West awarded Bancroft Prize
Arkansas historian’s book is on U.S. westward expansion
Elliott West, 78, has been named one of two winners of the 2024 Bancroft Prizes in American History and Diplomacy, among the highest awards in the American History field.
He and fellow 2024 Bancroft Prizes awardee Carolyn Woods Eisenberg will be honored this week in New York City.
“It’s very humbling — this is about the top award for an American historian — and I couldn’t have been more surprised,” said West, who retired in 2022 as Alumni Distinguished Professor of History emeritus following 42 years of service at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. “I’m very happy and honored.”
West won for his latest work, “Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion,” published last year by the University of Nebraska Press, which the jury described as an “epic story of the re-birth of the United States beginning in the mid-nineteenth century.”
“This story is the history of America’s western expansion, a searing narrative explaining how the republic became a transcontinental nation,” according to the jury. “In short, in order to integrate the western half of the continent into the republic, the country had to undergo a radical transformation, a vast racial, social and political reordering that redefined the definition of citizenship and redefined relationships between government, industry and the people who created the modern United States.”
Presented by Columbia University Libraries, the award recognizes “scope, significance, depth of research and richness of interpretation” in historical works, according to UA-Fayetteville. More than 225 books were considered for the award,
which includes a $10,000 award for each author.
“I’ve been working on this on and off for 20-25 years,” and the book is an attempt to bring the creation of the American West — which has often been viewed as more “peripheral” — onto the “center stage” of American history, said West, who won the SEC Faculty Achievement Award and Arkansas Professor of the Year recognition from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and was a finalist for the Robert Foster Cherry Award for outstanding classroom teacher in the nation during his teaching career.
“It’s revealing of larger themes of American History, and it’s an extremely complicated story, both uplifting and horrifying.”
Particularly after the national trauma — and divisiveness — of the Civil War, westward expansion was a unifying force in the country, as Americans saw “the future was out there, in the West,” he said. “Of course, there’s a dark side to that,” as remaking the West also meant “dispossessing and destroying” Native Americans living on that land.
Acquiring and developing the West “made the U.S. modern,” he said. “The closer you look, the more you see it was a transformative part of the American story, and there’s no example in modern world history of a place that size being physically and environmentally ‘made over’ to the degree the American West was” in the second half of the 19th century.
The American West has long been a focus for West, who has written nine scholarly books and nearly 90 articles and essays on the subject, according to the university.
He’s won several awards for research, including the Caughey Prize from the Western Historical Association, the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians and the Ray Allen Billington Prize from the Organization of American Historians.
Part of “Continental Reckoning” divides fact from fiction in the West, exploding popular myths, including that the creation of the West was “a basic story,” he said.
“It’s highly complex, but enormously important,” because westward expansion was key in America’s becoming an economic superpower.
Through film, television and books, Americans have been fed an image of “rugged individualism” in the West’s cattle industry, and while that isn’t completely untrue — “those cowboys were very hardworking and tough” — the West was “corporatized,” he said. In ranching, mining and agriculture, hundreds of corporations — with stocks sold worldwide — dominated the West, so it was “big business.”
During his research, he was also “struck over and over again” by how crucial this period in the West was for scientific advancement, he said. “There were huge leaps forward in science — paleontology, geology, meteorology, and epidemiology — and so much of that was the result of work in the American West, a great lab of scientific investigation.”
West also hopes those living today take a lesson from the environmental results of the country’s great westward expansion.
“We’re at a time, now, in world history of massive climate change, and we’re clearly causing it,” he said. “Be careful, because we don’t know all the consequences, (as) there were huge consequences in environmental change due to the remaking of the West that were not anticipated.”
West and fellow award-winner Eisenberg — author of “Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast Asia” — will be honored Thursday during a ceremony at the Forum in New York City at Columbia University.
The Columbia University trustees created the Bancroft Prize in 1948 with a bequest from namesake historian Frederic Bancroft, according to UA-Fayetteville.
Each year, a provision is made for two annual prizes of equal rank to be awarded to the authors of distinguished works in either or both of the following categories: American History and Diplomacy.
“I am so pleased professor West has received this most prestigious prize and outstanding recognition for his groundbreaking new book,” Caree Banton, chair of UA-Fayetteville’s history department, said in a news release from the university.
“He is an exceptional researcher, writer and scholar, and his work provides critical insights into the American West and even more so into this country’s past in ways that help us create a better world for our future.”