"At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the American West is a region of great views and great friction, vigorous economic expansion and equally vigorous social conflict. In Something in the Soil, Patricia Nelson Limerick continues the project she began with The Legacy of Conquest, traveling far outside the usual academic circles in order to bring past and present into a spirited encounter. Whether her topic is the rapid growth in the West today, the patent awfulness of most academic writing, the resurgent boom in Western gold mining, the unexamined - the increasingly ineffective - rituals of American environmentalists, or current struggles over the standing of the "Great White Men" of the frontier past, Limerick operates on the principle that history is an active presence in the West today - layers of collective memory that are, quite literally, "something in the soil." Her irreverence for conventional pieties coexists with her respect for the American Were's long history as a magnet for dreams of a better life."--Jacket.