As part of the larger re-examination of the American experience begun by professional historians in the 1970s and 1980s, scholars attempted to re-conceptionalize the “winning of the west” as a not particularly romantic period of resource extraction and industrialization. Such potent scholars have successfully (or at least to the satisfaction of the intellectual establishment) debunked the idea that there was anything romantic, heroic, or even very interesting about the Old West of the cowboy and the range war.
The question, though, particularly for the individual who has an emotional connection with the West, is whether the New Western Historians have brought such energy to the destruction of the myth of the wild free man of the frontier because the myth is flawed, or because they have a deep and personal distaste for the wild free man unconstrained by the dictates of peer-reviewed journals and departmental policies.
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