I am admittedly not a fan of dense environmental or geographic descriptions, be it in nonfiction or any other. The less directly human quandaries\u00a0are involved, the less likely I am to really be engaged with the material. Samuel Truett’s\u00a0Fugtive Landscapes<\/em>\u00a0makes the argument that historical explorations of human affairs and the physical environment should become inseparable queries, particularly regarding inherently in-flux frontiers and borderlands. The\u00a0European\u00a0expansionist mindset, at times alongside equally opportunistic voices from Mexico City, saw the borderlands as essentially unclaimed space to be molded for national and business purposes.\u00a0Ms. 20perez2016 recognized Truett’s argument that\u00a0the U.S.-Mexico frontier acted as\u00a0a \u201ccrossroads\u201d for movement of peoples, resources and ideas between societies near and far. (Treat 60, 106). The ‘fugitive’ element of the book’s title addresses how, in spite of the best institutional intentions, the people and geography of the Arizona-Sonora border remained impossible to \u00a0pin down, entirely. Historical memory of these peoples and spaces,\u00a0likewise, is equally transient and divergent in nature.<\/p>\n

The historiography that Truett builds upon stem chiefly from environmental, local,\u00a0and economic studies. William Cronon, Truett’s advisor for the Ph.D. thesis from which this work derives, is an environmental historian and author of\u00a0Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West<\/em>, which has\u00a0been noted by Publishers Weekly for its multitude of linkages between frontier and urban landscapes.\u00a0<\/em>(ix<\/em>;\u00a0<\/em>186 f.\u00a05) This is what Truett also tries to accomplish, expressing how metropolis elites failed to “domesticate” (a word the\u00a0author uses a lot, in addition to “spaces, “spatial,” “landscape,” etc.) these domains that\u00a0simultaneously lived within and without their respective states. Also leaned on is\u00a0historians Michiel Baud and Willem Van Schendel’s\u00a0article “Toward a Comparative History of Borderlands,” for lessons on how borderlands both unite and divide states on either side. (186, f. 11)<\/p>\n

Truth’s Fugitive Landscapes<\/em>\u00a0is a workman-like that reads like the dissertation it began as. Every paragraph is a huge block on tightly-packed information, with a single obligatory footnote appearing like clockwork that sometimes contained many references in yet another block of text. The obvious amount of research that Truett conducted make this a wonderful resource and springboard for further projects, but the thesis becomes stretched and the structure questionable. While there were great primary sources of businessmen and missionaries, it is not enough to save the work from\u00a0the overbearing detail of geographic minutia. The lack of clear chronology, the pounding-home of spatial references, and, ironically for a work focused on a particular occasion, the jumping around to different locations made for more than a little retreading to figure out what was going on.<\/p>\n

I also question just how novel this approach is compared to traditional histories outside of the border realm. It seems like even those Barnes and Noble local histories would contain a variety of nuggets on different cultures, markets, and otherwise. To my suspicions, however, I believe Truett would respond that the focus has traditionally been telling the story from the state perspective. Although Truett\u00a0does not elaborate on modern events\u00a0throughout\u00a0Fugitive Landscapes<\/em>, the reader gets a sense that the author is skeptical of viewing borders strictly as governments want us to.\u00a0By viewing the\u00a0terra\u00a0firma\u00a0<\/em>on its own terms, we can view those who grace its “crossroads” as equally critical actors both in historical understanding and, implicitly, in contemporary border politics.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the best result of Truett’s approach and style is his ability to at once challenge conventional wisdom of history writing and popular understanding while coming across in a non-argumentative, methodical manner. Business leaders, Indian nations, missionaries, statesmen and explorers are given attention and agency, and while exploitation and\u00a0violence are accounted for, Truett obviously does not bring an axe to grind. Focusing on the land and resources first, while not always enthralling to this reader, ultimately lends to a narrative that is both even-tempered and convincing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am admittedly not a fan of dense environmental or geographic descriptions, be it in nonfiction or any other. The less directly human quandaries\u00a0are involved, the less likely I am to really be engaged with the material. Samuel Truett’s\u00a0Fugtive Landscapes\u00a0makes the argument that historical explorations of human affairs and the physical environment should become inseparable […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/31"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=442"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":455,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442\/revisions\/455"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}