Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1987
Abstract
Craig Miner's new book is a social history of the settlement of a specific Western region. In methodology and manner of presentation it resembles other "new" social histories. It is interdisciplinary and based on the social scientists' modeling techniques. Miner cites European historians and, what is more remarkable, one can imagine them citing him. He uses unconventional primary materialsmanuscript censuses, tax records, and the reminiscences of the "ordinary" people whose story he tells; he concentrates on the material lives of those people, "the fellows at the bottom," Bertolt Brecht called them, the ones, according to T. E. Lawrence who "did not write the dispatches." His focus is, perforce, regional. Social history does not permit of broad historical canvases splashed with unsupported and often meaningless generalizations. Its practitioners understand that nets cast deeply yield more than those cast widely, that the scope of the topic does not determine the significance of a book but rather the intelligence with which the topic is explored and the care with which its lessons are applied.
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly 7:1 (Winter 1987). Copyright © 1987 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.