New Mexico Historical Review Volume 64 Number 2 Article 2 4-1-1989 The American West: From Frontier to Region Martin Ridge Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/nmhr Recommended Citation Ridge, Martin. "The American West: From Frontier to Region." New Mexico Historical Review 64, 2 (1989). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/nmhr/vol64/iss2/2 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by UNM Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in New Mexico Historical Review by an authorized editor of UNM Digital Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. The American West: From Frontier to Region MARTIN RIDGE We are fast approaching the centennial of the Bureau of the Census' 1890 declaration of the closing of the frontier. It would seem appro priate to mark that centennial by asking why and how American his torians became interested in the history of the American frontier, and why and how, in recent years, there has been increasing attention paid to the West as a region. And why studying the West as a region poses special problems. The history of the frontier and the regional West are not the same, but there is a significant intellectual overlay that warrants examination. A little more than a century ago the scholarly discipline of Amer ican history was in its formative stages. The tradition of gifted au thors-men like Francis Parkman, Brooks Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, Martin Ridge, Senior Research Associate and Director of Research at the Huntington Library, San Marino, California, and professor of history at the California Institute of Technology, served as editor of the Journal of American History for eleven years.