What do you think?
Rate this book
Something in the Soil
Something in the Soil : Field-Testing the New Western History by Patricia Nelson Limerick. W.W. Norton & Co.,2000
Unknown Binding
First published March 1, 2000
5 people are currently reading
173 people want to read
About the author
Patricia Nelson Limerick
36 books29 followersPatricia Nelson Limerick is an American historian, considered to be one of the leading historians of the American West. She was born and raised in Banning, California.
Limerick received a B.A. in American Studies in 1972 from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a Ph.D. in American Studies in 1980 from Yale University. She worked at Harvard University as an Assistant Professor from 1980 to 1984. Previously she taught at Yale as a graduate teaching assistant, where she helped teach the highly-regarded 'daily themes' class. Since then Limerick has been at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she is Professor of History and chair of the Board of the Center of the American West.
Limerick is a former president of the American Studies Association (1996-1997) and the Western History Association (2000). She is known for her 1987 book The Legacy of Conquest, which is part of a body of historical writing sometimes known as the New Western History. In 1995, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.
Her essay on the Modoc War, titled "Haunted America" appears in the collection "Ways of Reading," a textbook widely used by undergraduate English students. She also co-edited a collection of essays, titled "Trails: Toward a New Western History," which relate to her famous 1989 Trails Through Time exhibit.
Limerick received a B.A. in American Studies in 1972 from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a Ph.D. in American Studies in 1980 from Yale University. She worked at Harvard University as an Assistant Professor from 1980 to 1984. Previously she taught at Yale as a graduate teaching assistant, where she helped teach the highly-regarded 'daily themes' class. Since then Limerick has been at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she is Professor of History and chair of the Board of the Center of the American West.
Limerick is a former president of the American Studies Association (1996-1997) and the Western History Association (2000). She is known for her 1987 book The Legacy of Conquest, which is part of a body of historical writing sometimes known as the New Western History. In 1995, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.
Her essay on the Modoc War, titled "Haunted America" appears in the collection "Ways of Reading," a textbook widely used by undergraduate English students. She also co-edited a collection of essays, titled "Trails: Toward a New Western History," which relate to her famous 1989 Trails Through Time exhibit.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
May 8, 2014
The occasion of an essay is that part of its structure where you explain the relevance of your topic, why you need to say something about it, address a counterargument, etc. It usually comes up front, but doesn't have to. Limerick needs to shorten up her occasions. She spends way too much time in almost all of these pieces explaining why something's an issue, and telling us that she plans to revise a perception, and relatively little time saying something new about the stuff she's critiquing. She's good at explicating paradoxes in the stories we tell ourselves about the West, and in the way we orient to this landscape--as beauty, as a place of healing, as a place of renewal, as a from which wealth can be extracted. Above all, American culture likes to make *use* of things. In English, the term wasteland means land not under cultivation. In general, Americans have had a hard time dealing with land that doesn't LOOK like wasteland (beautiful mountains, for example), and yet is not easily put into production. Surely there must be something we can DO with it. Even if it's a desert. (Over) graze cattle, drill for oil, log, build dams, install wind plants. But the more we industrialize the West, the more dissonance we have with the *story* of the West. Personal freedom! Natural grandeur! Pure water! Transformation and healing! Nutty sects!
The trouble is, a lot of this ground was covered in Limerick's masterpiece, Legacy of Conquest. I don't have that with me and am too lazy to compare publication dates. If you had to choose between the two, I'd go with Conquest. Also, these essays probably should have been edited quite a bit for the sake of the collection. As individual pieces they're probably quite engaging, but as a collection the occasion issue becomes more pronounced, and there's an element of repetition. Or perhaps it's just that enough time has passed for us to be more familiar with her central arguments. Still, lots of tidbits that are good to know, and she's the best at what she does.
The lecture-y section at the end on how to write for a lay audience was a little weird. Seemed like it should go in a thin book of its own.
The trouble is, a lot of this ground was covered in Limerick's masterpiece, Legacy of Conquest. I don't have that with me and am too lazy to compare publication dates. If you had to choose between the two, I'd go with Conquest. Also, these essays probably should have been edited quite a bit for the sake of the collection. As individual pieces they're probably quite engaging, but as a collection the occasion issue becomes more pronounced, and there's an element of repetition. Or perhaps it's just that enough time has passed for us to be more familiar with her central arguments. Still, lots of tidbits that are good to know, and she's the best at what she does.
The lecture-y section at the end on how to write for a lay audience was a little weird. Seemed like it should go in a thin book of its own.
August 29, 2009
Professor Limerick is a wonderful writer and a model of a modern historian, one who writes about the past for the benefit of teh present but without a trace of whiggishness. The essays in here are never less than good and often magnificent (America rediscovered from the West is a terrific piece, and so is the essay on Mormon ethinicity). If you want to understand why the history of the West matters and why it didn't stop with the "closing of the frontier", this is a book for you. And if you just want to read a witty, trenchant and engaged scholar at the top of her game, it's for you too.
February 27, 2011
This is a wonderful collection of highly readable academic essays. For years Limerick had a column in USA today on Western history. She's a true public intellectual. I've used this as a text in several composition courses at Cal. Students love it--esp her essays on Frontierland in Disneyland, and one on The Modoc Wars called "Haunted America," in which she uses The Modoc Wars as a case study for what Americans fail to learn in every war we start.
March 6, 2024
An important step in one's self-education regarding an alternate/accurate representation of the History of the American West, without romanticizing or aggrandizement. Limerick describes herself at the center of "an untamed and badly groomed intellectual entity called The New Western History", a "kind of Rorschach test for people ruled by strong, unexamined emotions about the West."
Amen.
-and although this volume is over 20 years old, getting in on the genesis of this conversation is wonderfully enlightening. I am no one to speak meaningfully about an historian's work. I am simply a rancher, having lived out my life in "the West". No doubt, I have my own strong and unexamined emotions, but I have been so grateful to put these under a different lens power and rethink what I assume I know. There is much wonderful perspective: not the imagery of "wagons-ho" and immigration marching Westward, but all that was happening around the edges, and all that was driving it.
On top of all that, some damn fine sentences.
Amen.
-and although this volume is over 20 years old, getting in on the genesis of this conversation is wonderfully enlightening. I am no one to speak meaningfully about an historian's work. I am simply a rancher, having lived out my life in "the West". No doubt, I have my own strong and unexamined emotions, but I have been so grateful to put these under a different lens power and rethink what I assume I know. There is much wonderful perspective: not the imagery of "wagons-ho" and immigration marching Westward, but all that was happening around the edges, and all that was driving it.
On top of all that, some damn fine sentences.
In recent times, making up for a longstanding imbalance in historical practice, the attention of many professional historians shifted toward the history of minorities, women and workers, and away from the holders of power and influence. The time seems propitious to return to the study of the famous, prosperous white men, with their stories now enriched and deepened by a recognition of the people whose subordination made possible the prosperity of the elite."
I can chew on that all day . . .
gave-up
October 5, 2021This really wasn't for me. I found myself skimming or outright skipping several of the essays, which is why I left this unrated.
This is one of those books that says it's doing a lot more than it is. The heavy handed references to how dull and self-important academics are, compared to what a disruptor the author is in this regard, are super cringey and not really backed up by the material.
Unlike The Legacy of Conquest, which I also read, none of these essays feel like they're bringing anything close to the same level of analysis. Many of the essays seem scattered and unnecessarily convoluted (see the chapter on Mormon history).
This is one of those books that says it's doing a lot more than it is. The heavy handed references to how dull and self-important academics are, compared to what a disruptor the author is in this regard, are super cringey and not really backed up by the material.
Unlike The Legacy of Conquest, which I also read, none of these essays feel like they're bringing anything close to the same level of analysis. Many of the essays seem scattered and unnecessarily convoluted (see the chapter on Mormon history).
May 23, 2023
I think I would’ve enjoyed this more had I have been reading it for research. A few articles were thoroughly entertaining.
August 17, 2015
Another of Professor Limerick's Western history products, and again some brilliant handling of range of subjects - as note her subtitle. As Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., states "Her sparkling essays show with sharp insight for forgotten dramas of our frontier past shape actions, ideas, and dilemmas of the western present." Cover design nicely shows a huge tumbleweed on a desert.
I single out the 40 pages of the chapter "Haunted America" which deals 'in extensio' with the series of military actions called the 1872-1873 Modoc Wars in northeastern California and southeastern Oregon. She does not suffer the history with scholarly drudge data, but presents in eleven "Storys" the sequential historical phases of the Wars, each one followed by a "Pattern" which provides judgment made from a remote from the event. The unbiased and objective and comprehensive treatment of these engagements is in my judgement brilliant history.
Others are interesting but as history seldom of the same depth and quality. She discourses on the nature of the word "frontier," she plays on why Juan Bautista de Anza is not a household name, an essay about John Sutter as a prototype 'for failure,' environmental perspectives (a very weak treatment), takes frequent time to denigrate the American historian Frederick Jackson Turner, looks at the Gold Rush consequences, the ethnicity of Mormonism, an essay on "landscapes" (quite muddled), the Mormon inadvertent initiative at harmony, a fine painting of religious belief, and does a fine job of defining "the Real Californian".
She is a popularist writer, perhaps the very best in a type of journalistic presentation (though the essays are uneven in quality), a fine sense of a more valid historical picture of the West, never an inappropriate phrase, with a fine light touch, often with an apt anecdote. Enjoyable reading.
She concludes with 3 essays as an epilogue:- A how-to guide for the academic-going public, The trouble with academic prose, and Limerick's Rule of Verbal Etiquette." (Lessons for me to learn by.)
Could not this book be used (and might have been intended and marketed) as an academic introductory course text on the "New Western History"? This is a field in which Professor Limerick reportedly "has been a dominant voice for two decades."
I single out the 40 pages of the chapter "Haunted America" which deals 'in extensio' with the series of military actions called the 1872-1873 Modoc Wars in northeastern California and southeastern Oregon. She does not suffer the history with scholarly drudge data, but presents in eleven "Storys" the sequential historical phases of the Wars, each one followed by a "Pattern" which provides judgment made from a remote from the event. The unbiased and objective and comprehensive treatment of these engagements is in my judgement brilliant history.
Others are interesting but as history seldom of the same depth and quality. She discourses on the nature of the word "frontier," she plays on why Juan Bautista de Anza is not a household name, an essay about John Sutter as a prototype 'for failure,' environmental perspectives (a very weak treatment), takes frequent time to denigrate the American historian Frederick Jackson Turner, looks at the Gold Rush consequences, the ethnicity of Mormonism, an essay on "landscapes" (quite muddled), the Mormon inadvertent initiative at harmony, a fine painting of religious belief, and does a fine job of defining "the Real Californian".
She is a popularist writer, perhaps the very best in a type of journalistic presentation (though the essays are uneven in quality), a fine sense of a more valid historical picture of the West, never an inappropriate phrase, with a fine light touch, often with an apt anecdote. Enjoyable reading.
She concludes with 3 essays as an epilogue:- A how-to guide for the academic-going public, The trouble with academic prose, and Limerick's Rule of Verbal Etiquette." (Lessons for me to learn by.)
Could not this book be used (and might have been intended and marketed) as an academic introductory course text on the "New Western History"? This is a field in which Professor Limerick reportedly "has been a dominant voice for two decades."
January 19, 2013
If you live in the American West then you should read this collection of essays. Ms. Limerick is insightful, nuanced, and often funny as hell as she explores familiar topics (such as the California gold rush) in new ways, or reveals lesser known characters (De Anza)or events superbly. The sacred cows (cowboys, Indians, rugged independence, you name it)are, one by one, slayed by her pen...only to be reborn in vastly more interesting and accurate ways via her ability to see things from numerous perspectives all at once. Best of all, her history never exists in a vacuum (or behind the glass of a museum) but is constantly being used to illuminate our current situation, be it matters of race, religion, economics, or the environment. I will definitely be seeking out more of her writings.
December 19, 2012
This is a collection of essays by Limerick, a renowned "New West" historian at CU. Her style that places a premium on argument over coherent and comprehensive narrative works better in essay form than it did in book form. The result are several interesting essays about certain events in Western history, though I still found myself skipping through sections and getting excited about being done, which is not a good sign.
March 21, 2014
I feel as if I accidentally walked into a room that I never knew existed. Written by a history professor at CU Boulder, this book introduced me to the idea that history is fluid and is totally influenced by the historian. I feel like a beginner in understanding history in this way, and I look forward to learning more. I will definitely read her first book, Legacy of Conquest.
May 18, 2008
Really an excellent book with many insights on how we in the west got to the place we are today. Professor Limerick does go off on tangents about her world of academia: the inner workings of how versions of history are brought to the masses.
Read
August 30, 2008Authors Laura Pritchett and Stephen Trimble both recommended this as part of the Rocky Mountain Land Library's "A Reading List For the President Elect: A Western Primer for the Next Administration".
January 3, 2011
Not bad. The first few chapters were strong but it seemed to repeat itself and I lost some interest in the middle and skimmed the rest of it. The end appendix on intellectuals and academia is great, especially if you are currently drowning in that world.
December 19, 2010
some repetition and overlap from her amazing 'legacy of conquest,' and not nearly so captivating, but still a pretty good read-aloud when road-doggin'...i would recommend 'legacy of conquest' first!
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews