Western United States - History - General & Miscellaneous, Frontier & Pioneer Life - Western United States, 19th Century US Westward Migration & Development - General, United States History - General & Miscellaneous, 19th Century American History - Genera

Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner

Name: Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner
Author: John Mack Faragher
ISBN: 9780805032987

by John Mack Faragher

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Overview

In 1893 a young Frederick Jackson Turner stood before the American Historical Association and delivered his famous frontier thesis. To a less than enthusiastic audience, he argued that "the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development"; that this frontier accounted for American democracy and character; and that the frontier had closed forever with uncertain consequences for the American future. Despite the indifference of Turner's first audience, his essay would soon prove to be the single most influential piece of writing on American history, with extraordinary impact both in intellectual circles and in popular literature. Within a few years his views had become the dominant interpretation of the American past. A collection of his essays won the Pulitzer Prize, and for almost half a century, Turner's thesis was the most familiar model taught in schools, extolled by politicians, and screened in fictional form at local movie theaters each Saturday afternoon. Now, a hundred years after Turner's famous address, award-winning biographer John Mack Faragher collects and introduces the pioneer historian's ten most significant essays. Remarkable for their truly modern sense that a debate about the past is simultaneously a debate about the present, these essays remain stimulating reading, both as a road map to the early-twentieth-century American mind and as a model of committed scholarship. Faragher introduces us to Turner's work with a look at his role as a public intellectual and his effect on Americans' understanding of their national character. In the afterword, Faragher turns to the recent heated debate over Turner's legacy. Western history has reemerged in the news as historians argue over Turner's place in our current mind-set. In a world of dizzying intellectual change, it may come as something of a surprise that historians have taken so long to overturn the interpretat

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Editorials

Library Journal

Editor Faragher (history, Yale Univ.) has assembled ten of Turner's writings into one source. One hundred years after Turner's Significance of the Frontier sent a shock wave through academia, his writings continue to spark historical debate. Faragher introduces the essays and concludes the work with a discussion of American frontier historiography. Turner believed that America needed to channel its expansionistic energy into developing distinct regional identities. These regional differences, he felt, would add variety to American homogeneity, sparking growth and creativity. Through his writings, Turner attempted to convince his colleagues of the importance of studying place as well as events throughout history in order to capture the sense of what it means to be an American. Recommended for academic libraries supporting research in American history.-Terri L. Summey, Emporia State Univ., Kan.