Changes

Pursuing a policy of “total use for greater wealth,” an alliance of capitalists, politicians and regulators constructed an economic and political structure that favored the accumulation of wealth, property and power in the hands of relatively few people.<ref>Worster, pg 262.</ref> Worster warned of the anti-democratic and ultimately anti-life implications of the Capitalist State, and urged his readers to accommodate nature instead of subduing it. Through his analysis of the powerful economic structures that enabled the accumulation of capital, Worster also exposed the social and economic constraints experienced by the inhabitants of the Southwest. He not only highlighted the importance of the region, and advocated wise stewardship of nature, but also recommended a re-examination of nature’s relationship to human history.

In 1994, work on the American West was published in <I>[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195112121/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0195112121&linkCode=as2&tag=dailyh0c-20&linkId=b248589fcec6dc41b70a71e397a6872b The Oxford History of the American West]</I>, and the wealth and diversity of historical studies brought together in the book illustrate the multiple subjects, perspectives and processes involved in western history.<ref>Clyde Milner, ed., <I>The Oxford History of the American West</I> (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).</ref> The complex history of the Southwest was featured within the Heritage section, and the article by David Weber, The Spanish-Mexican Rim, describes the Spanish influence on the region. Weber explored the interaction between native Southwesterners and Spanish, and the role that the northern portion of the Spanish American empire played in the international competitions between Spain and France.

===Conclusion===

The historiographical scholarship on the American Southwest has progressed over the last few decades, and culminated in the kind of sophisticated analysis of heritage, culture and identity exemplified by historians such as David Weber, Matt Garcia and Andres Resendez. Yet these kinds of interpretive works would not have been possible without the contributions of Chicano and New Western historians. The “conceptual fog” that so worried Patricia Limerick was lifted from the study of the American Southwest and other western regions, and the ensuing analysis has given insight into the previously obscured lives of southwestern residents. Not only freed from the limitations set by Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis, studies of the Southwest have uncovered evidence of widespread personal agency and political culture among Mexican Americans, re-examined connections between human history and ecology, and recognized the importance of identity and continuity in a contested region shaped by conquest.

===References===

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