Summary Of The Unbroken Past Of The American West By Patricia Limerick

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Patricia Limerick believes, “In Western America...the dominance of the profit motive...[was] the passion for profit... [and] at the core of the Western Adventure” (77). Her book is a symbol of the foundations of the West and their deep roots in economic development. These developments often come with risk and would prove to have negative, lasting impacts on the modern Western World. In the book The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West by Patricia Limerick, she outlines two distinct arguments that focus on the foundation of Western history and its roots in profit, competition, and property as well as how the problems associated with the West have had a lasting impression on society today. Throughout The Legacy of Conquest, …show more content…

Limerick highlights the fact that when it comes to conquest of native peoples, “the subject...was the domain of mass entertainment and... national escapism” (19). This would prove to be detrimental to American views on western history and the impact that Western expansion had on the native people. While the settlers often had good intentions, negative impacts on the native people were more common than success. For example, the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) was meant to give control back to the Natives, but still forced them to assimilate to American forms of politics. Barriers such as language, not understanding how to write a constitution, and cultural aspects like peyote all led to the IRA negatively impacting the native people. These negative consequences helped lead to the mistreatment of native people and the laws that impacted them in the twentieth century. The second impact can be seen in farming. Limerick writes, “Ranchers in the 1980s shared many of the farmers’ problems: ‘supplies, declining demand, and... high interest rates” (157). These are the same issues that farmers faced in the nineteenth century when the government bailed them out. Cattle country was also seeing familiar problems due to the “cattle trade inaugura[ting] a chain of unforeseen consequences, a chain by no means at an end” (159). These statements display the influence of the decisions made in the nineteenth century and how those consequences continue to affect the modern world. To be completely honest, I dreaded reading this book. I have never been a fan of non-fiction books and have stuck to fiction novels. As I began reading the book, I came to realize that I truly did enjoy it. Not only did the book have a great flow that made it easy to read for hours at a time, but it also was written in a way that made learning about this aspect of history very interesting. Her

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