Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

An Open Field, Char Miller

Pomona Faculty Publications and Research

It should have been during a similarly punishing and mercurial moment in late twentieth-century San Antonio, enveloped in a "furious storm of rain, of hail, or of snow," that I initially encountered Richard White's seminal historiographical essay. Such a convergence of art, life, and weather pattern might have defied reality, but it would have made for a fabulous narrative opening. That said, like the norther's rush, his article, which I read shortly after its publication in the August 1985 issue of the Pacific Historical Review, blew me away.