Provincializing Pacific History: Hubert Howe Bancroft’s History Company, the Historical Profession, and the Unmaking of the Pacific Coast

This poster will advance one of the primary historiographic arguments of my dissertation graphically by juxtaposing the methods and conclusions of the popular historian Hubert Howe Bancroft and his academic counterpart Frederick Jackson Turner. I argue that Bancroft, not Turner, makes a more sensible starting point for western U.S. history and that giving the historiography of that subfield a new starting place reorients the century of scholarship that has followed the two rough contemporaries. Beyond speaking to specialists in western history, however, I hope to suggest to professional historians in general how and why we have chosen to identify particular intellectual figures in the past as our intellectual forebears while ignoring others, and what that says about our profession, its assumptions and values.

Bancroft began his History Company (ca. 1870-1900) as a for-profit history factory for the express purpose of writing the history of the Pacific Coast. He eventually wrote a set of classics in the then-nonexistent genre of western history, a subfield that has recently struggled to replace Turner’s frontier—an imagined line between civilization and savagery that ostensibly marched across the American West, churning out agricultural and democratic bounty in its wake—with a New Western history, locally contingent, transnational, and always contested. Bancroft predated Turner’s frontier thesis, and so it ought not to surprise—and yet it still does—that he moved in the opposite direction, writing his way inland from the Pacific Coast. More importantly, the company’s historical gaze—and its researchers—spanned from Alaska to the Central Valley of Mexico. At the outset, the History Company set out to write the transnational history of the Pacific Coast as a contested region of fictional, always-shifting borders and contested land claims—often relying on personal historical narratives from dispossessed citizens who had not left when their country’s flag had as primary sources.

This poster will compare Bancroft and Turner’s assumptions about historical scholarship, their research methods, and their respective legacies—public and academic. The comparison lends itself to graphic representation: Bancroft infamously wrote hulking tomes while Turner never wrote a single book. Bancroft expended nine volumes California alone while Turner purported to explain the entire “frontier” in twenty-three pages. Bancroft accomplished his monumental task by employing research assistants who also worked as his ghostwriters, a system that put him knowingly at odds with the nascent standards of the historical profession that were emerging from Herbert Baxter Adam’s seminar at Johns Hopkins University. While the version of North American history that Bancroft produced looks more like what scholars have spent the last decade championing, Turner’s intellectual pedigree, qualifications, and more familiar research and writing methods mark him as a professional, and so historians have fixated on his legacy while ignoring his predecessor. Western historians have now spent over two decades attempting to supplant Turner with an intellectual endeavor strikingly close to Bancroft’s without seeing the connections between the new west and Bancroft’s very old west.