Global West, American frontier
Abstract
From article, "The author is a member of the history department at the University of Nevada,
Las Vegas. This was his presidential address at the annual meeting of the Pacific
Coast Branch, American Historical Association, in Pasadena, California,
August 9, 2008.
This article questions the common assumption that nineteenth-century audiences in
America and around the world viewed the American western frontier as an exceptional
place, like no other place on earth. Through examination of travel writings
by Americans and Europeans who placed the West into a broader global context of
developing regions and conquered colonies, we see that nineteenth-century audiences
were commonly presented with a globally contextualized West. The article also seeks
to broaden the emphasis in post-colonial scholarship on travel writers as agents of
empire who commodified, exoticized, and objectified the colonized peoples and places
they visited, by suggesting that travel writers were also often among the most virulent
critics of empire and its consequences for the colonized."
Citation
Wrobel, David M. "Global West, American Frontier." Pacific Historical Review 78, no. 1 (2009): 1-26.
Related file
http://phr.ucpress.edu/content/78/1/1http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/phr.2009.78.1.1