Volume 10, Number 8 · April 25, 1968
The Old Frontier
By John Higham
America's Frontier Heritage
by Ray Allen Billington
Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 302 pp., $7.95
Turner and the Sociology of the Frontier
edited by Richard Hofstadter, edited by Seymour Martin Lipset
Basic Books, 224 pp., $2.95 (paper)
Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West
by William H. Goetzmann
Knopf, 656 pp., $10.00
America's Western Frontiers: The Exploration and Settlement of the Trans-Mississippi West
by John A. Hawgood
Knopf, 440 pp., $10.00
How important was the westward movement in shaping American history and forming a distinctive national character? For three decades, from the 1930s through the 1950s, specialists in American history argued the issue fiercely. On the whole, southern and western scholars held faithfully to the teachings of the master, Frederick Jackson Turner. In opposition to this 'Turnerverein,' to recall some of the epithets of the day, arose the 'asphalt flowers,' men who identified with a cosmopolitan, urban culture, and who regarded Turner's view of American history as a kind of rural provincialism writ large. Surely American democracy had not come 'stark and strong and full of life out of the American forest,' as Turner declared in one of his more enthusiastic moments. It was the creation of prophets far more than pioneers, of statesmen rather than backwoodsmen. It was above all the unfolding of an inheritance rather than the flowering of an environment. It came not from nature but from civilization.
Review, 3056 words
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