The Frontier in American Culture
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- $23.99
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- $23.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
White and Limerick analyze some of the most pervasive images of the American West, many of which are represented in a show of the same name at Chicago's Newberry Library this fall. In his contribution ``Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill,'' White compares Turner, the distinguished historian who first contended that the notion of the frontier was the driving force of American history and culture, and Buffalo Bill Cody, the Wild West performer, who both appeared in Chicago in 1893. It's hard to believe the two are representing the same terrain: Turner's presentation emphasized settlers idyllically filling a near-empty continent with a few peripheral Indians, while Buffalo Bill's re-enactments were of bloody conflicts with murderous natives. Limerick's ``Adventures of the Frontier in the Twentieth Century'' is incisive and often wry-as is only appropriate for an historian who begins her catalogue of Western images at Disney's Frontierland. Limerick goes on to examine the shameless use of frontier/pioneer images in everything from politics to advertising. At the turn of the century, the frontier was defined as that point at which people were scarce, or as White states, ``where white people were scarce''-with Limerick adding, ``where white people got scared because they were scarce.'' Both scholars look at how the frontier influenced interactions between whites and Native Americans, Hispanics, Asians and African Americans, ultimately creating a real melting pot that, maintains Limerick, made the idea of the frontier a ``cultural glue'' holding Americans together.
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