Elizabeth Fenn often gets the question: “What do you work on?” Her reply evokes quizzical looks: “Late medieval and early modern North Dakota.”
Ms. Fenn studies the Mandan Indians, a people known mainly because Lewis and Clark wintered among them in 1804-5.
But the Mandans have lived at the center of North America for centuries. With her quip, Ms. Fenn, an associate professor of history at the University of Colorado at Boulder, hopes to get people thinking about that deep history.
“American history does not begin when Europeans and Africans arrive,” says Ms. Fenn, who this year published a book on the Mandans, Encounters at the Heart of the World (Hill and Wang).
Her work is part of a broader effort among historians to expand and revise how we think about early American history. Scholars of the period often focus on the 13 British colonies. The field’s canonical texts cover many “greatest hits": Pilgrims and Puritans, the American Revolution, the drafting of the Constitution.
But those 13 colonies occupied only about 4 percent of North America. The other 96 percent “has been largely unexplored by early American historians,” says Claudio Saunt, a professor of history at the University of Georgia.
That’s changing. Several acclaimed books in recent years have looked west to bring different people and places into the story.
Among their findings: the discovery of an empire. In The Comanche Empire (Yale University Press), which won the Bancroft Prize in 2009, Pekka Hämäläinen introduces an Indian power to the traditional account of this period as a three-way struggle among the French, British, and Spanish. Other key works include Ned Blackhawk’s study of colonial violence between the Sierra Nevada and the Rocky Mountains (Violence Over the Land, Harvard University Press) and Juliana Barr’s tale of Indian dominance in Texas (Peace Came in the Form of a Woman, University of North Carolina Press).
Many of the new Western books deal with themes that resonate today, like environmental change, infectious diseases, and the impact of global trade on local communities.
It’s not that scholars hadn’t written about the early history of the West before. But they were typically marginalized as either “regional” or “borderlands” historians.
Some scholars are skeptical that early American history is heading for a Western moment. Most historians, they note, are uncomfortable with the methods and sources needed to make that happen, like oral history and archaeological records. But others see scholarly gold on the Western horizon.
“The field is just on the edge of being completely transformed,” says Mr. Saunt, who this year published a history of 1776 focused on events beyond the 13 colonies, West of the Revolution (W.W. Norton). Mr. Hämäläinen, a professor at the University of Oxford, speaks of a “continental turn” in early American history.
“There’s a continent, a big continent, that was only half-illuminated just 10, 15 years ago,” he says. “We are retrieving huge chunks of history from obscurity.”
New Views of America
To appreciate that change, it helps to remember what the continent looked like at the outbreak of the Revolution. The colonial population, about two million people, cleaved largely to the Atlantic coast, Mr. Saunt says. A handful of outposts dotted the Mississippi River. Several thousand colonists lived in Spanish New Mexico. One hundred or so soldiers occupied the Spanish forts on the California coast.
Indians peopled the rest of the continent, he says, numbering between 1.5 and two million.
A closer look at Mr. Hämäläinen’s Comanche work—which he is expanding into a project on nomadic empires in world history—gives a sense of what historians are learning.
The Finnish scholar moved in the 1990s to the United States, where two trends shaped his research. One was the “New Western History,” which, starting in the 1980s, saw historians write about the West not as a frontier of settlement separating civilization from savagery, but as a complex place that spoke to issues like race, conquest, and the environment.
The other trend, which started taking shape as early as the 1970s, was the “New Indian History.” Rather than viewing American Indians as passive actors who reacted to things done to them, scholars examined what the world looked like from their perspectives.
That’s how Mr. Hämäläinen approached the Comanches. What he found was far more complicated than the typical picture of those Indians as violent raiders who attacked Spanish outposts.
It turns out that the Comanches were active traders. At the height of their power, roughly 1750 to 1850, they ran an economic empire in parts of modern-day Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico. They poached horses from the Spanish, exporting them north and east in exchange for guns. They also captured people, becoming a large-scale slaveholding society.
In Mr. Hämäläinen’s telling, the Comanche story reverses the conventional colonial dynamic. It wasn’t the Spanish who dominated. It was the Comanches who exploited and marginalized them.
And that shaped a chain of events, he writes in The Comanche Empire, among them the erosion of Spanish imperial authority and the decay of Mexican power. “Ultimately,” he writes, “the rise of the Comanche empire helps explain why Mexico’s Far North is today the American Southwest.”
Barriers to Entry
Still, scholars face institutional and methodological challenges as they attempt such research. Ms. Fenn’s story highlights the cross-disciplinary sleuthing involved in recovering these histories.
Inspired by The Horseman on the Roof, a French novel about a cholera epidemic, Ms. Fenn wanted to tell the story of an 18th-century outbreak of smallpox. The result was Pox Americana (Hill and Wang), her 2001 history of an epidemic that swept the continent and shaped the American Revolution.
That’s how she encountered the Mandans, one of the populations affected by that epidemic. These Indians were traders and farmers: “The continent’s peoples and commerce arrived at and departed their towns,” one historian has written, “like blood through arteries.” Ms. Fenn was struck by the existence of such a cosmopolitan nation that didn’t enter historiography until Lewis and Clark’s visit.
But telling its story presented a problem. The documentary record of the Mandans before 1800 is sparse. (By the time Lewis and Clark pulled up their 55-foot keelboat, Mandan society had largely collapsed.) So Ms. Fenn waded through archaeological reports to trace how the Mandans had migrated northward to the confluence of the Heart and Missouri rivers. She drew on oral traditions recorded by turn-of-the-century ethnographers. She talked with modern Indians to understand their past.
“It’s challenging history to write,” she says. “You can’t just go and hunker down in the archive with the letters of so-and-so and write a dissertation.”
Scholars who study nontraditional early American subjects may also face a different kind of problem: skepticism on the job market.
Are you really an early Americanist? Can you lecture on the ratification debates? Those are the sorts of questions candidates can get, Mr. Saunt says.
“That creates a lot of drag in the westward movement of this field,” the Georgia historian says. “People are afraid, for good reason, that it’s going to diminish their chances of getting a job.”
Until very recently, Mr. Saunt adds, the flagship journal of early American history, The William and Mary Quarterly, didn’t publish anything about the vast majority of early Americans.
But the journal is changing. One sign: In July, Joshua Piker took over as editor, the first Indian specialist in that position.
Mr. Piker, a professor of history at the College of William & Mary, puts the Western debate in a broader context. For the past generation or so, he says, early American history has been expanding geographically beyond the 13 colonies. The initial movement was eastward, into the Atlantic world. Few articles now focus on a single one of the 13 colonies, he says. Instead, scholars trace connections between a colony and Europe, say, or the Caribbean.
Still, not much Western scholarship crosses Mr. Piker’s desk. “I would like to see more scholarship from the West,” he says. “And I expect that I will.”
Whether or not they conquer early American history, the continentalists are already having a broader impact. The period is now taught very differently, says Mr. Hämäläinen. One example: a textbook he helped write that is used in survey courses. The biggest change in the 2014 edition is to present the early parts from a continental perspective.
