About this Event
Steve Aron’s “The Strange Career of the Frontier”
Join ICW and the San Gabriel Valley Humanities Center for a workshop discussion of Steve Aron’s “The Strange Career of the Frontier” on October 17th at 10:00 a.m. Humanities Center (414 S Mission Dr, San Gabriel, CA 91776).
Steve’s essay is envisioned to be the first chapter of The Oxford Handbook of the North American West (edited by Louis Warren and Rachel St. John). It traces the career of the frontier as the wellspring of western American history, tracking precursors to Frederick Jackson Turner, the overlapping but also contesting interpretation of Theodore Roosevelt, and the long shadow that Turner’s “frontier thesis” cast over the field. It turns then to the efforts of “New Western Historians” to escape from Turner’s trail by privileging “place” over “process,” a fixed region over a moving frontier, and currents running in multiple directions over ones that ran exclusively from east to west. The chapter concludes with an examination of how the frontier has endured, even as contending constructs now crowd the field. As recent scholarship has foregrounded, would be competitors work well alongside frontier to illuminate a larger, if less liberating, history of the American West.
Stephen Aron is the Calvin and Marilyn Gross Director and President and CEO of the Autry Museum of the American West and a Professor Emeritus at UCLA. A past president of the Western History Association and an elected member of the Society of American Historians, Aron's most recent books are The American West: A Very Short Introduction and Peace and Friendship: An Alternative History of the American West (both from Oxford University Press).
Please RSVP to attend, and the draft essay will be sent to you. Space is limited.
Event venue & nearby stays
San Gabriel Valley Humanities Center, 414 South Mission Drive, San Gabriel, United States
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