be quiet!

In the interim between the announcement of the meeting and its convening, the semester progressed quite successfully.  Milner’s Major Problems, with its solid coverage of a broad range of subject areas and its effective utilization of a mixture of primary sources and essays by modern historians proved an invaluable resource, for both class discussion and paper writing.
In the second to last week of the semester we gathered in our two separate groups (the class had more than thirty students, so I had been teaching it in two separate seminar sections). Present were Fred Turner’s ghost, along with Ray Billington’s, Angie Debo’s, Robert Athearn’s, and Walter Prescott Webb’s. Patricia Nelson Limerick, Glenda Riley, Vicki Ruiz, Gerald Nash, Roderick Nash, William Goetzmann, William Cronon, Richard White, Larry McMurtry, Donald Worster, and Martin Ridge were also in attendance.  Each student had read enough of their character/historian’s work to be an active participant in the proceedings.  There were few moments of silence in these last two weeks of the course.  The groups discussed issues in round-table sessions, papers were delivered and commented upon, and I was quieter than usual (in fact, playing myself at the sessions, a junior historian, I was less disposed to hold forth on every topic that came up). 

The students did a wonderful job, and it was one of my most gratifying teaching experiences.  Among the particularly memorable recollections I have from these sessions was that of the young man who played Martin Ridge and was absolutely wonderful in the role—his mannerisms so closely matched those of Ridge’s character that the effect was uncanny.  In perhaps the most prophetic moment of the semester, Gerald Nash tore into the revisionists.  Fred Turner simply chuckled, and when questioned about his seemingly irreverent mood, he said something to the effect that it was doubly ironic that people would expect him to be bothered by the fact of another generation rewriting the past according to the dictates of the present.  More memorable still was one young man who dressed in drag and delivered a fifteen minute address on the trials and tribulations of cannery women—Vicki Ruiz would not, I think, have been displeased with the performance.  Larry McMurtry was quite vocal in his criticism of the revisionists, Worster, White, and Limerick defended their regionalist ground vigorously against the “frontiersmen.”  William Cronon suggested that there might be more to the Turnerian legacy than first met the eye, perhaps even something salvageable; Ray Billington remarked that he felt he’d said something similar in America’s Frontier Heritage.  Some argued that the “New Western History” was not so new as its proponents claimed, and Limerick contended that part of the newness stemmed from the reality that people were now listening.

The mock WHA conference helped the semester end on a high note.  The take-home final exams were of high quality and demonstrated a good understanding of the nuances of the debates among historians, of the nature of myth and symbol, and the complexities and ambiguities that mark the relationship between myth and reality.  Students remarked in course evaluations that they had enjoyed the conference, and that it had helped them put the whole course into perspective.  I had learned to be quiet for short periods, an important pedagogical development for me and a bonus for my wife too!  I had also demonstrated to my own satisfaction that students can “handle” historiography; indeed, they can do so very effectively. 

As I geared up to teach the class again in January 1994, my highest priorities were to incorporate more effectively the fields of race relations and western women’s history into the final segment of the course.  Fortunately, this end was facilitated by the addition of two books to the required readings list—an excellent new collection of essays on Peoples of Color in the American West by Sucheng Chan, et al., eds., and Glenda Riley’s superbly structured and highly readable book of essays and documents, A Place to Grow: Women in the American West (15). Both works generated extensive discussion, provided the basis for numerous group presentations, and generated some very thoughtful student papers (16).

Also, because I was lecturing on Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath to public audiences around the same time that the class was being taught, I decided to devote more time (three full two and a half hour class sessions in fact) to incorporating the novel and movie into the structure of the course.  For three days we convened to hear mini-lectures by myself on key aspects of Steinbeck’s novel, to hear individual presentations by class members on each chapter of the book, and to view a portion of Ford’s movie. These sessions, in the final week of class, served a purpose similar to that of the mock WHA meeting of a few years before. Careful examination of The Grapes of Wrath generated discussion on environmental themes, women’s roles, race relations, and debates over the validity and usefulness of the concepts of frontier and region.

As my intellectual interest in the West has increased I have continued, ironically, to move eastward—from Northeast Ohio, to upstate New York, and now to a position at Widener University, just outside of Philadelphia.  I am teaching “The American West: Myth and Reality” for the fifth time this fall.  The three segments of the course—”Historians and the West,” “ Myth and Reality,” and “The Twentieth Century West”—remain intact as the structural framework.  New additions to the required reading list include John Mack Faragher’s fast-paced biography of Daniel Boone (17).  Students will utilize Faragher’s biography to address the question of whether there is a place for the frontier in revisionist interpretations of the western past.  The above-mentioned works by Riley, Chan, et al., Limerick, and Steinbeck will be retained.  The second part of the course will be expanded to include coverage of western imagery in advertising and western themes in American popular music.

While reflections on four semesters of experience teaching a single course certainly do not have the value of a lifetime’s experience reflecting on western matters—the weight of my experiences certainly lacks the poignancy and insightfulness of Stegner’s or Athearn’s recollections—nevertheless, this exercise in descriptive (rather than theoretical) pedagogy may be of interest to those considering the structure of a course in western history.  The tripartite structure of “The American West: Myth and Reality” has allowed me to explore three vital areas in the field of western American studies—historiography, myth, and the twentieth-century West.  While the starting point for the course is Turner and Roosevelt, the course quickly moves to the revisionist interpretation and the students are able to weigh the value of these approaches for themselves.  I am convinced that the vast majority of undergraduates are fully able to “handle” historiographical issues.  I would also venture that an initial exploration of the historical debates gives the students the tools to handle the course materials (primary sources, secondary works, literature, film, art) with a more critical eye. 

An examination of the complex relationship between myth and reality is a good starting point for the study of any body of historical source material.  The rich source materials that have shaped popular conceptions of the American West constitute a particularly fertile field for such investigation. An examination of American western mythology takes us back into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, thus ensuring that the “heroic era of white settlement” is not excluded, but neither is it allowed to dominate the structure of the course.

The twentieth-century West works well as a theme, allowing for flexibility in choosing sub-themes: environmental history; women’s history; the histories of peoples of color; and Federal-Indian relations are all workable.  Additional themes might include the urban West or colonialism (Limerick’s treatment of this topic in The Legacy of Conquest can provide a solid basis for discussion).  This flexibility enables the instructor to play to her/his strengths, and also allows the students to explore those topics that interest them most. 

Over the past four years while teaching this course, I have learned to lecture less, and to worry less about whether every necessary detail is covered.  The interconnectedness of the course’s three segments ensures that most important elements will be included at some point.  I have also learned to veil my biases fairly effectively—the vacillating nature of my own views on many of these issues facilitates this effort.  The issues that have ignited the field of western history in the last half decade or so have such close bearing on the debates over curriculum and political climate that currently occupy academia that the students can be drawn into discussion quite easily.  The polemical exchanges that marked the mock WHA meeting (described earlier) suggest that student apathy is as often a figment of our imagination, or lack of it, as it is a reality. Just as each generation rewrites the past and teaches it according to the dictates of the present, so each generation of college and university faculty predictably regrets the intellectual regression of the current generation of undergraduates.  Perhaps there is something to these lamentations, but my experiences with the current generation of undergraduates have been largely positive, as I hope my reflections on this course have borne out.

I am certainly not suggesting that the structure of my course “The American West: Myth and Reality” be adopted as a framework by other western history teachers.  Instead, I am sharing my experiences as a young academic just getting my feet wet in a particularly contentious field.  I feel the class has benefited from my utilization of the debates over frontier or region, process or place, heroic settlement or tragic conquest.  This debate can be used as a starting point for examining the myths and realities of frontier/Western history.

The course has not by any means been an unqualified success—in fact its shortcomings would occupy an essay at least as long as the present one, but on reflection, it has been a profitable and enjoyable endeavor.  The experience of taking into the classroom the debates that have recently reignited scholarly discourse in the field of American western history has been fruitful.  For me, teaching western history in the early 1990s has proven to be as interesting as writing about the West, and the essential interconnectedness of the two seems obvious and worthy of more attention. 

2. Stephen Aaron, “Lessons in Conquest: Towards a Greater Western History,” Pacific Historical Review 63 (May 1994): 125-47. 

3. Exceptions to this trend are Patricia Nelson Limerick’s treatment of textbook coverage of the American West, “The Case of the Premature Departure: The Trans-Mississippi West and American History Textbooks,” Journal of American History 78 (March 1992): 1380-1394; Richard White, “New Western History, Textbooks, and the U.S. History Survey Course,” Perspectives, 30 September 1992, 1, 10-12; and Nancy Shoemaker, “Teaching the Truth About the History of the American West,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 1993, A48. 

4. Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1987).

5. David M. Wrobel, “The Closing Gates of Democracy: Frontier Anxiety Before the Official End of the Frontier,” American Studies 32 (Spring 1991): 49-66, and The End of American Exceptionalism: Frontier Anxiety from the Old West to the New Deal (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993). 

6. This course, incidentally, was taught by Robert Daniel, a neo-Turnerian and student of Merle Curti.

7. Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West, 4 vols. (New York: Collier, ca. 1889-1896; Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt, 1920); and Ray Allen Billington, America’s Frontier Heritage (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1966).

8. Miriam Horn, “How the West Was Really Won,” U.S. News and World Report, 21 May 1990, 56-65; Larry McMurtry, “Westward Ho Hum: What the New Historians Have Done to the Old West,” New Republic, 9 October 1990, 32-38; “Rewriting the West,” USA Today, 7 December 1990, sec. D, p.1-2; Richard Bernstein, “Ideas and Trends: Among Historians the Old Frontier is Turning Nastier with Each Revision,” New York Times, 17 December 1989, sec. E, p.66; and “How the West Wasn’t Won: Historians Tackle Myth,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, 22 November 1990, sec. F. 

9. William H. Goetzmann and William N. Goetzmann, The West of the Imagination (New York: W.W. Norton, 1986).

10. Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950). 

11. David Daly and Joel Persky, “The West and the Western,” Journal of the West 29 (April 1990): 3-64.

12. John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939; New York: Penguin Books, 1967).

13. Michael P. Malone and Richard W. Etulain, The American West: A Twentieth-Century History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989).

14. Gerald Nash, Creating the West: Historical Interpretations, 1890-1990 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991); and Clyde A. Milner II, ed., Major Problems in the History of the American West (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath, 1989).

15. Sucheng Chan, Douglas Henry Daniels, Mario T. Garcia, and Terry P. Wilson, eds., Peoples of Color in the American West (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath, 1994); and Glenda Riley, A Place to Grow: Women in the American West (Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1992). 

16. Two of the papers from the Hartwick class, Lori Smith, “The New Western Historians and an Old Indian Painter: Reassessing George Catlin,” and Florence Jill Thorpe, “The West as America: Reinterpreting Western Images,” have since appeared in the first issue of Nu Theta, a publication of the Hartwick College chapter of Phi Alpha Theta, the national history honors society, pages 10-12 and 12-14, respectively (available upon request from the author or the Hartwick College Library).

17. John Mack Faragher, Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer (New York: Henry Holt, 1992).