Review: Both Sides Now: Writing the Edges of the North American West, by Sheila McManus

Book Review| May 01 2023 Review: Both Sides Now: Writing the Edges of the North American West, by Sheila McManus Both Sides Now: Writing the Edges of the North American West. By Sheila McManus. (College Station, Texas A & M University Press, 2022. 224 pp.). Benjamin H. Johnson Benjamin H. Johnson Loyola University Chicago Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Pacific Historical Review (2023) 92 (2): 306–308. https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2023.92.2.306 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Benjamin H. Johnson; Review: Both Sides Now: Writing the Edges of the North American West, by Sheila McManus. Pacific Historical Review 1 May 2023; 92 (2): 306–308. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2023.92.2.306 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentPacific Historical Review Search In this slender yet substantive volume, Sheila McManus offers a historiographic account of recent scholarship on the Mexico-U.S. and western Canada-U.S. borders. McManus achieves the difficult feat of writing an account that is historiographically oriented yet rooted in the actual histories of these places, accessible yet rigorous, and even-handed in its description of scholarship but also helpfully proscriptive. “Borderlands have long memories,” the author proclaims in the book’s evocative first sentence, “they remember and reveal the messy, uneven, contested history of the constructed nature of the national spaces” (p. 1). In an introduction that traces the history of studying the regions that became international borderlands in the nineteenth century, McManus urges historians to “craft inclusive comparative frameworks” by examining the ways borderlands “retain their unique characteristics” and by focusing on the methodology of such studies (p. 3). The five body chapters that follow are both thematic and roughly chronological, serving... You do not currently have access to this content.