| America's Frontier Heritage (Histories of the American Frontier) |  | Author: Ray Allen Billington
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Category: Book
List Price: $42.50
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Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 1366737
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 310
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.7
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.2 x 1.1
ISBN: 0826314635
Dewey Decimal Number: 973
EAN: 9780826314635
ASIN: 0826314635
Publication Date: November 1993
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Condition: Good plus condition. No dustjacket.
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Product Description
The hypothesis advanced in Frederick Jackson Turner's 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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A Defense of the "Frontier Thesis," but only a Partly Successful One January 10, 2006
Roger D. Launius (Washington, D.C., United States)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Ray Allen Billington, who died in 1981, was one of the most prolific historians of his generation, and the major defender and reinterpreter of the "Frontier Thesis" of Frederick Jackson Turner. Turner's 1893 "Frontier Thesis" paper is perhaps the most influential essay ever read at the American Historical Association's annual conference. It has exerted a massive influence on the historiography of the United States, in no small measure because of its powerful statement of American exceptionalism and its justification of conquest. Turner took as his cue an observation in the 1890 U.S. census that the American frontier had, for the first time, closed. He noted, "Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development." He insisted that the frontier made Americans American, gave the nation its democratic character, and ensured the virtues of self-reliance, community, and the promise of justice. He noted that cheap or even free land provided a "safety valve" that protected the nation against uprisings of the poverty-stricken and malcontented. The frontier also produced a people with "coarseness and strength...acuteness and inquisitiveness, that practical and inventive turn of mind . . . [full of] restless and nervous energy...that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom." It gave the people of the United States, in essence, virtually every positive quality they have ever possessed.
The "Frontier Thesis" has enjoyed both eloquent critics and defenders over the years. None of its defenders, however, has been more zealous than Ray Allan Billington and "America's Frontier Heritage" is his most mature statement on the subject. Turner never really applied his thesis to the test, but Billington invokes the work of historians, sociologists, economists, anthropologists, psychologists, demographers, and a host of other social scientists to "suggest logical means whereby three centuries of expansion did alter the behavioral patterns of the frontiersmen, and to a lessening degree of their descendents in the twentieth century" (p. xiii). Throughout Billington asserts the primacy of the "Frontier Thesis" in shaping American exceptionalism, despite his persistent chirping that he is not a "monocausationlist," not a very convincing statement when one explores this book's persistent pro-Turner bias.
A useful example of the manner in which Billington reinterprets the "Frontier Thesis" is his analysis of the labor safety valve. Turner suggested that the frontier provided a draw from the cities so that the burdens of class, economics, and other factors did not weigh on the development of United States the same way that it did in countries were the opportunity of the frontier did not exist. Numerous students have noted that this "safety valve" did not really exist, that most people who went to the frontier were not from the cities, etc. Billington accepts this reality, but notes that it was unimportant. The belief that it existed was enough, and it helped release pent up frustrations with the social order and prompted people not to turn in upon themselves, defusing jeopardy to the democratic fabric. The widespread sense that movement to the West "provided an escalator to the top of the social ladder that could not be duplicated in the East or Europe" helped ensure the democratic republic.
I first read this book in graduate school a quarter century ago as the most eloquent statement of the "Frontier Thesis." At that time the "New Western History" was just emerging and no one wanted to be called a "Turnerian." So I had to learn more about it, and I remember being impressed with Billington's eloquent defense of a provocative but ultimately overstretched explanation of the American character. Rereading it in the first part of the twenty-first century, I remain impressed with the work and how well it still explains many aspects of American history. Billington was sensitive to the contradictions and inconsistencies in the "Frontier Thesis" and usually found a way to smooth over them to create a generally convincing argument. In some instances he casts parts of the hypothesis overboard, but generally he modifies and amplifies to support Turner's basic ideas. There are now virtually no "Turnerians" left among historians, certainly none with the skill of Ray Allen Billington, but there are still aspects of the "Frontier Thesis" deserving of investigation. Among those, and Billington points them out, is the lack of a rigid class system, a faith in ordinary people and their will arrived at through democratic processes, and an emphasis on peaceful change. Turner and Billington believed those ideas sprang from the influence of the frontier on Americans. They are significant ideas regardless of their sources, and "America's Frontier Heritage" offers an enticing set of ideas about their evolution. It is not fully convincing, but it is interesting.
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