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Ray Allen Billington - Americas Frontier Heritage

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Book:
Americas Frontier Heritage
Author:
Ray Allen Billington
Publisher:
University of New Mexico Press
Genre:
Books / History
Year:
1975
Rating:
3 / 5
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The hypothesis advanced in Frederick Jackson Turners famous 1893 essay, The Significance of the Frontier in American History, has been debated by three generations of scholars. The pioneering experience, Turner suggested, accounted for some of the distinctive characteristics of the American people: during three centuries of expansion their attitudes toward democracy, nationalism and individualism were altered, and they developed distinctively American traits, such as wastefulness, inventiveness, mobility, and a dozen more. After opening with a summary of the appearance, acceptance, and subsequent dismissal of the theory, the author carefully defines the frontier and reviews recent evidence on its political, social, and economic characterstics. He discusses the compulsion to migrate and examines other behavioral patterns and traits in his explanation of how and why pioneers moved west. His extensive bibliographic notes constitute a remarkable guide to the literature of many disciplines dealing with the frontier concept.

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title Americas Frontier Heritage Histories of the American Frontier - photo 1

title	:	America's Frontier Heritage Histories of the American Frontier
author	:	Billington, Ray Allen.
publisher	:	University of New Mexico
isbn10 \| asin	:	0826303102
print isbn13	:	9780826303103
ebook isbn13	:	9780585273594
language	:	English
subject	Frontier and pioneer life--United States, National characteristics, American.
publication date	:	1974
lcc	:	E179.5.B62 1974eb
ddc	:	978/.02
subject	:	Frontier and pioneer life--United States, National characteristics, American.

Page i

Ray Allen Billington

Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery

Page iii

America's Frontier Heritage

Ray Allen Billington

Histories of the American Frontier
Ray Allen Billington, General Editor
Howard R. Lamar, Coeditor

UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PRESS
Albuquerque

Page iv

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 66-13289

ISBN 0-8263-0310-2

Printed in the United States of America
Sixth printing, University
of New Mexico Press, 1991

Page v

Preface

If the hypothesis advanced by Frederick Jackson Turner in his famous 1893 essay on "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" is valid, its importance today is greater than at any time in the past. The pioneering experience, Professor Turner suggested, helped account for some of the distinctive characteristics of the American people; during three centuries of expansion their attitudes toward democracy and nationalism and individualism were altered, and they developed identifiable traits not shared in like degree by their European ancestors: wastefulness, inventiveness, mobility, and a dozen more. If these distinctions do exist, they should be known to the American people and the international community. In the contracted world of the post-World War II era, men and nations can live in harmony only if they recognize each other's similarities and differences. The misconception that mankind has been cast in a common mold and that the institutions of one nation can be transplanted unchanged to another with a different cultural heritage is as destructive of international tranquility as the equally false belief that variations in culture are irreconcilable. If peoples everywhere can recognize that other peoples must behave in differing ways world frictions will be lessened.

Since the frontier hypothesis was pronounced as onebut only oneexplanation of distinctive American behavioral patterns, it has endured an experience of overenthusiastic acceptance and one of un-

Page vi

justified rejection. Each did it harm. Until Turner's death in 1932 the thesis was almost universally viewed as the sole valid interpretation of the nation's history; students in many disciplines restudied the past and concluded that expansion had been responsible for shaping the thought and behavior and values of the people of the United States. During the 1930's and 1940's the thesis endured a series of attacks that were often as unreasonable as the overextravagant praise that it had inspired during the previous decades. More recently historians have entered into what one of them has called the "third generation of the frontier hypothesis." Their attitude is still one of doubt, but scholars in a variety of fields are increasingly showing a willingness to test aspects of the thesis, rather than accept or condemn it as a whole.

This book attempts not only to summarize their findings, but to reappraise the entire hypothesis in the light of modern research in both history and the social sciences. Its purpose is neither to praise nor attack Professor Turner's statement of that thesis; his name and his ideas seldom appear after the first chapter, which recounts the history of the theory that he evolved. Its concern is solely with the validity of the thesis, to the degree that that validity can be tested with tools available to today's historian. This approach would have been heartily endorsed by Professor Turner. "Each age," he wrote in his essay on "The Significance of History," ''writes the history of the past anew with reference to conditions uppermost in its own time." As a pioneer in popularizing the concept of relativism and as a trail breaker in the employment of interdisciplinary techniques, he would favor retesting every historical theory periodically with every technique that the world of scholarship could muster.

A word on my own methodology seems appropriate. My first task was to attempt to identify the attitudes and behavioral traits that were judged to be most distinctly "American" by visitors from overseas. This quest led to the reading of several hundred travel accounts, written largely during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with an eye always for the characteristics that were considered "different" by the authors. An attempt was made to select visitors who had included the frontier in their itineraries and who paid particular attention to the characteristics of the pioneers. The result was rewarding. Not only did a majority of the visitors agree on a number of traits that they viewed as distinctly American, but a sizable proportion believed that these were most strongly exhibited in the successive Wests. Thus they found Americans everywhere were wasteful, democratic, and inquisitive, but they

Page vii

found that Westerners were more wasteful, more democratic, and more inquisitive than their counterparts along the Atlantic seaboard. Moreover these traits were noted on each new frontier; travelers observed them among the pioneers who peopled the Trans-Appalachian country just after the Revolution, among the frontiersmen who conquered the Mississippi Valley backwoods a generation later, among the homesteaders who overran the Great Plains late in the nineteenth century. These findings suggested, but by no means proved, that some connection existed between identifiable characteristics of the American people and their pioneering heritage.

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