"Challenging and at times veritably poetic, Richard White's The Middle Ground establishes a meaningful new framework for the analysis of Indian-white relations. Rather than setting up easy victim-exploiter categories or glorifying Native American resistance, White examines how violence, cultural innovation, confrontation, and accommodation worked on the ground, in specific interactions and conflicts between and within settler and indigenous groups. The author views Native Americans and Europeans soberly, showing the deep divisions on each side in relation to questions of power, legitimacy, and meaning.
By resisting the temptation to glorify or satanize either side, White presents a deep, humane, and enduring picture of Native American heroism in the face of increasingly unviable odds. His conceptualization of the "middle ground," and of the role of the state in constructing ethnicity, also represent contributions of lasting value to our understanding of Indian-white relations throughout the Americas."
--
American Historical Association
1992 Albert J. Beveridge Award Announcement
A new trend in the study of American history has stirred up
controversy in recent years. Academic historians have scrapped
the time-honored, sacred American myths about the Old West; and
the media, from the New York Times to People
Magazine, have taken notice.
At the forefront of the "new Western history" is UW history professor and alumnus Richard White, whose pathbreaking works about the West and environmental history have received national acclaim in a slew of awards. Among them is one of the famed "genius" grants--a fellowship award from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 1995.
White's first book, based on his dissertation for his doctorate from the UW, focused on the history of Whidbey Island. The book debunked the popular myth that the white man destroyed an environment that the native peoples had left intact, revealing that the Indians had indeed significantly altered their environment in the course of living off the land. White's work helped to give rise to a new subdiscipline: environmental history.
"White's book is highly original, certainly the most innovative and challenging overview of Western history written in the last couple of generations."
--Elliott West, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville,
on It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own
But it was with his book, It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A New History of the American West, published in 1991, that White distinguished himself as a scholar of the American West. UW history department chairman Richard Johnson characterizes it as "a reinterpretation of Western history that decisively turns away from the Hollywood epic of white men heading wagon trains and shaping frontier democracies on virgin land.
"Instead, it delineates the forming of a region: one already
endowed with distinctive Indian and Hispanic cultures, and one
where racial tensions and discriminations, extractive
industries, highly urban settlements and a common dependence on
the federal government were at least as important as the
traditional elements we associate with a rural and independent
West."
Previous concepts of the American West were based largely on
work at the turn of the century by Frederick Jackson Turner,
the "founding father" of Western history. Turner characterized
the Western frontier as a process, explains historian Sherry
Smith in a recent article about new Western history.
Turner "believed that the
westward movement across the continent was the defining
national experience, one which left its imprint on both
national character and institutions," she explains. But
Turner's thesis does not embrace the experiences of Native
peoples, Mexicans, Asians, and women. Instead, "it promotes a
triumphal story of progress which belies the West's
complexities," she asserts. Moreover, Turner's analysis
abridges the history of the West, concluding in 1890 when the
Census Bureau announced there was no longer a distinguishable
frontier, thereby denying the West a 20th century history.
"The Middle Ground is a brilliant scholarly accomplishment, one of the most impressively researched works in any field of history."
--John Mack Faragher, Mount Holyoke College,
in the Western Historical Quarterly
New Western historians have abandoned the concept of the frontier as a process, and think of it in terms of place and relationships. White's book, which Smith calls "the best synthesis of New Western History scholarship," asserts that the West is characterized by a set of relationships that distinguish it from other sections of the country--the region's relationship with the federal government; a dual labor system based on race and the existence of minority groups with distinctive legal status; patterns of political participation and political organization. Together, these relationships among people, and between people and place, have combined to make the West a distinctive region.
On another front, White's research on the history of
Indian-white relations, reported in what is considered his best
work, also challenges previously-held beliefs. "Most histories
of Indian-white relations in the U.S. tend to emphasize Indian
victimization," notes White in an interview in the Seattle
Post- Intelligencer. White examined little-used French
and English manuscript sources from the 17th to the 19th
centuries, including some 200 microfilm rolls of
French-language primary documents. He expected to find that
Indians would be dependent on the fur trade: "I expected to
find Europeans coming in and dictating the terms for their
alliance," says White. "Instead, I found Indians acting with
remarkable independence."
The culmination of that study, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region 1650-1815, has won five major history prizes: The 1992 Albert J. Beveridge Award of the American Historical Association for the best book published in American history, as well as the Albert B. Corey Prize, the Rawley Prize, the Francis Parkman Prize, and the American Society of the Colonial Wars Prize. Moreover, the book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1992.
In a review of the book, Colin G. Calloway of the history
department of the University of Wyoming observes "the middle
ground which White describes was not just a place; it was a
network of fluid relationships, held together by its own
language, rituals, and patterns of behavior." The place,
physically, was the region around the Great Lakes, especially
the area between Lake Erie and the Ohio River. Here, Europeans
had to adjust to the kinship politics of native society.
"People tried to persuade others by appealing to what they
perceived as the others' cultural values, and they achieved
accommodation and shared meaning through a 'process of
creative, and often expedient misunderstandings.'" 
Echoes a review in the William
and Mary Quarterly: 
UW history department chairman Richard Johnson notes The
Middle Ground "moves us beyond…depicting Europeans as
all-powerful aggressors and Indians as puppet victims to see
how competing groups developed their individual strategies for
interaction and survival." He adds that "a whole generation of
graduate students is now applying this paradigm to other times
and places." Johnson calls The Middle Ground "a book
that will set the standard and shape the language of research
and interpretation for many years to come."
