Angela’s Reviews > Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West > Status Update

History, as well as current behavior, tells us that the charms of mobility and outdoor action have already been very well promoted, and thus there is every good reason to manipulate public opinion in order to place a positive and even heroic aura around acts of restraint and refusal of mobility.

The recognition of how much the phases [of our relationship with the environment] overlapped and continue to overlap restores considerable maneuvering room to us today. We often act as if attitudes and behavior toward nature are very much congealed by now, set in concrete, and determined by the past, but they are a lot more flexible than they seem.

The history of westward expansion has ended up divided into two, utterly separate stories: the sad and disheartening story of what whites did to the Indians, and the colorful and romantic story of what whites did for themselves.

If an ideal of historical detachment and objectivity requires us to hold to a scrupulous neutrality on the question of whether soldiers should shoot young children, then this is a professional ideal that corrodes the humanity of the historian.