Virgin Land: The American West As Symbol And Myth

Virgin Land: The American West As Symbol and Myth, by Henry Nash Smith is a very interesting book and it’s not your typical history book. It is an critical analysis of how Americans view the western expansion through the myths, legends, and symbolic culture that’s associated with it. Smith delves into the topic of what the West and the frontier meant to the American public. This is not a book which discusses established history but a book about what people believe is true about the American past. This analysis of the American Western experience is important to American historiographical research. Henry Nash Smith gives those interested in exploring the symbology and mythology of the West and the American experience a place to start.

In Virgin Land: The American West As Symbol and Myth, Smith gives the reader an insight into how people develop their own mythology and how these beliefs affect later historical events.

Scholars in different fields of study have long since abandoned the kind of work Smith proposed, but rereading Virgin Land takes us back to the two disciplines and to the academy in the early 1950s. For all the book’s flaws, Smith saw several things clearly when he wrote Virgin Land. He recognized that the symbolic dimensions of politics were often as important as what passed for hard-headed realism. Beginning to explore the cultural dimension of politics, Smith noticed the political influence of culture and asked readers to acknowledge the tensions in American literature between the conventions of genre and the peculiar social experience that was the United States. By delving into the literature of westward expansion, Smith also laid out the sources for the ideas of Frederick Jackson Turner and offered an explanation for Turner’s odd