The new western historians recast the study of American frontier history by focusing on race, class, gender, and environment in the trans-Mississippi West.
The movement is best known through the work of Patricia Nelson Limerick, Richard White, William Cronon, and Donald Worster.
By focusing on race, class, gender, environment, they added to the work of older Borderlands scholars of Hispanic studies, furthered the understanding of Native Americans in the United States and frontier women, and worked the fertile ground of twentieth-century western history.
These “old” western historians had addressed multiethnic and environmental issues on the Colonial, trans-Appalachian, and trans-Mississippi frontiers.
Although they left much work undone, these Progressives planted the fields the new western historians later harvested.