In the 1990s, the historiographical field of American Western History was the stage of an intense debate about the significance of the history of the American West between the so-called "New Western History" and its adversaries. In that context, one of the ways used by the former to attack the latter was a rhetoric of suspicion and professional delegitimation which connected the new western historians to the allegedly dangerous ghosts of "post-modernism" and "deconstruction", for example - even if such accusations made little or no sense at all. Thus, it can be said that such rhetoric was an instrument in the combat for the domain of the social places or production of the history of the American West.
American historiography; New Western History; rhetoric of suspicion