Limerick, Patricia Nelson 1951-

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LIMERICK, Patricia Nelson 1951-

PERSONAL:

Born May 17, 1951, in Banning, CA. Education: University of California at Santa Cruz, B.A. (American studies), 1972; Yale University, Ph.D., 1980.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of History, University of Colorado, Campus Box 234, Boulder, CO 80309-0234. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Yale University, New Haven, CT, acting instructor in American studies, 1976-78, instructor in college seminar program, 1978-80; Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, assistant professor of history, 1980-84; University of Colorado, Boulder, assistant professor, 1984-87, associate professor, 1987-91, professor of history, 1991—, chair of board of directors for Center of the American West, and associate director of minority arts and sciences program. Member of board of advisors for Ken Burns documentary series The West.

MEMBER:

American Studies Association (president, 1996-97).

AWARDS, HONORS:

Charles Warren fellowship, Harvard University, 1983-84; American Council of Learned Societies fellowship, 1989; faculty fellowship, University of Colorado, 1989-90; named State Humanist of the Year, Colorado Endowment for the Humanities, 1992; John D. and Catherine T. Mac-Arthur Foundation fellowship 1995-2000.

WRITINGS:

Desert Passages: Encounters with American Deserts, University of New Mexico Press (Albuquerque, NM), 1985.

The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West, W. W. Norton (New York, NY), 1987.

(Editor, with Clyde A. Milner and Charles E. Rankin) Trails: Toward a New Western History, University Press of Kansas (Lawrence, KS), 1991

(Editor, with Gary Holthaus, Charles F. Wilderson, and Eve Stryker Munson) A Society to Match the Scenery: Personal Visions of the Future of the American West, University Press of Colorado (Boulder, CO), 1992

(Author of text, with Thomas W. Southall) Mark Klett, Revealing Territory: Photographs of the Southwest, University of New Mexico Press (Albuquerque, NM), 1992

(With Richard White) The Adventures of the Frontier in the Twentieth Century, edited by James Grossman, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1994

(With Richard White) The Frontier in American Culture: An Exhibition at the Newberry Library, August 26, 1994-January 7, 1995, edited by James R. Grossman, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1994

(With Howard R. Lamar, Albert L. Hurtado, Richard White, and Iris H. W. Engstrand) John Sutter and a Wider West, edited by Kenneth N. Owens, University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE), 1994

(Author of text) Drex Brooks, Sweet Medicine: Sites of Indian Massacres, Battlefields, and Treaties, foreword by James Welch, University of New Mexico Press (Albuquerque, NM), 1995

(Author of commentary) The Real West (exhibition catalog), introduction by Andrew E. Masich, afterword by Georgianna Contiguglia, Gwen F. Chanzit, and Eleanor Gehres, Civic Center Cultural Complex (Denver, CO), 1996

(With Edward L. Ayers, Stephen Nissbaum, and Peter S. Onuf) All over the Map: Rethinking American Regions, edited by Fred M. Shelley, Johns Hopkins University Press (Baltimore, MD), 1996

(With Dave Hickey and Thomas W. Southall) The Altered Landscape, edited by Peter E. Pool, University of Nevada Press/Nevada Museum of Art (Reno and Las Vegas, NV), 1999.

Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West, W. W. Norton (New York, NY), 2000

(Editor, with Douglas Brinkley) Bernard Augustine DeVoto, The Western Paradox: A Conservation Reader, foreword by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2000

(With Claudia Puska) Making the Most of Science in the American West: An Experiment, Center of the American West, University of Colorado at Boulder (Boulder, CO), 2003.

Contributor to periodicals, including American Historical Review, Journal of American History, Denver Post, Rocky Mountain News, USA Today, Daily Camera, and New York Times Book Review. Member of editorial board, American Historical Review, 1993-96.

SIDELIGHTS:

Patricia Nelson Limerick has emerged as an important voice among historians trying to establish the New Western History, a scholarly movement that characterizes the traditional view of the development of the American West as a triumphant myth. In writings that have attracted both academic and general public interest since the late 1980s, Limerick has focused on discussing neglected issues in western history, including the failures, victims, and environmental damage done. Some critics are quick to point out that Limerick and other supporters of the New Western History are only repeating ideas already presented by others and that Americans are quite happy with their mythology. Limerick, however, has spurred renewed debate on the subject.

Limerick's first book, Desert Passages: Encounters with the American Deserts, is a revised version of her dissertation. In this study she looks at writings by eight well-known Anglo-American men whose view of the desert evolved from that of a deadly, fearful place into one in which they saw a land of beauty and opportunity. Limerick tells how an important turning point came at the time of John C. Fremont, who introduced the idea that the deserts could be "conquered" thanks to technology that improved travel and provided access to water. Writing in Bloomsbury Review, Jerry D. Moore called the book "a fine, small study," but he wondered whether "the changing perspectives which Limerick skillfully outlines really reflect commonly held views or are they literary artifacts?" Jim Aton similarly commented in Western American Literature that Limerick doesn't "probe very deeply into her eight writers' minds," though he still said the author "organizes her material well and has an easy, succinct style."

The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West helped establish Limerick as a significant contributor to New Western scholarship. The book responds to the romanticized view of the West created by both the media and American literature, a trend Limerick rejects "because it transforms a folk belief into a historical theory," as she explained in a People interview with Vickie Bane. "It was what many white Americans had wanted to think about themselves." Limerick argues that the European settlement of the West should be labeled a "conquest" in order to put it in proper perspective; also, Americans should acknowledge that Asians, Hispanics, and French Canadians had an important role in the migration process, and that such issues as water and land management are still enormously important and controversial today. Choice contributor D. L. DeBerry called The Legacy of Conquest "informative, provocative, and challenging … an extraordinary interpretation and synthesis of western American history." In a New York Times Book Review assessment, however, Annette Kolodny warned that the author's anecdotal approach based on other people's writings leaves "the reader wanting more information and lengthier analysis," though she still called it "an eminently readable historical overview."

After writing The Legacy of Conquest, Limerick edited a number of books and contributed text to exhibition catalogs such as Mark Klett's Revealing Territory: Photographs of the Southwest and The Real West. In Sweet Medicine: Sites of Indian Massacres, Battle-fields, and Treaties, Drex Brooks's photographs show how, over time, former Native-American landmarks have been transformed into cities, parks, and farmland. Choice contributor R. A. Bucko said that Limerick's essay in Sweet Medicine is an "astute" demonstration of "the complexities of Indian-white relations."

Limerick's revisionist view of American history is also reflected in her edited works, such as Trails: Toward a New Western History, a collection of essays in which "Limerick rightly insists on the continuity of western history across the centuries to the present," according to American Historical Review contributor John Mack Faragher. However, E. A. Schwartz complained in an American Indian Quarterly review that Limerick and her ilk "resemble the historians they purport to overthrow in limiting their interest in Indian peoples to their interactions with whites" and that she "gives [non-whites'] significance a faint endorsement when she says they should be included 'in the broadest picture.'"

With The Frontier in American Culture: An Exhibition at the Newberry Library, August 26, 1994-January 7, 1995, which Limerick wrote with Richard White, the authors present the common depiction of the frontier and the constant use of the word "frontier" in contemporary American life. Stressing that these myth-based images and references mask the real frontier, Limerick and White demonstrate the images' presence in entertainment, merchandising, and political speeches. David S. Reynolds commented in the New York Times Book Review that while Limerick "is not totally comfortable with this near-universal acceptance of the frontier, she is aware of its extraordinary power as a cultural myth." Pacific Historical Review contributor Darlis A. Miller commended Limerick's essay for showing "considerable wit" and noted that Limerick rightly "concludes that the scholarly debate over terminology has had little impact on the general public."

Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West, published in 2000, continues Limerick's effort to set the record straight about western history. For example, she deflates the picture of John Sutter, "the father of California," reveals the negative environmental impact of the Gold Rush, and familiarizes readers with colonial Governor Juan Bautista de Anza of New Mexico. Comparing Something in the Soil with Limerick's earlier work, Peter Schrag noted in American Prospect that the author's "tone of anger has modulated." Schrag added, "If there is a refrain in this collection, … it's that after the old triumphalism has been stripped away, it's hard to come to any consistent narrative about anything, and certainly not one that … merely puts the black hats on the guys who used to wear the white hats and vice versa." Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Lauren F. Winner commented that "what distinguishes Limerick from other prominent Western historians is her inimitable prose. Limerick boldly breaks all the rules of academic writing." Winner concluded by saying, however, that "Limerick's insistent reminders that she has made it as a public intellectual [are] tiresome," adding that reading the author's "writing on the West is far more satisfying than reading Limerick's writing on writing."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Historical Review, February, 1993, John Mack Faragher, review of Trails: Toward a New Western History, pp. 106-115.

American Indian Quarterly, winter, 1993, E. A. Schwartz, review of Trails, p. 115.

American Literary History, fall, 1998, Sara Blair, "Cultural Geography and the Place of the Literary," pp. 544-567.

American Prospect, March 27, 2000, Peter Schrag, review of Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West, p. 70.

Bloomsbury Review, March, 1990, Jerry D. Moore, review of Desert Passages: Encounters with American Deserts, p. 15.

Booklist, March 1, 2000, Gilbert Taylor, review of Something in the Soil, p. 1192.

Choice, April 12, 1987, D. L. DeBerry, review of The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West, pp. 679-680; November, 1995, R. A. Bucko, review of Sweet Medicine: Sites of Indian Massacres, Battlefields, and Treaties, p. 527.

Christian Science Monitor, January 6, 1992, Brad Knickerbocker, "Understanding the West," p. 11.

History, October, 1995, Margaret Walsh, review of John Sutter and a Wider West, pp. 439-440.

Journal of Historical Geography, July, 1997, Stanley D. Brunn, review of All over the Map: Rethinking American Regions, pp. 373-374.

Journal of the West, April, 1994, Bill Bryans, review of A Society to Match the Scenery: Personal Visions of the Future of the American West, p. 91.

Library Journal, July, 1992, Russell T. Clement, review of Revealing Territory: Photographs of the Southwest, pp. 80, 82; April 15, 1995, Mary B. Davis, review of Sweet Medicine, pp. 90, 92.

New Republic, October 22, 1990, Larry McMurtry, review of The Legacy of Conquest, p. 32.

New York Times Book Review, August 2, 1987, Annette Kolodny, "The Crowd in the Wilderness," p. 15; September 20, 1992, Alison Friesinger Hill, "In Short/University Press: Nonfiction: Praising Arizona"; September 20, 1992, Richard E. Nicholls, "True West: A Reading List"; January 22, 1995, David S. Reynolds, "Plow in One Hand, Six-Shooter in the Other," p. 12; April 30, 1995, Richard White, "Last Stands," p. 31; March 19, 2000, Lauren F. Winner, "True West," p. 24.

Pacific Historical Review, February, 1988, Richard W. Etulain, review of Desert Passages, pp. 94-96; November, 1995, Darlis A. Miller, review of The Frontier in American Culture: An Exhibition at the Newberry Library, August 26, 1994-January 7, 1995, p. 600.

People, April 22, 1991, Vickie Bane, "Calling Dances with Wolves 'Fantasy,' a Historian Sounds a Charge against the Mythic Past of the American West," p. 97.

Publishers Weekly, October 4, 1991, review of Trails, p. 83; September 5, 1994, review of The Frontier in American Culture, p. 106; February 14, 2000, review of Something in the Soil, p. 183.

Reviews in American History, September, 1997, p. 369.

Social Science Quarterly, December, 1997, Randall K. Wilson, review of All over the Map, pp. 1023-1025.

Virginia Quarterly Review, winter, 1988, review of The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West, p. 16.

Western American Literature, summer, 1986, Jim Aton, review of Desert Passages, pp. 162-163.

Western Historical Quarterly, October, 1986, Kevin Starr, review of Desert Passages, pp. 457-459; autumn, 1997, Corlann Gee Bush, review of The Real West, p. 407.

Whole Earth Review, fall, 1995, Andrew Needham, review of The Frontier in American Culture, p. 56.