Historian Patricia Limerick: We can’t change history, but we can change how we understand it

Patricia Limerick helped start a revolution in how historians think and write about the American West. In Seattle Tuesday, she said she’s been dismayed to see how often an understanding of history is missing as we struggle with racism, terrorism, climate change and other issues that cry out for a more complete understanding of our past. 

The University of Colorado historian is best-known for her 1987 book, “The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West,” for which she was both vilified for destroying myths of the West and praised for presenting a history in which Indians, Asians and Hispanics figured prominently.

In a talk at the University of Washington, she addressed a statement often voiced by critics of her work: “You can’t change history.” 

History doesn’t change, but a better understanding of it can change a person. And she said history is relevant to the problems we face today because good hindsight can lead to better foresight.

“When amnesia strikes an individual,” she said, “that is not an occasion for celebration. People don’t say, ‘How great your life must be, every second is fresh, so open and full of opportunities.’ Instead, you rush them to the neurologist. And when a society has amnesia, that’s just as bad, that’s just as dire, and so I’ve said and I still believe, you rush them to an historian.” ...