PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

Abstract

It is always a pleasure for an author to be asked to introduce an additional edition of one of his works, in this case for William Goetzmann's distinguished American studies series. On this occasion my pleasure has been enhanced by the unusual circumstances of the reissue. The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience originally appeared in 1968, having been a doctoral dissertation that I submitted to the Department of American Studies at Yale the previous year. The book was in a tradition of American studies literature on the relationship between symbolic figures and images in America and the culture in which they had appeared. Shortly after the book appeared that sort of methodology became less compelling in academic circles, quantitative studies became more in vogue, and a genre of works that had their origin with Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land and R. W. B. Lewis' The American Adam became encapsulated in time. I would not like to think there was any causal relationship between the appearance of my book and the end of the genre, but the fact was that by the early 1970s American studies work of that sort was not being produced and The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience was out of print. One reviewer of the first edition had noted that I was attending Harvard Law School at the time of its appearance and surmised that I might "write no more." For a time I did not, and when my next book appeared, in 1976, it was in legal history and I was a law professor. Since then I have not done any more western history, although I have been fortunate enough to have a chance to apply some of the techniques I used in the first edition of The Eastern Establishment to some legal history topics. In my most recent book, for example, a cultural history of the Marshall Court, I revisit the writings of James Fenimore Cooper, whom I treat with a different