and around the country, so you can make up your own mind. 1979, c-spanble in is brought to you by your local cable or satellite provider. c-span. your unfiltered view of government. the western history association hosts a panel discussion titled "does the west matter, the future of regionalism in american history." broader roled the of regions understanding the past and present of the united states. this was a part of the organization's 2019 annual meeting. >> good afternoon. the marnie sandy white, president of the wha, and it is my great pleasure to welcome you to this afternoon's presidential session.

does the west matter? the future of regionalism in american history. there is some 150 sessions theng place at the wha, but presidential planetary 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 , thedent of the wha professor from arizona state university, to open this session with a native lands acknowledgment, a statement that feels crucial as a historical organization that cares deeply about the past, and particularly, about the past in this part of the world. >> i would like you to repeat after me. -p-mahi.

in the muscogee creek language, we say these words. said, very good. i said hello, how are you? and you said good. [laughter] >> i want to welcome you. i am an american indian. being an american indian scholar, just to acknowledge that we are on this land. they were also in the land of sonyouthern, western to and all the people -- western shoshone, and all these people. there is not always an indian present, but this extends to an american indian presence. it is for us as historians to not forget native people so that when we teach, remember american indians being a part of the past, present, and future. [applause]

>> thank you. lannery addresses a simple question and perhaps an odd question for the western history association to think about. does the last even matter -- does the west even matter anymore? does regionalism matter in american history? in a moment when people are increasingly net together by transportation, internet, and popular culture, does itionalism have the salience did in the 19th century where despite shared political cultures, different regions of the country had distinct histories revolving around slavery, settler colonialism, or native people. or, more those 19th century history so different? to help us explore these

questions today, we have an exceptional panel of scholars and not all of whom focus on the american west, but all of whom wrestle with questions of region and geography in their work. to introduce them and to moderate this conversation, i want to turn the session over to my colleague and friend from the university of wisconsin madison. bill, welcome back to the wha, thank you. bill: hi. we decided to get to the heart of the matter quickly, i am going to do the briefest of introductions here. you see the names of our panel, i am not going to spend five minutes giving each of their biographies. they all have powerful reasons for being here and having things to say about this particular question. paradox the interesting but the two titles have, they are not quite synonymous in their meaning in the word 'even

.' does the west matter is a different question than does region matter. and what regions ought to be addressed and thought about and thinking about the past and other regional entities of the united states. what are the boundaries around the word with the focus of the field called western history? what we have at this table are people whose work centrally the west,n people whose work is in hybrid space with the west, and people whose work is in regions not considered west in the way this organization now defines west. i'm going to simply introduce the panel without giving background on them. they will speak in the order that you see on the screen. every so often, one of the speakers will have images or manage here.ill

if they want to respond to each other and anyways, i may ask them to her three questions, and then we'll throw this open to questions and comments from all of you. as you listen to the comments, please do be thinking about things you would like to be brought to this conversation and i mightregion, add the category just place. one of the things i cherish about the work of everybody on this panel and most people in ofs room is this place base nist which i think it's something we all share here, however we think of the category called region. starting all the way down on a professorwe have from the university of richmond, susan lee johnson from the university of nevada, las vegas. tiya miles, from harvard

university. and lisa brooks from amherst college forget i'm going to ask susan to start us off. susan: thank you, bill. hand a deck in my of cards -- bill: pull the microphone closer. it is on. susan: now can you hear me? >> yes. hands,i am holding in my one more time. i am holding in my hand [laughter] a deck of cards that tells the history of the american west and 40 two and a half by four inch installments. i got the cards as a party favor at a retirement for howard lamar, a mentor of many here today. at the dinner, a bunch of abd's were milling around the table where the cards are being handed out. a person which

after writing his dissertation, went on to a career in film and on the stage. when some of us wished out loud that we could have more than one check of cards, -- one deck of cards, one person quipped, it is the west, just take it. [laughter] susan: this reminds me how crucial it is to keep studying places termed the west, and have seen int we imperialism and colonialism. quip, of only a course, 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, but western historians get the joke.

non-western historians get it, too, because the taking because a continental and global process for which the west stands as -- i just learned how to pronounce that word. [laughter] susan: howell parks came to stand for the whole has its own history. casualhis as observations as it is writing and teaching american history that drives home the continued relevance not only the self-consciously space placed history, but also and especially of history that fits, however uneasily, under a western banner. the uneasy fit is often very much the point because the west this contempt provokes productive conversation about comparative and connected

histories, about belonging and citizenship, about self-determination and sovereignty. of the west discontent, i mean borderlands history which encompasses now mexico and canada, pacific ocean island based history, and history of places like appalachia or the great lakes. alaska, too. but the discontent is not just places outside of the customary boundaries we drive around the so-called american west. the west discontent is also humans for which the idea of the and represents less promise more violence, dispossession, disenfranchisement, exploitation, expulsion, and

incarceration, including those we have come to call asian people,s, latinx african-americans, and indigenous people. when i think of the west at this contempt, i am reminded of another conversation with david gutierrez in the heyday of the western history. he told me his graduate students in chicano history worried over the relationship of their work to the new western history, a field towards which they felt ambivalence. how the students asked him to navigate those waters and stay true to their commitments dave told them, ride the wave, baby. ride the wave. he wanted to students to get knew that he malibu and the rest of the west would never be the same. a generation of scholars studying the west at this

pt, west discontem you will reliably hear papers andt indigenous peoples places, and processes in north american places we now consider midwestern or southern. or might hear a comparative connected piece that looks at colonialism's and more than one world region. in north america and australia perhaps, or among both pacific and caribbean islands, though i can see that caribbean appears only once in this year's program and pacific appears 26 times. you might hear the talk of racial relations of city suburbs of denver, colorado and washington dc. the last example is wishful thinking. thesperately wanted to hear whoy of amateur historians

wrote about the 19th-century frontiersman and who navigated precisely those urban theyionships even as remain in the past, the distant history were then producing. such aabsence of comparative urban study, i did the work on denver, d.c., chicago myself. i felt no less a western historian when i flogged through the fairfax county or loading square sources when i visited height -- then i did visiting archives. because the neighborhoods and suburbs are distinct but comparable and connected. with all of this said, the west

remains a part that stands for a poll of colonialism and the exercise of power intrinsic to both. the west in that sense is a vector of violence, routinely invoke to justify all manner of misrule in the presence. asked myge this and hoa why some units in my condo could access individual trash and recycling services while other units had to rely on dumpsters and had no access to recycling at all. the answer has to do with where garbage trucks couldn't could not maneuver, but that did not explain why recycling dumpsters could not be placed alongside the trash dumpsters for those of us and for individual service. a heated conversation followed. [laughter] the exasperated hoa official 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.' [laughter] susan: she was sadly mistaken. scale of one to 10 where one is the least agreed this invocation of the west to justify misrule, and 10 the most egregious, this was a 2. how invocations both implicit and explicit can escalate to far worse for calls for a border wall to white supremacist groups to homophobic and a trance -- trance phobic murderers, i thought it nonetheless. i have not won the battle. yet. [laughter] susan: sometimes the battle itself is a bright ball of joy. spring'sking of last

music model which let the air out of the west and defiantly black, country, and queer. if you missed the "old town road" phenomenon, just pretend you know what i'm talking about until you can grab your phone and do a quick google search and grab your earbuds. what you will see and hear, if you click on the music video, the end product of a process that started when a minor internet personality, lil nas x, bought a sample nine inch nails be online for $30 from a dutch producer. that beats powered the infectious song that lil nas x and the song went viral. it debuted on three billboard charts, including the hot country songs list. was exiled from

the genre in 2016, the hot country charts quickly dropped "old town road" as insufficiently country. .hat is too black nonetheless, a remix he made with billy ray cyrus that on billboard's top 100 list for 19 weeks, longer than any song in a chart's history. like the gay black man said, .an't nobody tell him nothin. ride the horse, ride the wave, ride till you can't no more. [applause] >> george sanchez. delight to bea invited on this important topic

with this array of stellar, scholars. isperspective on regionalism shaped by my own location. , hometown,t resident and birthplace in los angeles, california. a city that has been written out of the west altogether by individuals who have fled the city for other locations they believe embody more of the true west, and a time by western historians themselves. after sitting in traffic on an l.a. freeway for hours, many of former angelino has vowed never to return to this city, yearning for open spaces and the real frontier. i remember a map that was attached to the announcement of my friend and mentor new center of the west in boulder, colorado that literally had removed metropolitan los angeles from its configuration of the western region. [laughter] george: because our concepts of regionalism in the united states

were shaped primarily by the most significant national event of the 19th century, the civil war and the anglo conquest of the west, regionalism may be a ancient wait to acknowledge. and though we were able to communicate globally now in a way that was not even dreamed of in previous generations, it may seem for organizations like ours to depend on these terms, even for the shaping of the past. regionalism still plays an important role in the way people bring meaning to their lives, even if the 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. bese cities cannot simply examples of what the west has negatively become, or what nearby locations do not want to become to remain in the mythical west. conversationr

forward to, i want to offer other critical interpretations of regionalism for our area that may be as important as north, south, east, west, that served us so long and historical writings. some of these are well-established while others but this organization, may push us to what we actually mean by regionalism and identity. shapedsay that they were by ongoing conversations my graduate and undergraduate students from ufc. it seems relatively noncontroversial to at least speak of a coastal culture that is positioned next to the part of the u.s. that is between the fly over regions trump has what referred to as railamerica.

real america. the backgrounders of the coasts are hard to define. where'd do we put las vegas. increasingly politically connected to california, or the much more volatile california. there is data that also supports the coast as a region. the largest number of the homeless in this country reside in california, new york, d.c., or hawaii. asthat regions are now known diverse sites of immigration and multiculturalism. more specifically to los angeles, i am intrigued by the relationships of latino immigration from miami to los angeles. evoluding much of the nu south, and including texas, new mexico, and arizona. haveth of sunbelt states not only tied their economies together since world war ii, but

also have been further joined by an expanded border culture, om latins south fr america for people and commerce. new york's latin america which could get tied to this region, but the sunbelt and the rust belt has as much staying power as early notions for the century. we could certainly see that the southern half of the united states has as many if not more connections to population centers in mexico, central america, and the caribbean as they do to particular other sites in the united states. culture in los a angeles or north carolina in much the way earlier generations discuss the importance of iowa to understand southern california. these transnational movements of -- of and culture are

half-baked notion of a wall at the southern border. an chinese diaspora has had enormous cultural effect on the united states and latin america, but it is hard to see that made it to a particular cultural phenomenon. i do know the recent u.s. immigration policy is rapidly transforming the border region now gathers refugees and mexican border cities and frustrated attempts to enter the united states. i am intrigued by what happens to our notions of regions when we take seriously the migration of indigenous populations from latin america to locations in united states. indeed, the diversity of the indigenous and the very meaning of the term itself means to be re-examined if we are to map the u.s.. peopleulations of native and the rural areas of california and washington as well as cities across the country. they are reshaping the meaning indigenity, but also

providing a notion of land and heritage. finally, and more controversially, i think we need to think of a belt of white supremacy in this country. there has often been shaped by local policies intended to keep white europeans a majority culture. i will give you my own interpretation. moving west to east, it would require that we include parts of arizona and utah, but certainly including idaho, montana, and parts of oregon. this white supremacy belt would then make its way east, before settling to some parts of texas and the old south. the white supremacists can be found in every state and region in this country. it is important to understand where this movement has particular strength, whether it is measured by population,

anti-immigrant laws, white supremacist groups, or gun sales. clearly both the west and the south are the only regions of u.s. history cannot be sustained. regionalism continues to help us identify certain patterns of culture, and 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] >> tiya miles. tiya: over there, hi, hello everyone. thank you for being here with us. i am really pleased and excited to try to work together with all of you to solve the question of whether or not regionalism has a

future and whether or not the west matters. when i was asked to join this panel, i really did not know what i would say because even though i go to these conferences, i've always felt on the borders of western history. my work mostly focuses on the south, the u.s. southeast, and recently on the midwest. sometimes to make the case that this work is actually western history. but here is the way that i have done it or i might try to do it today or i might muddy the waters today. i thought back to my dissertation research in my early scholarship and my work on oklahoma. and about how oklahoma really throws a wrench into things when we think about familiar and set boundaries of place. largelys this place populated by native americans where black slavery, slavery

vaults, and lynchings were not to foreign practices or occurrences? i would talk conversation over dinner and when i proposed to a choctaw colleague from oklahoma the oklahoma might as well be the south. her jaw dropped. i should have thought twice before saying it. she strongly disagreed and perhaps its connotations. i ventured at that time to say precisely where oklahoma fell on the map and it taken on moral valences. , orhoma in the midwest south, or southwest, or in indian country that did and could exist nearly anywhere at any time. and what use is regional understanding anyway? grappling with the social dynamics of a place like oklahoma where many people, including indigenous groups and

nations, have emigrated from someplace else in the early 1900s, and where transnational movements became normative. seminoles, who repeatedly traversed the borders of indigenous nations, u.s., and mexico. , whofrican-americans kendra field has recently studied, flatly rejecting the notion of standstill. away at thears boldfaced imprints of regional boundaries. in the west, including the indigenous west has long and even always been a landscape of people and notion. oklahoma bears the mark of other places, often eastward from whence people came. andit bears this market collective memories, cultural practices, and in colonial,

racial, and gender relations. this seems to exemplify regional exceptionalism. i want to take it a step further to say i am calling oklahoma the south. this was a very odd souse to at thelack people fled turn of the 20th century as a haven that would give, securityd economic opportunity. exceptionalism is, as oklahoma indicates, the rule of region. once we drill down into the substrates of our archival findings and our oral history research, predetermined joe geo-social zones don't ask the way we expect them to. i shouldn't have been set rise to when my research took me just briefly, and revealed that black

women from the south, women whom were formerly enslaved, who were growing yams at stagecoach stops, opening soul food cafes and posing in four coats along the yellowstone river. we should not be surprised racial heritage was twisted there because these white women -- these black women, could grow rich of deposits in the wake of --, and could link elbows with military husbands through u.s.-state provided weapons , apaches,t cheyennes and look at us. for these black women, the race and gender dynamics of the south certainly penetrated. they arrived as domestics, but there was actual life for them in the notion of a western difference. that absence of centuries-old systemically entrenched, and

widespread black chattel slavery allowed, at least temporarily, for broader opportunities, loosened roads of interruptions, 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 better in the west, though living anywhere by black was never a stroll through the national park. 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 africann americans in the 19th century and the turn of the 20th century. we, i think, should see this difference, even as we recognize that regional boundaries have always been provisional

, political, and porous. thanks. [applause] >> ed ayers. ed: i have to begin with my own oklahoma story. i gave a talk one time about regional identity. i asked, where are we, in the south otherwise? half of the audience raised their hands and said, we are in the west. why is that? because we believe in freedom. why do you say south? because we are racist. [laughter] i said, that's is a bad deal. i have to admit that i have talked through these issues before. i have organized talks on regionalism at johns hopkins. back in a 1993, that became the book "rethinking american regions," though apparently we did not rethink them 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 westernists had sometimes been atheist. of the more mature field of southern history, but now that they had caught up, she said, i turned around i said, just kidding, there is no such thing as region. i didn't really say that, of course, and patty wouldn't did, but it does suggest that the south and west, of george was saying, we have a , too much region, and one of us is 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, the migrations of the american south, 1790-2020." 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 -- the ways that in greater detail than we were able to before, 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, for reasons we now deplore, counted that people separately from white people from 1790 on. it did not include indigenous peoples. so we had to find other ways to relate their histories. s other ethnic definitions are problematic as well, that 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 the maps as fmri's showing where the blood is flowing and draining, where the hotspots of departure and

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 don't highlight. matter of fact, right now, all of you are looking at the map instead of me, that is ok. present the maps not as illustrations of an argument, not as resources from which many insights can be gained. they map areas of population growth and decline, so we can avoid the problems from county problems. the first map is changing african-american population between 1850 and 1860, and it shows the intensity and reach of the domestic slave trade, and what proved to be in the final decade, accelerating in its forced migration of 2 million people, even as we know, was suicide. a great it shows a continued bleeding of virginia, kentucky, and coastal carolina for the fifth or 60 generation now, even as the

mississippi delta finally becomes the center of the slave trade. it also shows the slowing of the slave trade into the former lands of the cherokee and georgia, which had been exploited so hard in the previous decades that it had fire already fallen into decline for cotton production, pushing migration further west. even as the northern mississippi and the seminoles in florida had yet to be taken over for plantation agriculture. most important for today's discussion, it reveals the breakneck spread of slavery into texas. right up to what appeared to be its natural borders of the time. so, slavery is gaining acceleration. you can see how it is being drained from the upper south, even as the numbers remains great and again velocity. the next map is black change 1910-1920. this is the great migration. although we will have seen an earlier map in the book that showed that migration in some ways was a combination and continuation of movement of black southerners since the

first moment of emancipation, including oklahoma. he will see this map of cities in the midwest are bolstered by new african-american arrivals, so are the cities on the border of the south and west, as well as california. oklahoma is fed in these earlier days. surprising, however, is the growth of the upper mississippi delta and appalachia, both of which attract black southerners during the great migration. look how many black people are moving to the eastern seaboard. so the great migration is not the big red arrow going up the mississippi river that we often see in textbooks, but rather this very complex, many calculations going on about what is the appropriate amount of risk for what kind of return? and as we will see, there is plenty of african-american movement in the south long after the great migration, though you would not know it. we talk as if when that happened, black southerners are just frozen in place. not true. the next map is a white change in the decade of greatest

outmigration of white people. i have had a few tests over beers, and few people would have guessed it was the 1950's, but it is. it shows the massive losses across almost all of the rural south. people who fed so much of the growth of the west, but it also shows a band stretching the breadth of the continent was losing people at the same time. it also shows the difference that many small migrations across history can make. my mother, father, and i moved from the blue of the mountains of north carolina, to the narrow band of shining copper in middle appalachia, only one hour's drive from iron mountain, that opened new opportunities for them in a small industrial town. so migration does not have to be transcontinental to be significant. the movements from one county to another can hold enormous consequence. my next map is in some ways

foreshadowed by george's. what you see is the new wave of the south. as our burn,ral has become the hold of many people of latinx background, not just in florida, but it is to get 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 being the only exception. texas, florida, georgia, and north carolina. the final map is the change in asian and asian american population in the same decade, and it shows that 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 n.o.i.. here are my quick takeaways. if we follow all these people living such the virgin histories in the same places and times , allowing the paths they traced

to defend our questions, we can see regions constantly being made and remade. again, picking up on some of the comments of my friends. 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, even as moving to the west. so, putting the strands apart by race, ethnicity, and place, 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. and after slavery, even people who have the power to move, 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 plant, 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, the human and nonhuman, change and persistence and recurrence. so, 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 of migration, economy, and power, that cut across familiar boundaries of state and region within the nation. we have seen transnational history transformer understanding of many topics, but we have tended to portray u.s. history in ways that prevent us from seeing the ground patterns and connections that work across the nation. to see the nation hold, we may have to see it in pieces, as a -patially variegated but intra

transnationally, we may have to related 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. these regions have constantly interacted through borders blurring and bending, and that makes them more interesting and useful to think with, not less. thanks. [applause] >> lisa brooks. lisa: we have saved the east for last. [laughter] 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 that i can provide some ideas that we can wrestle with.

but are not things that you all have been talking about for decades, but -- [laughter] 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 speak earlier today, and it really grounded me in the history of the place. so i just wanted 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 that i want to share with you. some of you have seen these before. maybe for other people, they are new. when ed described maps as resources from which insights can be gained, that is how i see them, too. i want to start with this concept of intra-national history. i have always seen indigenous histories as transnational.

so, whether we are talking about histories among indigenous nations or whether we are talking about the history histories between indigenous settler colonies, or european powers, or other powers across the world, that history is almost always transnational. and i have to start with the east, because that's where i am that's 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, and river history, and then, networks of rivers, and networks of communities, and eventually ended up teaching history in guatemala because i needed to understand their stories to about corn, 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 really start with the question of what does it mean to be from the east? in our language, that is what the word means, it means that we are the people of the east, the first people to greet the don. but it also means that we are people born of that place, the easternmost place. 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 who are responsible for greeting the sun when it comes up every day. struggledinning, i with creating a map that would transcend nation-state 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.

like, you literally just had to cross the river, which also crossed the border in order to get to canada. from the stories he told me, they really do not think about that border as being real, until prohibition came along. [laughter] then it got real. river endeds, the up being a place in had to jump into to get away from the people who were regulating the border. the stories my grandfather told were really funny, but they also really embedded important ideas and legal concepts in my mind. that would not be here otherwise. when i first tried to map our territories in a way that would help me understand our histories, i found that at the time, the best mapping program available couldn't connect rivers across the borders. so this map you see here, it is like second wave technology, after i had a faculty position and could afford to pay somebody to create this kind of a base

map. the ideas of regions can be so influenced by these ideas of the nation-state. so i just want, with everybody here, for us to think about the problem of regions when they are defined within nation-state boundaries, as opposed to the dynamic movements and migrations of families, communities, individuals who have always crossed those boundaries, and sometimes, have crossed of in ways that have ended up with great damage to their persons and their families. i also just want to bear in mind , if we can go a couple of slides down -- of the way that places like say, new england, have been determined by colonial boundaries, and still to this

day, coming from the, this is still an imaginary that people are really invested in. one of the things i have been part of doing, part of a collaborative work ongoing for some time is to challenge us to think about not just the native homelands that are 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 that 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 really want to challenge all of us as historians to be accurate in naming the native places let historically at the

time, these places were. they didn't have any other identity, they weren't even overlapping identities. i do believe places have identities. example, if we look at the next map, is that there is this question of what the west is. as you all know very well, this question of the west, this naming of the west shifts so much during the history of this continent. i always joke about, when i think about west, i'm thinking about iroquois and shoshone territory. i thought that is what we were going to be talking about today, and i am sadly disappointed. [laughter] i consulted all of my shoshone friends so i would be prepared. even in the ohio river valley, right, in the 1790's when nations were gathered there and they were a separate confederacy from the united states and from british canada, they referred to mohicans as people

wapanak, as people of the east. because those were their relatives to the east. so this idea of east and west shifts based on where we are positioned and based on the constantly moving dynamics, relationships between people. so, 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 in order to do this. as you can see from all of my maps, i went to ask, what does it mean to think about regions in terms of waterways? what does it mean to belong to a banaki leaderlebanowa talked about in the 1730's? 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, too, of the incredible work being done now to map the mississippi river, including some of the work that a photographer margaret pierce is doing, where she is centering the mississippi as a dynamic space. in thinking about waterways, i also want to really have us think about the ocean waters as josh reed has done, of really centering movements within oceans. that oceans can serve as connecting spaces among people. also this map of the mississippi, which is not margaret's, it is just one that i use, for us, the west is also the place where corn came from. and corn stories connect us in , 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 a cross oceans and across land spaces whether we're talking about the emergence of corn and corn 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 nation-state 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 is a map that was done by biologists showing the movements and 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 are mapping our territories as many nations who have coyote at the center of the narrative have already done. and i want to think about what coyote is teaching is 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 -- some of you have already done so -- on remarks that others have made or to move the conversation forward in whatever way seems appropriate to do, given what you've heard. bill, i would like to just 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, just 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 -- don't quite know what to say butwhat to do with it, what does climate change mean for regional identities? is there a way that changing

climate will remake regions or lead people to intensify their definitions or identifications with regions? is there a way that it can help people to actually think about how we might continue to survive and live, and reimagine in the face of climate change? >> i should say about that, that the irony of the south flourishing because it's the sun belt, so it has this brief moment in the sun, unfortunately, and now, large parts of the coast are beginning to flood. to define yourself against the rust belt. and it is so interesting how that is, the upper midwest and new 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. so, i worry. i love the south. 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 that same issue, the one thing i will point out is that there is no way to understand migration from guatemala today without understanding climate change. what is actually happening to agriculture, to the way of life i of people 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 lots of places in the world, to other places that people can actually survive. that is just fundamental, and we already are seeing it, but we can't come to terms with migration being a function of climate change, because we 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 , just for a moment, to return

to the title -- does the west matter, the future of regionalism in american history. as i have listened to all of you, you have all said quite wonderful things. 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 that what in fact is interesting about region is precisely its dynamism which in a funny kind of way seems to be inviting western history back into an older version of itself in a way. 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 say, in someould

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 well if anything become a 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, not, not, not, asking for a debate in this room -- [laughter] about whether, is the west a place or a process, or a region or in front year? 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 whom 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, however we understand that word come what is the contribution reimagine 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. mean, i guess it is 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 subdivisions 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 that is in the minds of the people defending the statues and confederate flags. it is almost as if the quicker it is disappearing, the more determined some people seem to be holding onto it. living in charlottesville and richmond, i have 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. you know? i think this kind of 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 of meaning that i at least was not 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 is an imaginary that is very powerful. is that dangerous, or maybe is that positive? >> put the microphone closer. sorry. >> thank you. coming back from lil nas x 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 liberatory 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 wrestling with the am question, we know this imaginary exists. can it 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 that is just that's where it one. started, right? >> are just wanted to be down with popular culture. [laughter] >> ok, that goes on the program director. [laughter] >> another thing that i'll point out is the increasing battle over historical memory in latin x history. monica munoz 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 for the first time -- well, not for the first time, but actually 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 is 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, monuments, 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 just, but i think that's beginning in the west, and it is going to reshape the way that public history is done in the west, i think in a lot of different ways. at least in the fields i know, really, we are at the start of that process at this >> i point. 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. because i do think, going back to tiya's question, as well as what everyone is talking about right now, but movement of people towards where there is water is going to be a really important piece of our future here. and movements of people who have been displaced from corn and -- from actually cultivating

corn and other plants in ways that are sustainable to places where they cannot do that any longer is going to be a huge issue in the future, and how we ,emember our histories 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 am living bloody brook,ike 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. but if you will forgive me, just 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, "the west" and the imaginary 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 climate change and the very notion of keeping yourself cool in that space, the notion that we can move on is in 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, is they remind us that it is an obligation, i would say moral, ethical and , political obligation to know where you are. to 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 connect vector graphics to make rivers. 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. if i 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 empire and colonialism. they didn't know where it is, because it is in the northern border. they didn't think of it as the great lakes. they don't know where we are. one of the jobs we have, i i would say, is remind people where they are, in all the many meanings of where they are. i'm going to invite hands. i will call -- if you have a question for a particular panelist -- though, i would welcome 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. [laughter] if we follow the patterns that have been established here, is there anything that will -- [indiscernible] can there be an american history, or is that just lost? bill: i think most people heard the question. we start with the question does matter, but beyond that question, is, does the united states matter, is there a united states? one of the paradoxes of western history is that for an extended

period, it was the history of the united states. it presented itself as the history of the united states. and the role of the west in the history, 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, need are we and says, we to be thinking about and asking where people are, that question might be answered differently in u.s., andears for the 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 collin 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 think about the category of nation states and think about the work of western historians that have taken that category very seriously and helped us to think about when whenn-states matter, and 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. so, i'm thinking of michael witkin's book where nations -- don't even use the word. try to tell the 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 andre's first book about changing national identities in new mexico and texas. i mean, we are historians, we know this. it's a historical process. so i think it's less a question of, does the united states matter, but when do nations happen and when do nation-states matter, and how do 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 -- confederate states of america came pretty darn 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 is to emphasize just how close to call it was in the civil war. i point out that album 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, for he percent of white northern man would not vote for abraham freaking lincoln. [laughter] nobody would have predicted that. so i'm sort of amplifying your question, is that these fractures can suddenly 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. that is how fast these things can pivot. so i think it is a liberating

question to ask that. >> one of the ways i would thisach my answer is, and may move down that line is that you didn't want to get to, bill, which is, but if there is something that has been productive in the discussions of the west it is the discussion of the west as process. i may disagree with the process, but the process is sort of interesting. ,f you apply that to the u.s. the united states is not a place, but it is 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 being the united states, you are 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 . i always say if we ignore the u.s.'s process then we're doing harm to ourselves. [applause] bill: 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. with the exception of lisa, we haven't heard a lot about place and the role of material forming regions. [indiscernible]

i wondered if you could talk about that. bill: the question is, we have 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 is grown in california. ironically, it seems to me in some ways in our thinking, the material can limit our understanding of ourselves. so, we don't say you know where , i live? i live in the soy bean south.

which is what you do, right? [laughter] i say this not to trivialize your question but to suggest in some ways that we, in this 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. you know? guess has a west, i 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 would move where they did. on the other hand, we need to be careful. there is kind of a commodity fetish in southern history right now, where the commodity does

the thinking for our history rather than the people entangled in that commodity. so, we will pretend that was a partial answer. >> i mean, i think that's one of the reasons why i have always been so interested in space, because when talking about regionalism, there can be a lot of focus on the way that people produce space. but the material reality is that , all the time, all kinds of diverse animals and plants and other than human beings are always making space , and producing space, and they are doing it all the time, and we benefit tremendously from it. and we may not be producing space 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.

[laughter] first of all, we have 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, right? 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 language, in our language, you can't call a tree or a coyote "it." it would be grammatically incorrect. as an english professor in this audience, i couldn't withstand errors in this audience, so please don't call trees "it are: it's a shift that has to be made.

in the same regard, again, i am so struck by george, the points you are making, and as you were making those points, i was thinking literally about 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. bill: 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? syntheses, riffs, parting shots? [laughter] bill: ok, well i promised to end on time, so i'm going to do that. thank you all. let's thank the panel.

[applause] ♪ [chatter] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy, visit ncicap.org] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2019] >> on lectures in history, gettysburg college professor timothy shannon on colonial era diplomacy. >> they had to get together and conduct diplomacy with native american peoples, and the protocols in customs and language and metaphors that governor that diplomacy were not european in origin, they were native american in origin. announcer: at 10:00 on reel america, the 1969 film "the distant drummer, dreams from no place," on narcotics and the efforts to treated. >> amphetamines, barbiturates, at every social and economic

level. fills aftermath hospitals, prisons, and rehabilitation centers across the country. announcer: sunday at 6:00 p.m. eastern, blitzer prize-winning author carolyn fraser on the life of the "little house on the. prairie," author. >> she was kind of forced into this role that she had never contemplated for herself, which was to become a teacher. announcer: at 8:00 on "the presidency, go we continue our look at the work of pulitzer prize winning cartoonist timothy oliphant, from the university of virginia, which just acquired his cartoon collection. explore our nations passed on american history tv, every weekend on c-span3. this weekend, book tv features two new nonfiction books.

best on book tv at 630 be 6:30 p.m. eastern, rich lowry talks about the positive contusions of nationalism. >> a more nationalistic and populist republican party that has actually thought through affect of a new agenda and integrated it in its program would have more chance of jumping racial lines han and more stereotypical mitt romney republicanism would. african-american, latino, overwhelmingly male middle-class and working class would find this program and iteration more appealing. announcer: sunday at 10:00 p.m. eastern, journalists discuss the warning which looks behind the series of donald trump's presidency from an anonymous source. >> donald trump was the one who is the ultimate decider. of course, that is the job of any president.

but he really, really follows his own instincts on everything from foreign policy, which we have seen so recently with the syria decision, to the marketing that joe. was just talking about i mean, he is his own press secretary his own communications director, his own national security adviser. >> people in congress have kind of giving away their power and their authority to pennsylvania steadily over the last couple of decades. one way to not complain anonymously, as he just said jeff, and to do something about it is to do something about >> i think a national primary is probably one of the worst reforms we could implement. i would, if we were doing and in sort of a rational way have a rotating regional primary so that we basically, different elections had different sort of groups of states go together

which would allow kind of focused retail campaigning. the nominating process sunday night on question and answer. the director of the political management school at george washington discusses how we nominate presidential candidates and what reforms to the process maybe soon. watch sunday night at 8:00 eastern. 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.