Michael Biggs, University of Oxford@T2:Kerwin Lee Klein. Frontiers of Historical Imagination: Narrating the European Conquest of Native America, 1890–1990. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997, 377 pp.; Michael Leroy Oberg. Dominion and Civility: English Imperialism and Native America, 1585–1685. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999, 239 pp.

Extract

Historians define their jobs as the writing of history. Often, they look past their discipline to simply carry out the discipline's mandate. Yet Klein's project situates itself in the very question of disciplinarity, epistemology, and narrative. The study questions how history has been written by all sorts of professionals. The main concern of the book is to track historical treatments in general, and those of America in particular. Klein's other concern is with how history has been used and interpreted throughout the professional disciplines of literature, philosophy, and anthropology. Because of the powerful symbolism of the frontier, Klein uses this myth to explore visions of the past.