eastern on >> the western history association hosts a panel called does the west matter. five scholars ponder the definition of the american west. directly, culturally and politically. they discussed the broader role of regions in understanding the past and present of the united states. 2019 annualt of the meeting. >> good afternoon. i am the president of the wha. it is my great pleasure to welcome you to this afternoon session.idential does the west matter? the future of regionalism in american history. there is some 150 sessions taking place at the wha. this is the one session that brings all of us together in one place.

before introducing this panel, i want to take advantage of our collective presence here and invite the immediate past president to open the session with the native lands acknowledgment. a statement that those crucial to who we are as an historical organization. we care deeply about the past and the past of this part of the world. >> i would like for you to repeat after me. in this language, we say this word.

i want to welcome you. being an american and in scholar, we exhaust we are on the land here. in being here, there is not always in india presence but this establishes the american scence.-- an indian pre you have to remember american indians being part of the past, the present and the future. [applause] >> thank you. questionesses a simple

. perhaps an odd question for the western history association to thing about. does the west even matter anymore? regionalism matter in american history? at a moment when people are increasingly brought together by transportation, the internet and shared forms of popular culture, does regionalism have the salient it did in the 19th century when despite shared political cultures, different regions of the -- or, the panelists might address this as well. we have an exceptional panel of scholars. not all of whom focused on the american west. all of whom wrestle with questions of region and geography and their work.

i want to turn the session over to my colleague and friend from the university of wisconsin, madison. welcome back to the wha, bill. bill: we decided to get to the heart of the matter quickly. i will do the reversed -- briefest of introductions here. you can see all of those on the panel. they all have powerful reasons for being here and having things to say on this particular question. the title and the subtitle are not synonymous in their manning. does the west matter? that is a different question from does region matter? what regions are to be addressed and thought about, the path of

thinking about another regional entity in the united states, is in north america? what are the boundaries around the work that counts as the focus of the field called western history? what you'll see is what we have at this table are people whose work centrally focuses on the west, people whose work is in the hyperspace with the west. people whose work is in regions that are often not considered west and the way this organization now defines the west. i will introduce the panelists without giving backgrounds on them. they will speak in order you see on the screen. one of the speakers will have images or maps that i'm going to manage here. they will each five or eight minutes. i will be the timekeeper. i will ask if they want to respond to each other in any of these ways. this overture

questions and comments from all of you after that. if you listen to the comments, please be thinking about things you would like to be brought this conversation about the west, the region. one of the things i charge about the work of everybody on this panel and the work of most people in this room is the place basedness.s -- place we have ed from the university of richmond. , susan -- susan lee johnson. lisa brooks from amherst college. i am going to ask susan to start us off.

susan: i am holding in my hand a deck of cards. bill: hold the microphone closer. it is on. hand ai am holding in my deck of cards that tells the history of the american west in 4 inch cards. at the dinner, a bunch of abb's were milling around the table where the cards were being handed out. among us was wescott. they went on to a career in film and on stage. us which doubt that we could have more than one deck of cards, we said it is the

west, just take it. this reminds me how crucial it is to keep studying the history of places that have been called the west and processing that we have turned frontier and conquest, imperialism and colonialism. it is the west, just take it is not only a quip, it is a critique born of academic inquiry and historical trauma. it is also a form of indigenous humor. not always legibly funny outside of indian country. the western historians gets the rim job. non-western historians get it as well because the taking was continental, hemispheric and a global process.

it is as much these casual interactions and observations as it is years of writing and reading and teaching north american western history that drives home the continued relevance. also, and especially, history that fits, however uneasily under western pattern -- banner. discontinues productive conversation about comparative and connected histories, belonging and citizenship, about self-determination and 70. when i speak of the western discontent, i speak of borderlands history. the pacific ocean and-based

histories and histories in places like appalachia or the great lake. i mean alaska as well. these are places outside the customary barriers withdrawn outside of the so-called american west, the southern and northern borders, the continental u.s. and the mississippi river. the west discontent is also humans for whom the idea of the promise,esents less more disenfranchisement, exploitation, expulsion and incarceration. including those we have come to call asian-american, lesson in people, african-americans and latinx people,

african-americans and indigenous people. dave told me that his graduate studies were over the relationship of their work to the new western history. a field toward which they felt ambivalent at best. when the students asked them how to navigate earth waters, how did a state true to their intellectual and political commitments while claiming themselves in the profession, dave told them right away. he wanted his students to get jobs but he also knew that malibu and the rest of the west would never be the same. dave was right. a generation of scholars studying the west discontent had turned annual meeting into a site where you will reliably here i about canadians and places andple and aboutnous -- hear

canadians and mexican people in places and indigenous people in places. in north america, australia, perhaps. i can see the word caribbean only appears once in this year's program while pacific appears 26 times. themight hear talk on racial dimensions in denver, chicago and washington dc. that last example was wishful thinking on my part. book that traced the lives of two white women who wrote about the 19th-century frontiersman and who navigated precisely those urban relationships, even as they imagined the hinterland past.

in the absence of such a comparative urban study, i did the work myself. i slog through the fairfax county. this is because the history of the cities, their neighborhoods and their suburbs are distinct but also comfortable and connected. not least by the 300 letters with the three different postmarks that the two white women exchanged while they confronted a new racial future and constructed a novel western past. said, the wests remains a part that stands for all of extracted colonialism and the exercise of power intrinsic to both. is tost in that sense

justify all manner of miserable in the present. i encounter this when i moved to las vegas this summer and asked my hoh why some units in my condominium complex could access the individual trash and recycling services while other units had to rely on trash access and had no access to recycling at all. that did not explain why recycling could not be placed alongside the trash dumpster for those of us ineligible for individual service. i heated conversation followed. until the exasperated chicago board hit on the idea of appealing to me as a midwestern transplant. she thought i would finally shut up when she declared this is the wild west. she was seven mistaken.

of 1-10 where 1 is the least egregious and 10 was the most egregious, this was a 2. both implicit and explicit can worse,far ---- far from cause to a border wall, extremist groups, i have fought the battle but i have not won it yet. the battle itself is a bright ball of joy. i am thinking of last spring's music marble that let the air out of the west and glued it back together in a shape shifted thing. miss the old town road phenomena, pretend you know what i'm talking about until you can

grab your phone, get out of the room and then do a quick google search and grab your earbuds. hear, ifwill see and you click on the music video, is the end product of a process that started when a minor butrnet personality sampledd -- bought a nine inch nails beat. this song tells the story of a was going to write his west end the old town road until he can no more. charts quickly dropped old town road as insufficiently country. that is "too black."

lil nas x got sweet revenge. this was longer than any song in the charts history at number one. like the gay black man said "can't nobody tell me nothing." ride the horse, ride the wave. right until you can't anymore. [-- ride until you can't anymore. [applause] perspective on regionalism is admittedly shaped first and foremost by my own location. residence, hometown

and birthplace in los angeles, california. a city that has often been written out of the west altogether by individuals who have fled the city for other locations they believe in body more of the true west and at times by western historians themselves. after sitting in traffic on a los angeles freeway for hours, many of former los angeles -- angelano have left the city and vowed never to come back, yearning for space. this had literally removed metropolitan santos on the configuration of the western region. because our concepts of regionalism in the united states were shaped by the most significant national events of the 19th century, the civil war, regionalism may seem to be a way of organizing knowledge for the first third of the 21st century.

even though we may be able to communicate globally in a way that we would never have dreamed of in previous generations, it for our an optimistic shipping and understanding of the past. i want to argue that regionalism plays a role in the way that people bring meaning to their lives. even if those regions have changed substantially. it requires that we take los angeles and las vegas seriously as regional centers of meaning. if we are to fully embrace the realities of regionalism for the 21st century. these cities cannot be examples of what the west has negatively become or what nearby locations don't want to become to remain the mythical west. to move our conversation forward, i want to offer other interpretations for eric -- our era. it may be as important as the north, south, east and west for

our historical release. some of these were well established while others were just information. it's will push us toward it knowledge what we mean by regionalism and identity. take responsibly for each one of these new formations. they were shaped by ongoing conversations. in our popular political discourse, it seems relatively noncontroversial to at least be of a coastal culture in the u.s. . that is positioned next to that part of the u.s. that is between the coast. what is derisively called flyover reasons or what trump has called -- regions or what trump has called the real america. these act boundaries of the coast are hard to define. the exact boundaries of the coast are hard to define. vegas? we put las

increasingly connected to california. bordermuch more volatile -- florida. the large number of the homeless reside in california, the or, d.c. or hawaii. those regions are now known as -- california, new york, d.c. or hawaii. those regions are impacted. south andmuch of the including texas, new mexico and arizona. a wide swath of sunbelt states have not only tied their economies together since world theni but also have further joined by an expanded border culture which stretches south of latin america and the caribbean for people and commerce. where now population

exists more mexicans and puerto ricans get tied together with this region. the sunbelt and the rust belt have as much staying power as .arly notions of regions we can see the southern half of morenited states has connections to the population centers and mexico, central asrica and the caribbean they did to the other sites in the united states. in los angeles or north carolina for example, in much the way that earlier generations discussing the importance of the culture of iowa understand southern california. these transnational movements of people and culture are unlikely half-bakedted by a notion of a wall at the southern border. the chinese have had an enormous cultural effect on many parts of the united states and latin america but it is harder for me to see that limited to a particular regional phenomenon. i do know the recent u.s.

immigration policy is rapidly transforming border region in mexico as refugees from africa, asia and the middle east -- i am intrigued by what happened to our notions of region when we take seriously the migration of indigenous relations. the diversity of the indigenous and a very meaning of the term itself needs to be re-examined if we are to map the publish across the u.s. that identifies indigenous. appalachians of native people from latin america populated the traditional american south and the rural areas of california, washington and across the country. areas of california, washington and across the country. they are reshaping the meaning of individuality, not only in consensus counts but also providing a more hemispheric notion of land and heritage to those of us that remain u.s. centric. finally, maybe more

controversially, i think we need to think of a belt of white supremacy in this country. by localften shaped politics. i will give you my own to -- interpretation. moving west to east, we have to include parts of arizona and utah. we are including idaho and montana and even parts of oregon. this white supremacy both would make it's way east through parts of them out west -- the mountain west and texas in the south. the what to process can be found in every region of this country. it is important to understand where this movement has strength. clearly, both the west and the south as the only regions of meaning in u.s. history cannot be sustained.

this house is to define different parts of meaning that are useful to understand the diversity of the u.s. experience. i hope we can identify other regions in our discussions that can be as useful as the ones i have been able to come up with. thank you. [applause] >> hello everyone. thank you for being here with us. tiya: i am happy to have been invited to work together with you guys to figure out whether regionalism has a future and whether or not the west matters. when i was asked to join this panel, i did not know what i would say because even though i go to these conferences, i have always felt on the borders of western history.

my work mostly focuses on the u.s. southeast and recently, on the midwest. i struggle sometimes to make the case that this work is actually western history. i might try to do it today. i thought back to my dissertation research and my work on oklahoma and about how oklahoma really throws a range into things when we think about familiar and set boundaries. where was this place largely americansby native were black slavery, slave revolt and lynching were not foreign practices? i recall a conversation over dinner and what i propose to a choctaw colleague is that

minnesota might as will have been the south. you may have heard jaws dropped. she strongly disagreed with that and its connotations. it was hard to say where oklahoma fell on the net. -- map. is oklahoma the midwest, the south, the west? indiann amorphous country that could have existed at any time? what is this regional understanding anyway? many people in oklahoma, including several indigenous groups had immigrated from someplace else in the early 1900s. transnational movements as well as identities became formative for a sizable portion of the vibration including seminoles.

-- of the nation, including seminoles. they rejected the notion of standing still. course wears away at the boldface imprint of regional boundaries. in the west, including the indigenous west, they have long or always put a landscape of people in motion. oklahoma bears the mark of other eastward from where people came. this kind of southern, sort of eastern oklahoma i am protecting seems to resemble five regionalism.

regionalism. it looks like i am calling oklahoma this half but if it was, this was the odd south that black people flocked to in search of a haven that would give them safety, security and economic opportunity. is, as oklahoma indicated, the role of region. once we drill once we drill down into the substrates of our oral history research, predetermined geo-social zones don't act the way we expect them to. i should not have been surprised, therefore, when my research took me briefly to montana and revealed black women from the south, some formerly enslaved, who were growing yams at stagecoach stops, opening soul food paraphrase and posing coats along -- fur

the yellowstone river. we should not be surprised racial heritage was twisted there because these white women could grow rich and could link elbows with military husbands, whose u.s. state-provided weapons were directed at apaches .nd the code is -- lakotas for these black women, the race and gender dynamics of the south were perpetrated in the west. there was something in the notion of a western difference. the absence of centuries old systemically entrenched and widespread black slavery allowed temporarily for broader opportunities and new social compacts. as the novelist and cultural

critic ralph ellison said about his birthplace, oklahoma, for black people geography was fate. african americans could fare but it washe west never a stroll through the national parks. and faring relatively well in the west came in large part at the expense of indigenous people and nations. this was at best a western difference with a price. it would indicate the reality of regionalism for african americans in the 19th century and turn of the 20th century. we should see this difference even as we recognize that regional boundaries have always been provisional political, and , porous. thanks. [applause] >> ed ayers.

>> i have to begin with my own oklahoma story. i gave a talk there one time and i said -- are we in the south or the west? half of the audience raised their hands and said we are in the west. why is that? and they said because we believe in freedom. why do you say south? because we are racist. [laughter] >> that is a bad deal that goes to what you are saying. i have to admit that i have talked through these issues before. i have organized talks on regionalism at johns hopkins. apparently, we did not rethink some enough. in her essay in that collection, my friend, reflecting on my attempts to dislodge ingrained ways of thinking about the south complained with her characteristic humor that ists had sometimes

been atheist. it does suggest that the south and the west -- we have a kind of a -- one of us has too much region and one of us are trying to figure out how much we have. i want to talk in a different way today. i am publishing a book next year that will have 80 original maps made by my colleagues. the book is called "southern journey." and because it is about migration, it is also about the rest of the country and other parts of the world. it is obviously about regions because it fixates on people moving to and from regions. our maps trace the paths that people of different races and ethnicities as they were defined by the government from the first

census to the latest reports from the census bureau. the census counted black people separately from white people from 1790 on. it did not include indigenous peoples. it's other ethnic definitions are problematic as well. but the census gives us a good starting place to at least raise questions. as you will see, the maps show places of population growth in shades of copper or gold. glowing brighter the more rapid the growth. places of population decline appear in shades of blue. the brighter the intensity, the greater the loss. i think of it as showing where the blood is flowing and draining where the hotspots of , arrival occur in each decade. i want to offer some maps to suggest we think of regions in different ways. i am sure you'll see patterns

that i do not highlight. i'm pointing to the maps not to illustrate an argument but as resources from which many insights can be gained. these maps show population growth and decline so we can avoid the problems from county problems. the first map shows the intensity and reach of the domestic slave trade in what proved to be its final decade accelerated and it's forced migration of 2 million people even as we know it is heading for a great suicide. it shows a continued bleeding of virginia, kentucky, and coastal carolina for the fifth or sixth generation now, even as the mississippi delta becomes the center of the slave trade. it also shows the abrupt slowing of the slave trade into the former lands of the cherokee and georgia which have been exploited so hard in the previous two decades that they had already fallen into decline

for cotton production, pushing migration further west. and most important for today's discussion, it reveals the breakneck spread of slavery into texas. right at what appeared to be its natural borders at the time. slavery is gaining acceleration. in many ways this is where the , civil war comes from. it is being drained from the upper south. the next map is black change 1910-1920. this is the great migration. we will have seen in earlier that migration is the culmination of movement. you will see in this map the cities of the midwest are bolstered by new african-american arrivals. so are the cities on the border.

oklahoma is fed in these earlier days. surprising is the growth of the upper mississippi delta and appalachia. both attract black southerners during the great migration. look how many black people are moving to the eastern seaboard. the great migration is not the big red arrow going up the mississippi river we see in the textbooks but rather a very complex movement. there are many calculations going on about the appropriate amount of risk for what return. and there is plenty of african-american movement after the great migration. although you would not know it. we talk as if when that happened, black southerners are frozen in place. not true. the next map is a white change in the decade of greatest outmigration of white people. few people would've guessed it is the 1950's. but it is. it shows the massive losses across almost all of the rural south.

people who fed the growth of the west. a bandalso shows stretching the breadth of the continent was losing people at the same time. it also shows the difference that many small migrations across the street across history can make. my mother, father, and i moved from the blue mountains of north carolina to the narrow band of shining copper in middle appalachia. only a one hour's drive that opened new opportunities for them in a small, industrial town. migration does not have to be transcontinental to be significant. the movements from one county to another can hold enormous consequence. my next is foreshadowed to by george's. what you see is the new wave of the south. not just texas and florida but

distributed across the south in communities large and small. the south at the beginning of the 21st century claims four of the five states where immigrant families are growing most rapidly. california is the only exception. the final map is the change in asian and asian-american population in the same decade. it shows they are moving from all backgrounds and many countries to the south, especially cities. here is a fun fact -- more asian-americans live in atlanta today than in san francisco. more in texas than in hawaii. here are my quick takeaways. if we follow all these people living such the virgin histories in the same places and times allowing the past they trace to , define our questions, we can see regions constantly being made and remade. the history of the united states has been and still is being made by many "frontiers." in all directions.

opening new territories for people of different backgrounds. the east was having frontiers created by the migration of enslaved people moving to the west. pulling the strands apart by race and ethnicity and weaving them back together offers a more integrated history than what we have had. demographic history is a particularly democratic history. half the people in these maps are women. people have theve power to move and used it. everyone who left one place went to another changing both. the power of the physical environment is evident on every map from the ruthless efficiency of the slave trade to the location of chicken processing plants and the emergence of new edge cities today. environmental history pioneered by historians of the west is a model for a dynamic regional history. fusing the material and cultural, human and nonhuman.

putting these perspectives together and thinking of other kinds of sources, we might work towards intra-national history and attention to the complex and shifting networks that cut across familiar boundaries of state and regions within the nation. we have seen transnational history. that has transformed our understanding of many topics. but we have tended to portray u.s. history in ways that prevent us from seeing the grounded patterns and connections that work across the nation. to see the nation whole, we may have to see it in pieces as an interrelated country. to see it transnationally, we may have to look more closely intra-nationally. people have always circulated among the regions of the united states. have continually remade regions.

these regions have constantly interactions. borders blurring and bending making them more interesting and useful to think with, not less. thanks. [applause] >> lisa brooks. >> we have saved the east for last which seems appropriate here. i just want to thank everybody who has spoken and the organizers for inviting us into conversation with each other and i want to express my gratefulness for being here and to be invited into a space that is not normally my home space. i hope i can provide some ideas that we can wrestle with. thank you for allowing me to be here and also i wanted to send out a thank you to kristen simmons.

i don't know if she is here, but i heard her speaking earlier today and it really grounded me in the history of the place. i want to send a shout out to her. i really like this idea of intra-national history that you have raised. i think that is kind of the way that my brain works. and i also feel like it fits perfectly with some of the maps i want to share with you. some of you have seen these before. maybe for other people, they are new. as ed described maps as resources from which insights can be gained, that is how i see them also. i want to start with this concept of intra-national history. i have always seen indigenous histories as transnational. whether we are talking about the histories among indigenous nations or whether we are talking about the history between indigenous nations, settler colonies and european powers, or other powers across

the world, that history is almost always transnational. and i have to start with the east because that is where i am from. that is where my family is from. and for me, it is interesting to grapple with this idea of regionalism because it is hard for me not to think in terms of regionalism. i started with family history and then expanded out to community history, river history , and networks of rivers and eventually, and ended up teaching history in guatemala because i needed to understand their stories to understand our stories about corn. my own region has expanded out in my lifetime to these transnational networks you are talking about. but i want us to start with the question of what does it mean to be from the east? in our language, the word means

we are people of the east. we are the first people to greet the dawn but it also means we , are people born of that place, the easternmost place. it is interesting to me that east in our language does not refer to all people who live on the east coast. it is not a coastal orientation , but it is a sense of being the people responsible for greeting the sun when it comes up every day. and in the beginning, i struggled with creating a map that would transcend nationstate boundaries. of the united states and canada. my family -- my grandfather grew up in a house that was right on the edge of the border. you literally had to cross the river which also crossed the border in order to get to canada. from the stories he told me, they did not think about it as being real until prohibition came along.

[laughter] then it got real. and sometimes the river was where you had to jump into to get away from the people regulating the border. the stories my grandfather told me were funny but they also embedded important ideas and legal concepts in my mind. when i first tried to map our territory in a way that would help me understand our history, time, the best mapping program available could not connect rivers across the borders. the map you see here is like a second wave. after i had a faculty position and could afford to pay someone to create this kind of base map. but the ideas of regions can be so influenced by these ideas of the nationstate. i want us to think about the

problem of regions when they are defined within nationstate boundaries as opposed to the dynamic movement and migrations of families, communities, individuals who have always crossed the boundaries and sometimes have crossed them in ways that have ended up with great damage to their persons and their families. i also just want to bear in mind -- go down? of the way places like new england have been determined by colonial boundaries and this is still a boundary people are invested in. one of the things i have been part of is a collaborative work ongoing for some time is to challenge us to think about not just the native homelands within

new england but to understand that as new england is creating itself, these territories persisted for 100 years and they still persist today. and it is a mistake to say for example that settlers made towns in vermont when vermont did not exist until 1791. right? or that settlers were in maine when they actually were in very specific native american homelands. i want to challenge all of us as historians to be accurate in naming the native places that historically at the time these places did not have any other identity. they were not even overlapping identities. but these were the identities of these places. and i do believe that places have identities. one other example is that there

is this question about what the west is. as you all know well, the question of the west -- the naming of the west shifts so much. i joke about when i think about the west, i think about iroquois and shoshone territory. i thought that is what we were going to be talking about today. i'm sadly disappointed. i consulted all of my shoshone friends so i would be prepared. even in the ohio river valley, in the 1790's when nations were gathered there and they were a separate confederacy from the united states and british canada, they referred to mohicans as people of the east. because those were their relatives to the east. this idea of east and west shifts based on where we are positioned and based on the constantly moving dynamics, relationships between people.

i want to ask more than anything else today what it would mean to think about shifting our sense of region in ways that may not center just human beings. and i'm drawing on indigenous concepts coming out of the language to do this. i really want us to ask, what does it mean to think about regions in terms of river ways? what does it mean to belong to a river as the leader talked about in the 1730's. and what would it mean to change our shaping of areas of the continent looking at watersheds and what has happened within watersheds and what has happened when rivers move? rivers are always moving. i am thinking here also of the incredible work that is being done now to map the mississippi river, including some of the

work that market peers is doing --re she is centering them that margaret pierce is doing where she is centering the mississippi as a dynamic space. i also want to have us think about the ocean waters as josh reed has done. really centering movements within oceans. and the way oceans can serve as connecting spaces among people. also, this map of the mississippi -- for us, the west is also the place where corn came from. and corn stories connect us in the east down throughout the great lakes and down through the mississippi and into mayan territories into what is now mexico and guatemala. these rivers connect us across oceans and land spaces. whether we are talking about the emergence of corn and corn stories and its travel

throughout the continent before there was a united states, or whether we are talking about the migrations of indigenous peoples across these boundaries, either way, we are talking about a story map that transcends and is also impeded by nationstate and linguistic boundaries. but this is a very old map. the last thing i want to mention here is what it would mean to think about regions as ecosystems with other than human beings at the center. some of you know that my current obsession is with the movements and migrations of coyotes into the east from the west. we can certainly argue that the west is by all means coyotes' territories. if you don't know this yet, go to your backyard and you'll see this.

this map was done by biologists showing the migrations of coyotes. i really want to ask -- what would it mean for us to think about regions in that way? to think about the way coyotes as mapping our territories many countries have already done. and i want to think about what coyotes are teaching us about region in this century. thank you. [applause] >> i want to do what i promised i would do at the beginning, which is i want to give the panelists an opportunity to ask each other questions or to comment on remarks that others have made or to move the conversation forward in whatever way seems appropriate to do given what you have heard.

>> i would like to put something on the table and add it to the space. after first saying how appreciative i am of the comments that have been made, incredible, very exciting. what i am thinking about is a combination but not exactly of what lisa pointed us to having to do with rivers and the environment and something that george said which has to do with the importance of the west and regional identities of people today. i just want to throw out there the question of what does climate change mean for regional identities? is there a way that changing climate will remake regions or intensify their identification with regions?

think about how we might continue to survive and live in and reimagine in the face of climate change. say the irony of the south flourishing because it is the sun belt and so has this brief moment in the sun. and now, large parts of the coast are beginning to flood. to define yourself against the rust belt. it is so interesting how the upper midwest and york state seems to be the repository of so much entrepreneurial energy but it can also seem to be so portable that it can be drained into the south. i worry. i love the south. i worry that it is going to have a very short period in which its climate was its advantage.

i worry that it is going to be inundated on the borders and dried in the middle. >> on the same issue, the one thing i would point out is that there is no way to understand migration from guatemala today without understanding climate change. what is happening to agricultural, what is happening to the way of life in guatemala. that is fundamental to understanding the shifting migrations from the south. to understand the way our policies of immigration do not come to terms with climate change in any capacity. even when it is so clear that it is affecting everything about the movement of peoples. one of the effects of climate change is going to be massive migration. from a lot of places in the world to other places that people can survive. that is fundamental and we are already seeing it but we cannot come to terms with migration

being a function of climate change because we have put it always into national contexts. for me, the relationship between different regions and climate change is only going to be intensified. as people try to get to a place where they can actually survive. and it is going to be really a challenge to enact policies that not just recognize climate change but recognize that it will lead to massive movements of people. >> other comments? so, i want to ask a question which is in a way to invite you for a moment to return to the title. does the west matter? the future of regionalism in american history. i have listened to all of you. you have all said quite wonderful things and i'm really grateful for what you are shared in this conversation so far.

i think i have heard a loud and clear ringing endorsement of regionalism matters, although i think i have also heard an insistence that it is not a fixed category and in fact what is interesting about region is precisely its dynamism which in a funny kind of way seems to be inviting western history back to an older version of itself. one of the things i might say about western history is it was the place most reliably in u.s. history where the dynamism of regions and the change of regions was central to the focus of what people worked on though it has in some ways diminished in the last 30 years for good reasons and reasons that got lost along the way. i am hearing loud and clear that regions matter and if anything will become more interesting and more complicated as we move into a dynamic future that none of us understand. i am curious how we should

understand the west in that context. and how the west matters. and i am not asking for a debate whether the about west is a place or a process or a region or a frontier. that is not what i want to ask. what i do want to ask is as we imagine a future of this object of interest and study of so many people in this room from home we have all learned so much, thinking about the dynamism that has been talked about here, what should we be looking to the people who study the west -- what is the contribution that we imagine coming from that space? from this space? >> so, uh -- maybe the most dyed in the wool western historian here -- what i think as i listen

to these four just brilliant sets of remarks is i am totally on board with everything they have to say about changing regions and their porous borders and their changing borders and a kind of place-based history that takes into account climate change and animals and people. at the same time, i'm struck by how a particular meaning of the west, the hold that it still has culturally and it comes from a very small particular moment, i think, primarily in the 19th century, but it reverberates out and, at least in the remarks i gave today, it reverberates out mostly in kind of negative ways . so i guess i'd like us to think a little bit about the interplay

between changing regions and porous borders and the kind of cultural hold of very negative reading of what the west is. i guess it's not negative for everybody, but yeah. >> i guess in southern history, one of the things that people have been focusing on is that region is more in people's heads than it is anywhere else and that the more we start adding subdivision named after plantations and all of that sort of remarkably obtuse recycling of the worst parts of american history, the more people hold on to an identity that there's something in the south that's worth preserving. something that is puzzling now is that for the first time in american history, the south is the destination of african-american migration, that people are moving in large

numbers to the south. people whose families had been in slavery and segregation. obviously. the south in their minds is not the same south is in the minds of the people defending the statues and confederate flags. it's almost as if the quicker it's disappearing, the more determined some people seems to be holding on to it. living in charlottesville and richmond, i've seen a lot of this kind of -- well, we were at a hearing about the monuments on monument avenue and a white woman stood up with a t-shirt with a confederate battle flag on it and a child holding each hand and she cried and said, why does everybody else get to have an identity except us? you're taking away every -- what do we have? why does everyone else get to be proud of who their family has been but we don't. i think this gives you a sense

of where region lives and in some ways why these artifacts that seem to be so empty now seem to be carriers that i at least wasn't hearing until people started screaming about them. >> i want to comment on this idea that the west is in people's heads and that it's an imagery that's very powerful. is it dangerous or maybe is that positive? >> put the microphone closer. sorry. >> thank you. coming back from little nazx and old town road, which was sort of a riveting song, and it seems to be a song about black oppression and about this notion of freedom that can be had in the west. you get on your horse and you can just go. there's an exit door there. where there exists no such door in other places of the country. this connects to what has been called the yee-ha agenda.

[laughter] >> i think this happened online somewhere, which is an african-american embrace of all things west, which connects to this idea of kind of a liberatore identity. that seems positive. but exactly, exactly and what's behind it? we know what's behind it. a complicated picture, for sure . but some of that complication is very ugly. i guess i'm wrestling with the question of whether this imagery can be used for good. has it always been used for ill? >> a very brief comment. atlanta hip-hop seems to me to be a good -- not in an abstract sense but rather in the sense of reclaiming something, an identity.

so just one -- that's where it started, right? >>that's where it started, right? >> i just want to be down with popular culture. [laughter] >> ok, that goes on the program director. >> another thing that i'll point out is the increasing battle over historical memory in latin -- history. the work of monica munse martinez. the work of others. there's a spate of new works which are really talking about battles on the ground over historical memory in specific places in which latinos are making headway in making sure that the violence enacted against them and the things that give them meaning in particular places are given the same credence as other people's memories. so it's not a question of only one kind of historical memory but an actual battle over the historical memory attached to

place, which i think is fruitful and incredibly important in the west. i think the west is just beginning that process of different populations saying wait a second. this history is not remembered here and it's overwhelmed by a different kind of history and we're not going to take it anymore. we're going to actually battle it out now on historical societies in terms of mourments, in terms of national parks, in terms of a whole range of issues that we've just begun to recognize as having real resonance for populations in the west. and i think that's -- maybe other parts of the country have engaged in those battles more often but i think that's just beginning in the west and it's going to reshape the way that public history is done in the west, i think in a lot of different ways.

and you're, at least in the fields i know, that's really -- we're at the start of that process at this point. >> i think that's something, too, that i can say is in many ways just beginning in many parts of the northeast too. honestly, my mind is still circling around what you were talking about with people migrating from guatemala. going back to tiya's question, as well as what everyone is talking about now, movement of people towards where there's water is going to be a really important piece of our future here. and movements of people who have been displaced from corn and other plants that have been sustainable to places where they cannot do that any longer is going to be a huge issue in the future. and how we remember our history, actually, will have everything

to do with how we manage water, how we cultivate plants. if we forget that the markers of places like where i'm living now. place like bloody brook as places of honor and sacrifice where actually it was more about resource extraction. that if we can't mark our public history in a way that grapples with the damage that the quest for resource extraction has done, then our futures are looking very bleak, i think. if we can't. if we can't change public history and the perception of public history in that way. >> i want to move, as i promised i would do, to the audience and invite people to make comments or ask questions. if you'll forgive me, to make one comment of my own as an environmental historian sitting here as chair, and combining

what several people have said. for me, one of the paradoxes of, imaginary and the that you both pointed to is that on the one hand it carries this promise of starting over. of fleeing injustice, making a new life. moving on to a better future and that has been built into that myth for a very long time. even though, of course, there's violence all over that illusion of starting over and that's the second half of the paradox, which is at a moment of climate change and at a moment of a sun belt that was a zone of migration because of air conditioning that now peaks our electricity consumption in the summer rather than in the winter . the notion that we can move on is itself a really dangerous

assumption. and now finally, to lisa's point, for me, one of the things i've always loved about western history and all the place-based history that people have been talking about. they remind us that it is an obligation. i would say moral, ethical and political obligation to know where you are. know where you are. and for me, rivers are profoundly a part of that. it really is true what she said that modern g.i.s. mapping can't quect vector graphics to make river. study closely google maps and see if you can trace rivers. you won't be able to do it. and for me, a profound lesson in teaching a course on landscape history in the united states to my students two years ago for the first time was that they could name only one river, the mississippi. more than half of them did not know where the st.

lawrence is and if i had to pick one river in the eastern half of the continent that is historically the most important i wouldn't pick the mississippi. ,i would pick the st. lawrence in terms of european influence and colonialism. didn't know where it was. it is not north of the border and they didn't think of it as the great lakes. they don't know where we are. one of the jobs we have, i think, is remind people where they are in all the many meanings of where they are. i'm going to invite hands. if you have a question for a particular panelist, i would questions that invite conversations. if there are questions you want to just throw at the table, i'm not going to play traffic cop here, if i can avoid it. i would just like to keep the ball rolling on a conversation. yeah. i will try to repeat questions when they're asked. for the recording, yes.

>> looking at the title, and what struck me and i thought about this, the united states map. if we follow the patterns that have been established here, is there anything that will -- [indiscernible] can there be or is that just lost? >> i think most people heard the question. we start with the question does the west matter but beyond that question i gestured at the beginning is does the united states matter, is there a united states? one of the paradoxes of western an extendedhat for time, it was the history of the united states. and the role of the west in the united states, the meaning of u.s. history is the question i think the panel has been asked.

>> yes, there is a united states. [laughter] >> doing bad things in the world right now. i think we have to recognize that reality. and yet, there might not always be a united states. and there hasn't always been a united states. i think that's an important part of what we're talking about. maybe in the shadows when bill asked the question, where are we and says we need to be thinking , about and asking where people are. that question might be answered . differently in 25 or 50 years. for the u.s. and for the west. we should be among the many people who are doing that thinking about what those possibilities might mean. >> i think, also, if you can just go to this map here, there's a tendency, yeah, to any think about the united states as a geographic territory that's static, right? and i think as this map shows, even after the united states existed as a nation state,

right? its political and geographic boundaries were still very much in flux. and the question that i actually want to pose in response to your really excellent question is i'm going to paraphrase kalen callaway here who wrote this great book on the west and he asked a very profound question at the end, which i've heard in many spaces that i've traveled through, which is, what happens if we think about the united states not as a place but as a time? as a moment in time. >> so i guess i'd like -- i want to think about the united states but i also just want to any want to think about the category of nation states and think about the work of western historians that have taken that category very seriously and thought -- helped us to think about when nation states matter and when they don't matter.

if you grew up in the united states and went through public schools here, you learned to draw maps as if first european empires and then nation states made all the difference in the world all the time. and so, i'm thinking of michael witkin's book where nations -- don't even use the word. try to tell this history without using that word or to only use that word in a very critical and historicized sense. or the book "empires, nations, and families." nation states come to matter but they come to matter kind of late in the story that she tells. or his first book about changing national identities in new

mexico and texas. we're historians, we know this. it's a historical process. so i think it's less a question of does the united states matter do nations happen and when do nation-states matter and how they matter? and what does it look like when they don't really matter at all? >> we almost had a trial case of this in american history when the confederate states can close to creating a new nation. the question now is, could a civil war happen that's not geographically-based? the civil war was two regions. we think back on it now but even during the war, they were barely coherent holding themselves together. i think one useful thing about

history, how close a call it was. i point out that abraham lincoln was able to persuade exactly 1% of white northern democrats to change their vote to him in 1864. in the middle of the greatest crisis the nation ever faced, 47% of white northern men would not vote for abraham freaking lincoln. and nobody would have predicted that. so i'm sort of amplifying your question. these fractures can take on force we would not have anticipated. slavery had never been stronger than what that first map i showed you. five years later, it's gone. these things can pivot. it's a liberating thing to ask that. >> one of the ways i would approach my answer, and this may move down the line you did not want to get to, if there is

something that has been productive in the discussions of the west it is the discussion of the west as process. the process is sort of interesting. if you apply that to the u.s., the united states is not a place but it's a process. right? it has a history. there are people who struggled to make this the united states, to make it closer to the ideals set forth initially. that has been a long struggle. if you ignore the process of the united states, you're fundamentally wounding the united states. right? i think about this in relation to people in this country we live next to all the time who are not officially in the united states. they have no legal standing to be here, but they fight all the time to contribute to this society.

they fight to take our classes. they fight to get an education. they fight to stay here. they fight for their families and communities, but they also fight because it is the united states. they are part of the process of creating the united states on a daily basis. and then there are people who want to deny them that space. no, you're not part of the united states. you may be 10% of las vegas's population. you may be 20% of los angeles's population but you're not the united states. that's what they are told. so they are fighting on a daily basis to remain. and to prosper, to survive, to contribute. they look at what they do and they know that they are contributing, but that is denied to them. it is in those processes of becoming the united states that we are a nation. and we can look in our own societies and see that occurring and see people passionate about

that, even when they have no legal standing in this country . and i always say if we ignore the u.s.'s process then we're doing harm to ourselves. [applause] >> we have time for one or two more at the rate we're going. go ahead, yes. >> thank you. first of all, thank you all for these comments. we have heard a lot about people in forming regions. but we haven't heard a lot about place and the role of material concerns informing the region. [indiscernible] i wondered if you could talk about that. >> the question is we've heard a lot about people and less about the physical aspects of place and the questioner invites the panelists to talk about those non-people, material, physical attributes of place.

>> i think that making these maps i see the difference that 10 miles makes about where you put a farm. and everybody is trying to get near water. you look at these patterns, they don't make sense. then you turn up the magnification and say oh, there's the river. matters enormously. on the other hand, the south has been called the cotton south for so long and now there are 11 counties in the south that grow cotton and it's grown in california. ironically it seems to me in some ways in our thinking, the material can limit our understanding of ourselves. we don't say, you know where i live? i live in the soy bean south. which is what you do, right? i say this not to trivialize your question but to suggest in some ways in imaginary, we can allow one moment of history, in

this case generations, to identify the entire physical place and not be alert to all the meanings and possibilities a physical landscape has. again, i'm bringing it from a southern point of view. in some ways, we've been naturalized to death. the west, i guess, had a flip of that. i think we're not paying nearly enough attention to it on the microscale. we have lost any sense of why people of move where they did. on the other hand, we need to be careful. there's kind of a commodity fetish in southern history where the commodty does the thinking for our history rather than the people entangled in that commodity. we'll pretend that was a partial answer. >> i mean, i think that's one of the reasons why i've always been

so interested in space because i think that when we're talking about regionalism, there can be a lot of focus on the way that people produce space but the material reality is that constantly, all the time, all kinds of diverse animals and plants and other than human beings are always making space and producing space and they're doing it all the time. and we benefit tremendously from it. and we may not be producing reciprocally towards them in the same way. i had a student the other day come to the realization that although we were really dependent on trees for things like oxygen, for example, as well as many other things, that the trees didn't really need us.

well, first of all, we've given them all of the carbon that they probably need for many generations to come but there are so many other animals that are producing carbon dioxide that really, they don't need us so much. so i think that really paying close attention to all of the other than human beings or who are producing space all the time. and again, i go back to the language and the language is you can't call a tree or a coyote "it are: "it." it would be grantically incorrect and as an english professor in this all of a sudden, i cannot withstand any grantal error in this all of a sudden so please don't call trees it. it's a shift that has to be made. i'm so struck by the points you're making and as you were making those points, i was thinking about literally the farm workers who are actually producing us, right? i mean, when i eat a tomato that's been harvested and grown

at great personal risk by a farm worker, that's what's producing me, right? i don't exist without that so i think just thinking about those dynamics as much as possible is so important. >> we have just five minutes left. i'm going to invite the panelists. anybody have closing thoughts? any things they haven't had a chance to say? parting shots? [laughter] >> ok, i promise to the end on time so i'm going to do that. thank you all. let's thank the panel. [applause]

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>> monday night, the cofounder of netflix and author of the book, "that will never work," shares his experiences starting the online streaming service. hit a few keyso and we were live. he did not take long until we got the first ding. we opened the bottle of champagne. a few minutes later, three more orders. we were so excited. in all the excitement, we lost track of things until someone noticed it had been a while since the bell had rung. was there a problem? it turned out within the first 15 minutes of being online, we crashed all of our service. >> monday night at 8:00 eastern on "the communicators" on

c-span2. >> american history tv is on c-span3 every weekend featuring museum tours, archival films, and programs on the presidency, the civil war, and more. here is a clip from a recent program. >> the rabbi participated in the 1912 parade where many of the men he knew from elite circles were in their clubs looking down on 5th avenue, hurling insults. >> they were rolling their eyes. diary.g out his he wrote of the mockery he encountered that day. "for a few moments, i was very

warm and took off my hat, whereupon someone shouted, 'look at the long-haired susan.' some of the other delightful exclamations that greeted us were, aren't they cute? husband wasrage george middleton. takecalled hecklers crying that handkerchief out, he forgot to shave this morning. suggestionhave some of why it was so controversial, because it disrupted the gender role expectation men had. >> you can watch this and other american history programs on our

website where all of our video is archived. that is c-span.org/history. >> follow the house impeachment >> follow the house impeachment inquiry on c-span. time pride -- prime re-airs or stream any time on c-span.org. >> next, a visit to the smithsonian's national portrait gallery. it is the second of a two-part program. a historian gave american history tv a guided tour about the exhibit marking the centennial of the 19th amendment, using political cartoons and images of suffragists picketing the white house, she explores the party tactics