A place for stories: Nature, history, and narrative

Journal of American History

Volumn 78, Issue 4, 1992, Pages 1347-1376

  Cronon, William ^a  

^a YALE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34548802475     PISSN: 00218723     EISSN: 19452314     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2079346     Document Type: Article

References (64)

1. Paul Bonnifield, The Dust Bowl: Men, Dirt, and Depression (Albuquerque, 1979).
2. Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York, 1979).
3. Bonnifield, The Dust Bowl, 202.
4. Worster, Dust Bowl, 4.
5. For a wide-ranging discussion that explores the emerging intellectual agendas of environmental history, see "A Round Table: Environmental History," Journal of American History, 76 (March 1990), 1087-1147.
6. Throughout this essay, I will use "story" and "narrative" interchangeably, despite a technical distinction that can be made between them. For some literary critics and philosophers of history, "story" is a limited genre, whereas narrative (or narratio) is the much more encompassing part of classical rhetoric that organizes all representations of time into a configured sequence of completed actions. I intend the broader meaning for both words, since "storytelling" in its most fundamental sense is the activity I wish to criticize and defend. I hope it is emphatically clear at the outset that I am not urging a return to "traditional" narrative history that revolves around the biographies of "great" individuals (usually elite white male politicians and intellectuals); rather, I am urging historians to acknowledge storytelling as the necessary core even of longue durée histories that pay little attention to individual people. Environmental history is but one example of these, and most of my arguments apply just as readily to the others.
7. William H. Dray, Philosophy of History (Englewood Cliffs, 1964).
8. Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative (New York, 1966).
9. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York, 1967).
10. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, 1973).
11. Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, 1978).
12. Robert H. Canary and Henry Kozicki, eds., The Writing of History: Literary Form and Historical Understanding (Madison, 1978).
13. W. J. T. Mitchell, ed., On Narrative (Chicago, 1981).
14. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, 1981).
15. Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca, 1982).
16. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis, 1983).
17. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (3 vols., Chicago, 1984, 1985, 1988), trans. Kathleen Blarney and David Pellauer.
18. Dominick LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca, 1983).
19. Arthur C. Danto, Narration and Knowledge: Including the Integral Text of Analytical Philosophy of History (New York, 1985).
20. James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley, 1986).
21. Wallace Martin, Recent Theories of Narrative (Ithaca, 1986).
22. Louis O. Mink, Historical Understanding (Ithaca, 1987).
23. Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, 1987); and Kai Erikson, "Obituary for Big Daddy: A Parable," unpublished manuscript (in William Cronon’s possession).
24. This distinction between chronicle and narrative is more fully analyzed in White, Metahistory, 5-7.
25. White, Tropics of Discourse, 109-11.
26. Louis O. Mink, "Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument," in Writing of History, ed. Canary and Kozicki, 141-44.
27. David Carr, Time, Narrative, and History (Bloomington, 1986), 59.
28. Danto, Narration and Knowledge; and Paul A. Roth, "Narrative Explanations: The Case of History," History and Theory, 27 (no. 1, 1988), 1-13.
29. There are deeper epistemological problems here that I will not discuss, such as how we recognize what constitutes an "event" and how we draw boundaries around it. It should eventually become clear that "events" are themselves defined and delimited by the stories with which we configure them and are probably impossible to imagine apart from their narrative context.
30. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York, 1920), 12.
31. William Cronon, "Revisiting the Vanishing Frontier: The Legacy of Frederick Jackson Turner," Western Historical Quarterly, 18 (April 1987), 157-76.
32. Turner, Frontier in American History, 147.
33. Howard R. Lamar, "Public Values and Private Dreams: South Dakota’s Search for Identity, 1850-1900," South Dakota History, 8 (Spring 1978), 129.
34. Luther B. Hill, A History of the State of Oklahoma (Chicago, 1909), 382, 386, 385.
35. Joanna L. Stratton, Pioneer Women: Voices from the Kansas Frontier (New York, 1981), 204.
36. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley, 1969), 6-7.
37. Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Plains (New York, 1931).
38. James C. Malin, The Grassland of North America: Prolegomena to Its History (Gloucester, Mass., 1967).
39. Malin, Grassland of North America, 154.
40. The Future of the Great Plains: Report of the Great Plains Committee (Washington, 1936), 1.
41. Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America (New York, 1984).
42. Ronald C. Tobey, Saving the Prairies: The Life Cycle of the Pounding School of American Plant Ecology, 1895-1955 (Berkeley, 1981).
43. Malin, Grassland of North America, 168.
44. Bonnifield, The Dust Bowl, 202.
45. Worster, Dust Bowl, 5.
46. Webb, Great Plains, 508.
47. William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, 1991), 213-18.
48. Richard White, The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln, 1983), 147-211.
49. White, Roots of Dependency, 211.
50. Frank Linderman, Plenty-coups: Chief of the Crows (1930; reprint, Lincoln, 1962), 311.
51. The danger in the way Plenty Coups ends his story, and in Richard White’s ending as well, is that the close of these tragic narratives can all too easily be taken as the end of their protagonists’ cultural history. The notion that Indian histories come to an end is among the classic imperialist myths of the frontier, wherein a "vanishing race" "melts away" before the advancing forces of "civilization." Plenty Coups’s declaration that "after this nothing happened" conveys with great power the tragedy of an older Indian generation but says nothing about the generations of Indians who still live within the shadow of that narrative punctuation mark.
52. Aristotle, Poetics, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes (2 vols., Princeton, 1984), II, 2321.
53. Kermode, Sense of an Ending; this can be usefully combined with Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York, 1975).
54. Hayden White, "The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory," History and Theory, 23 (no. 1, 1984), 1-33.
55. Mink, "Narrative Form as Cognitive Instrument," 148.
56. David Carr, "Narrative and the Real World: An Argument for Continuity," History and Theory, 25 (no. 2, 1986), 117.
57. Robert Cover, "Nomos and Narrative," Harvard Law Review, 97 (Nov. 1983), 3-68.
58. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ""Objectivity Question"" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, Eng., 1988).
59. As with most of these criteria, there are deep problems here. To say that historical narratives must include all relevant details and contradict no relevant facts begs the most important question, for the tool we use to define relevance is narrative itself. Does this particular fact belong to this particular story? Only the story can tell us. To test a narrative by its ability to include facts-the relevance of which is defined by the narrative’s own plot-is to slide rapidly into tautology.
60. I borrow this lovely epigram from a remark of Patricia Limerick’s.
61. I owe this argument about the role of criticism in limiting historical narratives to Richard White’s comments on an earlier version of this essay. His help, and the way it has reshaped the text you now read, precisely illustrates my point about the critical praxis of scholarly communities.
62. Jim O’Brien pointed me toward the importance of this insight.
63. William Least Heat-Moon, PrairyErth (a deep map) (Boston, 1991).
64. Martyn J. Bowden, "The Great American Desert in the American Mind: The Historiography of a Geographical Notion," in Geographies of the Mind: Essays in Historical Geography, ed. David Lowenthal and Martyn J. Bowden (New York, 1976), 119-47.