Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Politics in the twentieth-century American West: where to begin? It may be but envious hindsight to suggest that students of the same topic in the nineteenth century West often — albeit appropriately — hang similar inquiries on a small number of critical moments of legislative action or political themes. Undoubtedly the juggernaut of the coming Civil War offers an obvious organizing principle though which to grapple with western politics from at least the 1830s forward. Territorial acquisition, political maturation, statehood, western violence spawned of disputes over the expansion of slavery — each of these important themes can be analyzed from the scholarly vantage of the coming crisis, and scholars have ably mined such fields for more than a century. Manifest Destiny, too, can and has operated as a fundamental historiographical theme in this regard. But casting the antebellum history of the West more in the direction of the coming of the war, provided the scholarship sails hard away from the dangers of reading the historical record backward as an exercise in inevitability, has been an especially fruitful way by which to approach nineteenth-century politics and political history in and of the region. Through the opening salvos of sectional conflict, Congressional (read Republican Party) action regarding the West —especially the Pacific Railroad bills and homestead legislation ... log in or subscribe to read full text