Professional historians will surely agree that the writing of history is itself an act of historical consequence. If history is, as Carl Becker argues, “the artificial extension of the social memory,” and if social identity and behavior depend in part on memory, then created versions of the past are a serious matter. They can have decisive effects on the present. Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land is an exemplary form of a creative history which extends, refines, and enlightens social memory. And it does so in a particularly significant way, by pioneering a new area for study, a new territory in the landscape of memory. It is the area of a general cultural consciousness—“the region of culture,” as Leo Marx puts it, “where literature, general ideas, and certain products of the collective imagination—we may call them ‘cultural symbols’— meet.” Henry Nash Smith himself describes as his aim to trace “the impact of the West, the vacant continent beyond the frontier, on the consciousness of Americans.” His territory is consciousness in relation to a complex historical actuality, the American West.