Download or read book An Essay on the myth of the American frontier written by Bernard K. Mundy and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 33 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Significance of the Western Myth in modern America written by Selina Schuster and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2013-09-16 with total page 20 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 2,0, University of Paderborn (Institut für Anglistik/Amerikanistik), course: Pro-Seminar 'The American Frontier', language: English, abstract: In this term paper I’m going to answer the question if the Western Myth and the idea of an American Frontier are still current topics in modern day America. The glorified myth of a frontier moving faster and faster into the unknown is deeply rooted in the heads of the American people, since the first settlers moved westwards, over hundred-fifty years ago. It had an enormous impact on America’s history and on its national identity. But can this idea of a frontier still be found today, or is it just a historically important, but today mostly unappealing episode in recent history books? Furthermore, I will try to find an answer where hints and connections to the myth of the Old West - with its cowboys, lonesome riders and sheriffs - can be found in modern American culture. Are those images of the wild, deserted West still topical and influential, and if so, where. In which parts of life and culture can they be found, or are the Old West and the Western Myth just outdated? I’m going to carry out my researches about this topic with the help of the books ‘The American frontier – Go West, young man’ by Prof. Dr. Michael Porsche, ‘The frontier in American History’ by Frederick Jackson Turner, ‘The Wild West: Myth and History’ by Alexander Emmerich and several internet sources to illustrate and prove my theses. At the end of this term paper I hope to be able to point out, in which parts of everyday life in modern America references to the myth of the Wild West and the American Frontier can be found and which significance they have.
Download or read book America s Frontier Culture written by Ray Allen Billington and published by Reveille Books. This book was released on 2003 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this little classic, first published in 1977, Ray A. Billington outlines the threecenturylong process of westering that forged the American characteristics of resourcefulness, individualism and democracy, and upward social mobility. "The American Frontiersman" looks at the mountain men of the fur trade who succumbed to the wilderness world in which they found themselves and in which they were forced to begin the climb upward to civilization once more. In "The Frontier and American Culture" the author suggests that although many backwoodsmen seceded from civilization, others made a heroic effort to perpetuate their culture. And in "Cowboys, Indians, and the Land of Promise" Billington reviews the worldwide myths of the American West--its violence and lawlessness on the one hand and its ripe abundance on the other.
Download or read book Americans Weren t the First to Live on the Frontier written by Jill Keppeler and published by Gareth Stevens Publishing LLLP. This book was released on 2019-07-15 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea of the American frontier means a lot to many Americans' images of themselves and their country. Everyone has heard stories or watched movies showing tough, brave settlers crossing the continent, daring harsh weather, hostile natives, and rough terrain to nobly "tame" the frontier and expand the United States. Is this image true to life? Young readers will get a wider perspective of the tales of the American frontier, including points of view often left out of history books and popular entertainment, and learn more about the real landscape of the West.
Download or read book The Frontier Experience and the American Dream written by David Mogen and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beyond the mountains that separated the English colonies from the Great Plains lay the frontier, which produced a set of images, attitudes, and assumptions that have shaped a peculiarly American literary heritage. The eighteen scholars represented here focus on the importance of frontier mythology to many American writers.
Download or read book The Significance Of The Frontier In American History written by Frederick Jackson Turner and published by . This book was released on 2021-02-08 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Behind institutions, behind constitutional forms and modifications, lie the vital forces that call these organs into life and shape them to meet changing conditions. The peculiarity of American institutions is, the fact that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people to the changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and in developing at each area of this progress out of the primitive economic and political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life. Said Calhoun in 1817, "We are great, and rapidly I was about to say fearfully growing!" So saying, he touched the distinguishing feature of American life. All peoples show development; the germ theory of politics has been sufficiently emphasized. In the case of most nations, however, the development has occurred in a limited area; and if the nation has expanded, it has met other growing peoples whom it has conquered. But in the case of the United States we have a different phenomenon.
Download or read book The Myth of the American Frontier written by Robin W. Winks and published by [Leicester, Eng.] : Leicester University Press. This book was released on 1971 with total page 50 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Regeneration Through Violence written by Richard Slotkin and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2024-01-23 with total page 816 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Book Award Finalist: A study of national myths, lore, and identity that “will interest all those concerned with American cultural history” (American Political Science Review). Winner of the American Historical Association’s Albert J. Beveridge Award for Best Book in American History In Regeneration Through Violence, the first of his trilogy on the mythology of the American West, historian and cultural critic Richard Slotkin demonstrates how the attitudes and traditions that shape American culture evolved from the social and psychological anxieties of European settlers struggling in a strange new world to claim the land and displace Native Americans. Using the popular literature of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries—including captivity narratives, the Daniel Boone tales, and the writings of Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Melville—Slotkin traces the full development of this myth. “Deserves the careful attention of everyone concerned with the history of American culture or literature. ”—Comparative Literature “Slotkin’s large aim is to understand what kind of national myths emerged from the American frontier experience. . . . [He] discusses at length the newcomers’ search for an understanding of their first years in the New World [and] emphasizes the myths that arose from the experiences of whites with Indians and with the land.” —Western American Literature
Download or read book The Other Frontier Women s Experiences on the American Frontier written by Romina Zeller and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2012-02-15 with total page 24 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2012 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 2,0, Ruhr-University of Bochum (Englisches Seminar), course: Frontier Culture, language: English, abstract: The American Frontier is one of the United States’ great myths that has shaped the whole nation’s perception of their world. Even though many scholars are puzzled by its meaning and the vague definition of the Frontier (West 1994, 115), it still remains a concept which “captured the American public’s imagination and [is] now deeply woven into the American consciousness” (Ridge 1991, 2). The Frontier immediately evokes images in everyone’s head – pictures of a vast and wild land that has been conquered and subjugated by man. Even Frederick Jackson Turner, one of the great historians of that time, called the Frontier “the meeting point between savagery and civilization” (Engler 2007, 415). This wilderness is mostly depicted by settlers moving over the mountains in their trail wagons and also strong and fearless cowboys facing the dangers and isolation of the Frontier. In history books, essays and many accounts of the American Frontier we find the glorified man (Hahn 2008, 149) who turned wilderness into the American nation. Of most of the ideas of the Frontier one important element has been denied or is missing – the pioneer woman. The experiences of all these women who were on the Frontier as well and were facing the wilderness are often denied or hardly mentioned. Female scholars bemoaned this obscured reality. Inspired by the feminist movement in the 20th century, women were eager to “recover their past” and historians tried to “place absent women in the westward movement” (Walsh 1995, 244). Therefore, this paper tries to find answers to the questions of what this male myth of the Frontier looks like, what the reasons for muting women’s experiences in frontier history were, and what the female role in this context was. It will also address one common element that can be found in many of the accounts of pioneer women – loneliness. It is to examine how loneliness was expressed, how these women coped with their loneliness and tried to overcome it. Then we will learn how women perceived violence and how they counteracted social disorder and describe women’s tasks as “missionaries of civilization”(Jeffrey 1983, 79). As the topic of this paper indicates we will take a look at “the other Frontier” and try to see it through the eyes of the pioneer women.
Download or read book The Trader on the American Frontier written by Howard Roberts Lamar and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 1977 with total page 66 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like the cowboy, the frontier trader has been so wrapped in myth that our understanding of who he was and what he did is largely shaped by stereotype: the Indian trader, for example - gunrunner, trader in slaves, and corrupter of the noble red man - or the mountain man, variously seen as romantic wilderness hero or degenerate white savage. Examining these and other myths, Lamar shows that early trade was, on the contrary, one of the first and most successful ways red men and white communicated, that traders were not snakes in America's western Eden but participants in a vigorous if exploitative trade system already in existence for generations, and already in existence for generations, and that until the Rocky Mountain fur trade bypassed the Indian, tribal ways deteriorated little and both Indian and trader found their "twilight civilization" an attractive, profitable - and exciting - way of life. The trader had to know and tolerate two worlds whereas the farmer who came after had no need of the Indian. His life meant adventure, often danger, but the trader, a hunter with strong mercantile instincts played a larger role than myth allows. As Lamar makes clear, his transition from lone scavenger to merchant-developer represents in microcosm the history of the frontier. This essay was originally presented in April 1976 at Texas A&M University as part of a symposium, "The American Frontier Reexamined," one of several Centennial Academic Assemblies held in honor of the university's hundredth year.
Download or read book The End of the Myth written by Greg Grandin and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE A new and eye-opening interpretation of the meaning of the frontier, from early westward expansion to Trump’s border wall. Ever since this nation’s inception, the idea of an open and ever-expanding frontier has been central to American identity. Symbolizing a future of endless promise, it was the foundation of the United States’ belief in itself as an exceptional nation – democratic, individualistic, forward-looking. Today, though, America hasa new symbol: the border wall. In The End of the Myth, acclaimed historian Greg Grandin explores the meaning of the frontier throughout the full sweep of U.S. history – from the American Revolution to the War of 1898, the New Deal to the election of 2016. For centuries, he shows, America’s constant expansion – fighting wars and opening markets – served as a “gate of escape,” helping to deflect domestic political and economic conflicts outward. But this deflection meant that the country’s problems, from racism to inequality, were never confronted directly. And now, the combined catastrophe of the 2008 financial meltdown and our unwinnable wars in the Middle East have slammed this gate shut, bringing political passions that had long been directed elsewhere back home. It is this new reality, Grandin says, that explains the rise of reactionary populism and racist nationalism, the extreme anger and polarization that catapulted Trump to the presidency. The border wall may or may not be built, but it will survive as a rallying point, an allegorical tombstone marking the end of American exceptionalism.
Download or read book Gunfighter Nation written by Richard Slotkin and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 868 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the ways in which the frontier myth influences American culture and politics, drawing on fiction, western films, and political writing
Download or read book The Frontier in American Culture written by Richard White and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1994-10-17 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Log cabins and wagon trains, cowboys and Indians, Buffalo Bill and General Custer. These and other frontier images pervade our lives, from fiction to films to advertising, where they attach themselves to products from pancake syrup to cologne, blue jeans to banks. Richard White and Patricia Limerick join their inimitable talents to explore our national preoccupation with this uniquely American image. Richard White examines the two most enduring stories of the frontier, both told in Chicago in 1893, the year of the Columbian Exposition. One was Frederick Jackson Turner's remarkably influential lecture, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History"; the other took place in William "Buffalo Bill" Cody's flamboyant extravaganza, "The Wild West." Turner recounted the peaceful settlement of an empty continent, a tale that placed Indians at the margins. Cody's story put Indians—and bloody battles—at center stage, and culminated with the Battle of the Little Bighorn, popularly known as "Custer's Last Stand." Seemingly contradictory, these two stories together reveal a complicated national identity. Patricia Limerick shows how the stories took on a life of their own in the twentieth century and were then reshaped by additional voices—those of Indians, Mexicans, African-Americans, and others, whose versions revisit the question of what it means to be an American. Generously illustrated, engagingly written, and peopled with such unforgettable characters as Sitting Bull, Captain Jack Crawford, and Annie Oakley, The Frontier in American Culture reminds us that despite the divisions and denials the western movement sparked, the image of the frontier unites us in surprising ways.
Download or read book The End of American Exceptionalism written by David M. Wrobel and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lucid and rewarding synthesis of cultural and western history. -- Richard W. Etulain, author of Writing Western History. Wrobel makes a fine contribution to the study of myth by analyzing the anxiety, or angst, Americans felt about the frontier in the half-century after 1890. This is an excellent book on a big subject, executed with much skill. -- Western Historical Quarterly. Direct, admirably brief, and crisply written. -- Journal of American History.
Download or read book The American Frontier Thesis Attack and Defense written by Ray Allen Billington and published by Washington : American Historical Association. This book was released on 1971 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book An Analysis of Frederick Jackson Turner s The Significance of the Frontier in American History written by Joanna Dee Das and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 essay on the history of the United States remains one of the most famous and influential works in the American canon. That is a testament to Turner's powers of creative synthesis; in a few short pages, he succeeded in redefining the way in which whole generations of Americans understood the manner in which their country was shaped, and their own character moulded, by the frontier experience. It is largely thanks to Turner's influence that the idea of America as the home of a sturdily independent people – one prepared, ultimately, to obtain justice for themselves if they could not find it elsewhere – was born. The impact of these ideas can still be felt today: in many Americans' suspicion of "big government," in their attachment to guns – even in Star Trek's vision of space as "the final frontier." Turner's thesis may now be criticised as limited (in its exclusion of women) and over-stated (in its focus on the western frontier). That it redefined an issue in a highly impactful way – and that it did so exceptionally eloquently – cannot be doubted.
Download or read book The Fatal Environment written by Richard Slotkin and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2024-01-23 with total page 994 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A two-time National Book Award finalist’s “ambitious and provocative” look at Custer’s Last Stand, capitalism, and the rise of the cowboys-and-Indians legend (The New York Review of Books). In The Fatal Environment, historian Richard Slotkin demonstrates how the myth of frontier expansion and subjugation of Native Americans helped justify the course of America’s rise to wealth and power. Using Custer’s Last Stand as a metaphor for what Americans feared might happen if the frontier should be closed and the “savage” element be permitted to dominate the “civilized,” Slotkin shows the emergence by 1890 of a mythos redefined to help Americans respond to the confusion and strife of industrialization and imperial expansion. “A clearly written, challenging and provocative work that should prove enormously valuable to serious students of American history.” —The New York Times “[An] arresting hypothesis.” —Henry Nash Smith, American Historical Review
