The NYT has an interesting column today about historic Deadwood, SD headlined "The Mild, Mild West." Excerpt:
But if you talk to some historians and economists about Deadwood and the rest of the West, you get a much different picture from what's on television - or what's been taught in history classes.
These revisionists' history, unlike the one now fashionable in academia, is not a grim saga of settlers exploiting one another, annihilating natives and despoiling nature. Nor is it like the previously fashionable history depicting the settlers as heroic individualists who tamed the frontier by developing the great American virtue of self-reliance.
The Westerners in this history survived by learning to get along, as Terry Anderson and Peter Hill document in their new book, "The Not So Wild, Wild West." These economists, both at the PERC think tank in Montana, argue that their Western ancestors were usually neither heroic enough to make it on their own nor strong enough to take it away from others.
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