Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion (2023) by Elliott West

 Book Review

Continental Reckoning: 

The American West in the Age of Expansion (2023)

by Elliott West

  Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion by Elliott West won a Bancroft Prize (for US history) this year and reading the description it very much sounded like a history book I would actually want to read.  I like reading history books, but not "popular history," i.e. Presidential biographies, Civil War battles or other "Dad History" topics.  I also don't like the niche stuff, or rather, I imagine to be myself someone who likes academic niche history but I don't actually enjoy reading the books, and they don't usually get published as Audiobooks.  That leaves a narrow category, which is "broad histories written by serious authors that summarize years of scholarship in the niche areas comprising the subject."  You might get one of these books per topic, per decade, if you are lucky.   Continental Reckoning is a great example of a work that synthesizes hundreds of sources to create a newish thesis on this broad subject, the history of the American west.

   If you could describe the course of scholarship on the American West in the past 50 years you would start with the "Manifest Destiny" thesis.  The description starts with scholars in the mid 20th century providing mild critiques and elaborations of this idea that white Europeans vanquished natives and other groups in a glorious effort to populate the western United States with white Europeans, "progress is great" etc.  The scholars existed in a very siloed environment, where "the history of the west" was a small subcategory of American History, which was dominated by scholarship on the founders/early America through to the time of the Civil War.

  In the 60's and 70's there was a reaction that produced a body of scholarship that directly attacked and eventually dismantled (for those paying attention) the myth of manifest destiny and exposed the settlement of the American west as a genocidal conquest that emphasized the experience of the people who stood in the way (the Native Americans), eventually this expanded to take into account the experience of other groups like Asian-Americans, latinos and women, to create a counter narrative, emphasizing the negative.  Another strand of this critique came in the emerging areas of technological and environmental history, where the settling of the west was exhibit "A" in many of those works.

   More recently, the history of the west has been caught up in the broader trend of historical scholarship which seeks to create linkages across time and history.  A pioneer in this area was Bernard Bailyn, who wrote histories of "the Atlantic" linking America and Europe.  Another pioneer was David Hackett Fischer, who wrote Albion's Seed in 1989- which, in my mind, is the most significant history book of the past half century.   Decades later, this last trend has reached the West and Elliott West has made his academic bones advocating for a "Greater Reconstruction" thesis that seeks to link the violence of the pre/Civil War and post Civil War era with the war against Native America that took place at roughly the same time and featured many of the same players. 

  In Continental Reckoning West persuasively argues that the mid 19th century was a violent time because white Euro-Americans were violently reordering the space of America along lines that favored the thesis of white supremacy.   Any thought that such a thesis might still be considered controversial in the 21st century is simply eradicated by the weight of the evidence, drawn from the very top (Congressional Records, Presidential papers) all the way down to the bottom (letters written by soldiers involved in Native American atrocities).  At every point, West is synthesizing materials discovered by others, but he is a lively writer and has a great eye for telling detail worth including in his grand narrative.

 Reading this book got me thinking the ways the different sides in our contemporary political scene use and abuse history.  What I came away with is that the persistence sense of grievance on BOTH ends of the political spectrum is nurtured both by the facts of American history itself AND the way that different people resist or don't acknowledge those facts.   This grievance based culture- which, I want to emphasize, is present on both sides of the political spectrum, is a culture of weakness.   Might both sides benefit from acknowledging the truth of American history before attempting to move past that history?