Kent's Place

2005-12-06T19:05:00.002-08:00

I posted comments to Audrey and Brian’s bloggs

2005-12-06T19:05:00.001-08:00

I posted comments to Audrey and Brian’s bloggs

2005-12-06T19:05:00.000-08:00

I posted comments to Audrey and Brian’s bloggs

2005-12-04T13:21:00.000-08:00

Week 12 Devil’s Bargain

I promise, that I will never travel to any western state unless I plan on becoming a full-time life-long resident; I promise that I will never ski in Utah, trek to Brice canyon, the Black Hills, or the lights of Las Vegas…there! That should keep Hal K. Rothman satisfied. At least that’s what one must conclude after reading the pages of Devil’s Bargain, authored by the fore mentioned.

Speaking as a former member of the hospitality industry, I must categorize Rothman’s work as one of the harshest criticisms of modern tourism that has ever passed beneath my nose.

He begins with a solid premise: Tourism is a flawed concept. A community beckons other non-native people to come and experience a unique environment. This uniqueness is the selling point. The more non-natives who come to experience it the better. As time passes and more non-natives pass through the environment, a struggle develops to keep the environment unique, and diversify its attraction(s) so that more non-natives might be drawn in. And in the conduct of this struggle, the original community’s character is inevitably altered, thereby adulterating the environment’s original uniqueness.

It’s a very interesting concept, that got me to thinking of the frontier concept. Rothman talks about seasonal skiing resorts, and the construction of vacation home properties. In a typical seasonal tourism destination, there comes a time, when the non-natives go home, and the original community can restore itself with a period of normal life, until the next season begins. But as the lust for non-native dollars grows, this window is squeezed closed; ‘out of season’ events are developed, non-natives build germinate dwellings, and alternate attractions are hyped….thus the original natives find themselves facing a frontier associated with a moving frontier based on time, rather than place.

Mr. Rothman reminds me of a whimpering 5 year old standing ankle deep in a rising tide which has just swamped his sand-castle. Economic forces will shift only in ways that are compliant with the desires of community at large. While tourism in the west has unmade much, it has so because we wanted it to. We wanted ski resorts, and road side attractions, and a modern Sodom and Gomorrah, and bemoaning the fate of those crushed under the wheels of this progress is not an occupation with any great future.

2005-11-27T14:08:00.000-08:00

Week 11 Cadillac Desert

Feeling way to sick to write intelligently folks, but here goes.

In Marc Reisner’s work Cadillac Desert, we find an interesting evaluation of how arid territory in the American West was set-up. In a nutshell, Reisner’s argument is that when confronted with a desert, America’s impulse was to change it. This was change was intended to make the desert productive. To do this, would require water, and lots of it. So the Colorado River was co-opted, as the most available source. This seemed to present no issues in the early 20th Century, but as demands for water increased, the bald spots of the arrangement became evident. The Colorado was a fixed resource for water and electricity, while the demands on it were open-ended. As this imbalance grew, so did environmental problems associated with it; not least of which was the river flowed in one part of the country while its water was consumed elsewhere. This pitted states and agendas at odds.

The need to make the desert bloom is part of a larger American imperative to reorder the land in ways and appearance that is consistent with traditional agricultural forms. The same drive to push aside the Native Americans also resulted in the Colorado being sucked dry. There is just a built-in revulsion to seeing land in fallow. Whether this stems from the capitalist need for profit, a European base reverence for the power of land, or some combination of the two isn’t nearly as important as recognition of its influence.

2005-11-20T15:07:00.000-08:00

Week 10: Roy Baker Take 2

Spent most of last weekend and all of this one, trying to find some meaningful materials to contribute to the Baker Blog. There were a few interesting books at the Library of Congress, but they didn’t appear to have anything about the military-civilian relationship; which is the angle I wanted to play up. The local libraries seemed to have even less. I managed to find a few odds and ends on Jstore and the Center for Military History, but as a whole, I really struggled with this. I once considered myself to be a pretty fair researcher…but in the last two weeks have concluded otherwise.

I enrolled in 711 next semester, and thank goodness. This experience has taught me I need nuts and bolts instruction on how to survive in the world of 21st Century researching..and fast.

2005-11-12T14:49:00.000-08:00

Week 10 Mexicans and Native Americans

One post for both books.

In Philip J. Deloria’s Indians in Unexpected Places, we find a number of interesting themes, the first of which deals with the ghost shirt rebellion. In this essay Deloria relates white reactions to this event as being centered on the term ‘outbreak’. As used by whites of that period, it has relation to the field of epidemiology than anything else, and tells us much about white attitudes towards Native Americans. The term outbreak describes an event wherein a disease is unleashed. A disease that nobody wants, and which must be stamped out before it can affect the whole. The conclusion here is that whites saw the ghost shirts as dissonant element on the reservation, which had to be silenced before their dogma could spread, and unsettle the whole of the Indian race, which had only recently been fully/formally separated from their traditional life.

When white society had been separated from its traditional life, by the closing of the frontier, the Chicago exposition had come in and pointed the way to a new direction: technology, progress, and imperialism. Native Americans had no such pointer. Their new life on the reservation had the look, feel, and reality, of a dead-end. With no apparent future, Indians accepted spiritual vision of returning past glories. The white nation, subject to generations of stereotyping, never quite grasped this and thus set the sage of the unhappy resolution of the doomed revolt.

The essays in this book, paint a picture of a race struggling between two extremes. At one end, the Native Americans had worked to shed the stereotypes that have trapped in the role of historical enactors for generations. Starting with Bill Cody’s Wild West shows and on through movies and television, Indians have been seen as primitive, violent, and obstructive. While their sovereignty has grown, this albatross has dogged every effort at progress into full membership of the 20th Century’s social/economic contract.

At the other extreme, we see Native Americans as adherents to the Luddite school of social philosophy. This view of the world, originated by Charles Ludd during an early 19th Century revolt in Britain, rejects modern technology for being a corrupting influence on human behavior. Native American Luddites see full membership of the 20th Century’s social/economic contract and the proliferation of their besieged culture as being mutually exclusive.

This struggle began when white men first appeared in North America…so it is nothing new, but the quickening pace of the 20th Century and the siren’s song of pop culture have deepened the divide, and left an Indian Nation at a crossroad.

In Becoming Mexican American, George Sanchez relates the experience of the Mexican Latino nation in terms of cultural adoption. For in his mind, the meat of the story is not to be found in community culture or in assimilation, but in the journey between the two, and the character of those who arrive at the destination.

Like Native Americans, Mexicans pre-dated the United States in many parts of the west, and also found it difficult to obtain a full membership in the social contract. Unlike the Native Americans, Mexicans continued to immigrate into the US despite this cultural bias. Unlike the Native Americans, Mexicans sought/were allowed to seek a greater degree of assimilation. The cost for residency and assimilation was a new identity…that of a Mexican-American.

As the name implies, the identity was divided; designed to function on both sides of the cultural divide. And with any divided entity, it functions with less than one dedicated wholly to one side or the other. That Mexicans were ready to assume this new identity with all its advantages and disadvantages tells us much of their motivation and determination to hold onto some of each.

2005-11-08T18:00:00.000-08:00

I commented on Marty's Blog
Ben's post

2005-11-06T10:53:00.000-08:00

Week 9: Print the Legend: Photography in the American West
By Martha A. Sandweiss

While belly-deep in his Gilded Age class, Dr Hawkes dropped a pearl in my lap. He said that changes in transportation and communication will translate to a much larger social impact. In Nineteenth-century American this was true for railroads, steamboats, and telegraph, it can also surely be said to have been true to the development and advancement of photography. For in these images, as never before, the viewer had the potential for a virtual presence at the scene.

For Americans, according to Martha Sandweiss, the societal impact of photography was the beginning of a long-term love-affair with the American west and the events and persons who populated it. It was not a relationship based on reality. The nation was looking for images of the west that confirmed their perceptions of what the land was. In panoramas, based on daguerreotypes taken by early explorers, artists wrought depictions that shared many characterizes with European landscape paintings of the Romanticism period. In these images nature and the land were a sprawling, untamed, powerful presence, and the white nation as the intrepid David, bending his sling with certain intent.

In the years that followed the civil war, western photographers began to assume a more proactive role. Funded by the federal government, or interested private concerns, these men were, due to technological advances in their craft, was now able to directly communicate with a much larger audience and sought to be more proactive in the composition of their subject matter. The effect of this new attitude varied with the desire of the photographer’s employers. The federal government was interested in cataloging resources, railroads were trying to inspire viewers to travel (via their rolling stock) and see what was in the pictures, land speculators were trying to entice settlers, and publishers were trying to sell books full of dreamy pictures of an idealized west.

And nor was it about landscapes only. It was also about the people who lived there. Images of cowboys, gunfighters, bandits, and especially Indians, were as much a part of the western photographic legend as any vista ever captured. Like the land, these men and women symbolized the character that easterners so cherished. To look into the eyes of a cowboy was to see the distillation of frontier trials. But it was in the images of Native Americans that photographers were to find their most compelling subject. By the 1880’s it was becoming very clear that the plains Indians were to be speedily converted from their traditional lifestyle to that of the reservation/civilized ilk. This made those still living some variation of the traditional lifestyle symbolic of a vanishing way of life, which aroused the sentimentality and interest of the white nation. Thus were the roots of the’Noble Savage’ laid, thus was the desire for photographs of this vanishing breed steeled. Ironically, this trend did nothing to stop whites from finishing what they had begun during the colonial period: The subjugation of the entire race.

Methinks there is scarcely a species more pleasing than that which affirms what we already hold. This attitude would have dominated the viewing public as it gazed upon images of the American West in 1870, 1970, and all the intervening years. An artistic element would find its way into the mix over time, but as a whole, once Americans could see the west, they began believe it; that the former was tailored to fit the latter was of little consequence or interest.

2005-10-30T16:19:00.000-08:00

Week 8: Women and Gender in the American West

In this week’s readings we tackle the always fascinating question of gender. The main work of interest is a ponderous volume entitled Women and Gender in the American West, edited by Irwin and Brooks. Most works on gender seems to come in two acts. The first of which basically tells the reader ‘every thing you’ve ever known is wrong’; the second says ‘behold the new landscape’. In this way, gender historians properly adjust the landscape to include their research and interpretations. Irwin and Brooks are no exception.

There is plenty of debunking here, from the quantity of women in the west, to the numbers of unmarried and the ill-conceived stereotypes that have typified both categories. The central theme of gender landscape adjustment comes down to power. In a stereotypical view of western women, all power resides with men, except for a few Annie Oakley types. Irwin and Brook’s assembled essays make the case that the balance of power was much more complex. From Mormon divorce property rights, to the struggle for suffrage at the state level, women of the west sought influence and agency in a variety of unconventional ways.

The argument can be made that this unconventional approach was due to the transition from one geographic area to another, but this is only part of the answer. The truth is that the unique character of gender roles and the advanced position of women in the west are due to the environmental needs to communities in that region.

2005-10-25T17:30:00.000-07:00

I commented on Brian and Ray

2005-10-24T09:12:00.000-07:00

Week 7: Colony and Empire

Historian Willliam Williamson is famous for arguing that the United States was founded as an empire and that every activity before 1898 represented the North American expression, and everything that happened after the internaltional phase. This imperial mindset was predicated on the notion that the express route to American dominance and prestige would be reached by stoking American economic power via integration of new territory, markets, and resources. And this imperial drive constitutes the true nature of the American character.

William Robbin’s take on the transformation of the West via Capitalism, is not quite as radical as Williamson’s, but not by much. Robbins depicts the post civil war captains of industry as viewing the old west as typified by Indians, buffalo, and a blank horizon, and the new west as being all about railroads, cattle, mining, commercial farming…and above all: profits. These captains saw the old and the new as being mutally exclusive, and were determined to supplant the old, and in so doing, extract profits.

To do this, would require transportation, capital,a nd benign federal authority. All of these were present, but profit and problems would result. After the civil war, a massive speculation in railroad investiment translated into several decades of extensive railroad construction. This made possible a more complete form of east/west commercial interaction. It meant railroads had a large defacto influence on how/where settlement and commercial activity occurred. This influence was not always employed constructively or for the greatest good. It also meant that fluctuations in railroad fortunes would ripple dangerously through the communities they served.

Northern Banks, particulary those in New York City, were quite prepared to pump investiment capital, both directly and via their networks of subsidiaries, into western ventures. But with so much capital coming from one place, bank failures/stock market downturns would be transmitted to the leaf level, where endusers had the fewest options for enduring trouble.

Robbins tells us tha the federal government excercised an extraordinary amount of power over affaris in the west. This power was used to facilitate the gowth. This was done via supports for mineral development, transportation construction, expanded settlement, and management of resources. The big problem was the government had little experience doing this, and was conducting policymaking operations from a great distance. This meant frequent missteps.

Robbins tells us that in any economic conversion there are going to be winners and losers. Clearly the Indians, buffalo, and the open range lost out as the new west replaced the old, but Robbins arugues that the new west fared or marginally better, due to it’s position at the tailend of multiple networks who performance the west could little influence. From land use policy, to silver price supports, to railroad schedules, to wall street executive confidence, influence traveled one-way.

2005-10-18T17:02:00.000-07:00

Commented on Audrey and Ben

2005-10-16T10:54:00.000-07:00

Week 6: The way to the West

Well my friends, today we take time out of our Roy Baker ruminations to contemplate the writings contained in Elliott West’s book, The Way to the West. The central theme of these collected essays all seem to point out one reality: life on the central plains was no picnic, that attempts to make it more manageable and to adapt to changing conditions only made matters worse, and that the only thing we’ve found more satisfying than surviving such trials is telling the world about it via popular culture.

When white men began moving out onto the central plains in the 1850’s from the west, south, and east, their reasons for coming might have varied, but the effect on Native American was the same: dislocation. Wherever white men went Indians had to go. Thusly pressed, displaced Native Americans began to crowd into territory that heretofore had been home-range to other tribes. This exacerbated rivalries and increased the strain on the land which had barely been able to support a more traditional balance.

While it may not be very glamours to say so, the Windmill was a principle tool in the winning of the west. This mechanism facilitated the pumping of ground water to the surface. Water is the key commodity on the arid plains. Where it is found, grass, animals, and people can flourish. Indians lacked this ability to procure waer via the windmill, and were therefore forced to live in areas where surface water occurred naturally. This brought them into direct competition with Bison and the livestock of white men.

The Bison were not in a position to compete with anybody. The case is made that their population was in steady decline during the second score of the Nineteenth-Century. By their physiology, these animals required large quantities of forage. And as this commodity grew scarce, the buffalo were driven into smaller and smaller ranges where Indian horses and white cattle/sheep/oxen/horses were already stretching the land beyond its limits. One must also contemplate whether the Bison’s decline was also due to the ‘mini ice-age’ that occurred between the Fifteenth-Century to the Eighteenth-Century timeframe. This condition may well have contributed to the scarcity of forage on the open plains, which drove buffalo into areas where the grass was greener, but there were more mouths depending on it.

Aside from the windmill, the family unit might also be considered a basic tool for winning the west. As a support network, and a source of labor and knowledge, as a mechanism for raising child, the family had few equals. The Native American family unit, as an institution, was as strong as its white counterpart at the beginning of the Nineteenth-Century…devasted by its end. What happened? The essayists in this volume argue that disease, alcoholism, societal decay, and wars with whites and other tribes, weakened the family unit beyond its capacity to absorb. This effect, was the greatest factor in the ‘winning of the west’.

Country music singer Tim McGraw has a song called ‘I guess that’s just the Cowboy in Me’. In it we’re told that the ‘urge to run, the restlessness, the heart of stone we sometimes get…the things we’ve done for foolish pride, the we that’s never satisfied...’ constitute ‘the Cowboy in us all’. Lordy, do we like hearing that; the notion of stubborn individualism is at the heart of the traditional western history. It is something that we have yearned for since industrialization necessitated the homogenization of our society. It is the reason why we connect so well with the West. And the fact that this character is largely a matter of myth is of little account.

2005-10-12T17:57:00.000-07:00

See my posts on
Stephen and David

2005-10-12T04:57:00.000-07:00

Week 5: Roy Baker

The story of Roy Baker makes one thing clear: All of the action and brains were in Cheyenne. Kate, Pearl, and the other key players from town appear to be in possession of the greatest intelligence. These smart people seem intent on using this intelligence for protecting their businesses, reputations, and livelihoods. The soldiers of the 17th seem just as determined to cover themselves, but are less skilled in doing so. Their efforts come-off more as blanket denials then reasoned argument.

There’s a lot going on in this disposition. The panel seems to go in several directions as it searches for a motive. Once it settles on Parkison as the killer and the conspiracy to steal guns and dessert as the motive, the panel stops asking questions about any other subject.

One wonders whether the panel wasn’t eager to see this matter resolved as a simple murder with no greater complication than a dissertation plot. Would Cheyenne have benefited from a murder scandal that damaged the army’s reputation? Not at all, the army was a principle source of revenue for the town. If the Baker inquest had grown into a larger inquiry, the army might have discovered the shabby state of the 17th. Such a discovery might have resulted in the closing of the base or the tightening of discipline there…which would have reduced the flow of dollars into the town.

So, like the Warren Commission, the Baker Inquest had every reason to find that a lone gunman was responsible for the crime, not so much because that was how it was, but because that’s what they wanted to find. There is however good reason to suspect there were more peas in the pod.

2005-10-04T18:01:00.000-07:00

I commented
John's & Brian's Blogs

2005-10-04T17:35:00.000-07:00

What is quality History?

Since class, I have been pondering Dr Petrik’s rhetorical question: What makes for good history. I can’t offer much opposition to the attributes we came up with…but I would add the following. All history is composed of two basic elements: historical facts and interpretation. These components sit at the poles of a continuum. Every historical work occupies a single spot on this continuum. To my mind, good academic history must be more factual and less interpretive, while good popular history should be in the inverse.

The reason for this is that, readers of academic history can draw their own conclusions and need far less interpretation to gleam the author’s central argument; while readers of popular history want something more readable, that is more forthcoming with fully fledged interpretive conclusions.

2005-10-02T14:30:00.000-07:00

Week 4: Roaring Camp by Susan Lee Johnson

When white men came to Virginia in the seventeenth-century, they were filled with ambition. They found plenty of land, and potential for profiting from it. All they lacked was labor. Then eventual solution for this was slavery. When white men rushed into California in the late 1840’s, in response to the gold strikes, the same factors were in play, and the same result occurred. Which is not to say that chattel slavery enable the fortunes that came out of the gold rush, but rather that a socio-economics system was developed which suppressed the many in virtual servitude to the cause of enriching the few….This, in a nutshell, is the central argument of Johnson’s book.

She remarks on the historical biase which has characterized coverage of the period; latin America sent an enormous # of settlers into the gould fields of southern California, yet this facet of the subject has been largely ignored by traditional accounts. Attention seems more focused on the northern gold fields, and the social/economic structure of the gold rush there.

Johnson’s vision of the gold rush is one where Lations move north, Whites move west, & Chinese moved east. They all met in California, and this transient character of the landscape spurred new social norms had to be formed. More powerful elements in this demographic hodge-podge scrambled to assert their lofty position over less affluent quarters. This stratification was particularly evident in contests that involved a field of mixed ethnicity. Gender-based roles and influences were modified to accomdate the lack of women, especially in the early years of the rush.

Johnson’s work points out the irony of the gold rush in that most of the people who went west and got rich did not do so digging for gold, but rather from providing domestic services for those who did. This eventuality was brought about by the fact that when the rush began, the supporting infrastructure of California was so meager, that the real opporutinies lay in providing the foundations of Maslow’s pyramid. Miners also engaged in some rather base social entertainments; how much of this was due to the absence of their women should spur considerable discussion tomorrow night!

Gold appears to have a unique place in the human mind. Amoung minerals, it posseses the greatest ability to warp normal perceptions and mores. In the case of California, it raised a large and diverse community in about the amount of time it takes to make a good bottle of Bordeaux. Like the wine, gold creates character in California; this character lacked a smooth full bodies taste, but it sure had a kick to it.

2005-10-01T13:34:00.000-07:00

Week 5: Murder in Tombstone by Steven Lubet

Western history is an odd duck. It seems to focus quite a bit of attention on single incidents that fit out collective perceptions about the west, and not to bother with anything else. We remember George Custer and the 7th’s engagement at the Little Bighorn because it’s about cowboys and Indians; and we remember gunfight at the O.K. corral, because it’s about a shootout between outlaws and lawmen. Yet the details elude the popular mind. Is this because they are unknown? Or is it because we fear that such revelations might adulate a good story and/or blur the line between good and evil?

In this week’s book, Steven Lubet seems far less concerned with such weighty subjects and far more concerned with relating how the criminal justice system worked in the west. His selection of such a high-profile case serves mostly as a mechanism for grabbing the reader’s attention…and a very effective mechanism at that.

Lubet uses the coroner’s inquest, to raise several points not in harmony with the traditional story of the gunfight: The Earps fired first, The Earps were hoping to provoke their opponents into a shootout, Tom McLaury was unarmed when the shooting started, and Doc Holliday had no business being there at all. All of this led to the trial which dominates the work.

Lubet also makes the reader aware of the backdrop against this affair was taking place. Vast amounts of money were being made in Arizona off the silver mining industry, and Tombstone was one of the state’s boomtowns. Whenever there is a great deal of money being made quickly in one place, there will always be parties jostling for their share and for control of the rest. The Earps were friendly with the local Republican machine while the Cowboys were in with the Democrats. How much competition this generated is hard to gage, but Lubet does make the case the Clantons/McLaurys and Earps were on different sides of the fence, which was bound to bring them into conflict.

The trial of Wyatt Earp set out to answer the question left for it by the coroner’s inquest: Had the Earps committed a crime when they gunned down the Cowboys? The inquest had rendered some strong evidence that they had. County Sheriff Behan had testified that the Earps sought the fight. Other witnesses had testified that Doc Holliday had fired first. During the trial though, this testimony was weakened by good cross-examination and prosecutorial miscues. The judge in the case also seemed to have an anti Cowboy attitude.

Far more interesting than he 30 second gunfight was the process by which the environment concluded that Wyatt Earp was not going to be punished for it. The inquest raised questions, but they could not stand the glare of a trial which was disposed to give the Earps the benefit of the doubt, evidence/testimony that bore the stamp of environmental rivalries, a clever defense, unstable victims, and prosecutorial missteps.

2005-09-27T18:14:00.000-07:00

I logged comments with
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And with
Steve

2005-09-25T11:20:00.000-07:00

Week 3: The Journals of Lewis and Clark

Just a short post on this one.

Reading the journals of Lewis and Clark, one detects none of the rumored animosity between the two that has been hinted at from time to time. Rather, the two dissimilar gentlemen appear to have had respect for each other. Respect based on their mutual dedication to the success of the expedition. which overrode any problems rising form their different backgrounds.

The journals give a powerful indication that the expedition was all about Native Americans. There are ten times as a many references to Indians encounters as there is scientific observation. This indicates that the expedition’s need for Indian assistance and guidance was far greater than Hollywood would have us believe; and the diplomatic aspect of Lewis and Clark’s mission was of great significance.

2005-09-24T10:57:00.000-07:00

Week 3: One Vast Winter Count by Collin G. Calloway

After fours years, and nine graduate history classes, you’d think that all of my Saturday matinee concepts of Native American history would have been shattered by now, but after reading through One Vast Winter Count, by Collin G. Calloway, I must conclude that I still have a ways to go. Calloway portrays a Native American society which differed from white colonial society only in its lack of industrial/scientific technological advancements; a society whose lifestyle was shaped by this lack; and a society caught amid the agendas of the several competing agendas of the imperial European powers and their colonial progeny. Calloway makes the case that these factors, working in tandem, brought about the demise of traditional Native American society.

One of the greatest eye-openers for me thus this term has been the degree to which Native American traded with each other. Calloway describes a network of tribes and regions that enabled the member entities to secure raw materials, foodstuffs, manufactured goods.

And there was war. As horses were introduced by the Europeans, and the mini ice age dragged on, Indians were far more able to move across the land and had far more reasons to do so. As this movement occurred, nations were brought into conflict over land and resources. Firearms, introduced by European traders, allowed nations who possessed them to dominate and ran up the body count.

These twin forces of trade and war necessitated a complex diplomatic regimen. Here the Native Americans employed their great verbal and negotiating skills to keep the peace. It was a peace of a different sort, for as Calloway says “For Indian people, peace meant more than a lack of conflict, or ending hostilities: it was a state of being that ‘required a positive assumption of moral duties.’” (Page 237)

Needless to say, this was not a vision white man shared. This lack of commonality between whites and Indians, doomed hopes of a lasting diplomatic solution to white/Indian conflict. The diplomatic situation was symptomatic of the larger conflict. Whites failed to grasp Native American society’s sovereignty and viability, as a result rarely hesitated to run roughshod over Indian concerns in pursuit of their ambitions.

Decimated by contagion, and the resulting social decay; divided by traditional rivalries and a lack of consensus over how to respond to grown white pressure; and weakened, morally and economically, by the undermining of their trade network, Native Americans had every reason to face the Nineteenth-Century with foreboding.

2005-09-19T04:57:00.000-07:00

I posted a comment on
Marty's Blog

2005-09-17T14:22:00.000-07:00

I posted a comment on
Stephen T. Jones blog

2005-09-17T13:55:00.000-07:00

Week 2: The Frontier in American History, by Fredrick Jackson Turner

There are times when the strike of hammer against the string isn’t nearly as significant as the sound it makes, and the ovation that is raised when the sound leaves the piano and reaches the ears of a primed audience. So it might be said of Frederick Jackson Turner’s work, The Frontier in American History, for the impact of this volume carried far beyond it’s publication in the 1890’s. The question is: Why? Why did the work strike such a chord with the public when it was published? The answer is that Turner’s work provided an answer that had been nagging at the American consciousness; the question of being, why is our nation no longer the entity our fathers knew?

American of the late Nineteenth-Century was plunging in the industrial revolution full bore. This had reshaped the economic and social landscape. A generation was leaving the farm to live in the city where steady work could be found; strange immigrants were flooding into urban centers to compete for jobs and alter the landscape with their alien ways; The workforce increasingly was forces to live by the time clock, and to march in lock-step with society to provide greater productivity; labor unions threatened public stability with their radical dogma; and the American populace began to live more and more on a cash basis, thereby accentuating the gap between rich and poor. It is little wonder Americans wondered why their country had changed so much so quickly. Truner felt he had the answer. The end of the frontier in America.

Turner’s central argument in this book is that the American frontier supplied a critical outlet for pent-up American stresses; an environment where, under only modest influence from more established communities, individuals and infrastructure could evolve in new and innovative forms; an intellectual sphere where unconventional ideas could root, and the rugged American individualist could flourish. When America ran out of frontier, the well which had nurtured. This entire trend ran dry…thus producing the tumult of the 1890’s.

Turner’s work makes some very interesting points. As he states “The West, at bottom, is a form of society, rather than an area. It is the term applied to the region whose social conditions result from the application of older institution and ideas to the transformation influences of free land.” (Page 205) Clearly, the western territories represented un-stratified communities, where tradition had established norms. Under conditions such as these, it would have been far easier to try something new and crazy. But Turner’s connection between the closing of the frontier and the unsettling trends of the 1890’s lacks the force of an argument which replaces the frontier variable with the effects of industrialization and the aftermath of the Civil War. The prophecies which testified that America could not proper without the benefits of the frontier, failed to account from the greater productivity and social mobility that the new industrial economy would provide. This point is supported by the assigned articles.

Far more can be learned from studying the effects of Turner’s work than from the work itself. Historian’s have briskly discredited most of Turner’s points, but have only faintly gleamed why the work was so significant in its day. This significance may well represent the most enduring aspect of Turner’s work.