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Yesterday I talked about western expansion. To both the English colonists and later to the Americans, the west was always the frontier so for us today, we tend to look that way to our future.
Frederick Jackson Turner is the one historian that is most closely tied to this idea that the history of America is the history of the West. In fact in the opening paragraph of a paper he delivered in 1893, he states:
In fact, according to the Turner, it was the frontier that ultimately makes us who we are today. According to him, it was this connection to the frontier and the dangers that it contained (lack of civilization, the threat of Native Americans, and the rugged simplicity of those living in it) that allowed for the European immigrants to truly become Americans (he uses the illustration of taking a German immigrant from a railroad car and putting him in a birch canoe.) In fact from an economic point of view, the west was very important for us. During the 1800s, a good portion of the revenue the US Government came from land sales and tariffs.
The great newspaper editor Horace Greeley is often quoted as giving the advice "Go West Young Man" during the 1800s, signifying that the future of this country was to the west. And we tend to think of this land as wide, open spaces, ripe for the taking. However, we don't always state that this land wasn't ripe for the taking and we forget that there was a people living here before we got here. A people who did not advance from the East to the West, but who arrived from the West and headed East.
More tomorrow.
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