In Marquart’s “The Horizontal World”, descriptions of North Dakota occur within the passage to emphasize a potential in her hometown. Marquart uses analogy to give the audience a relatable idea, “Devoid of rises and curves in places that will feel like one long-held pedal steel guitar note” (Marquart, L.3-L.5). By having the audience, United States citizens excluded from North Dakota, imagine an empty, long road makes people curious as to what other possibilities the region obtains. Since North Dakota does not attract huge amounts of tourists like Los Angeles, California or New York City, attention to this simple state could have some appeal. A new concept, a significance in simplicity, can attract Americans who are over consumed in busy tourist attractions; the new wave in modern times. With beautiful nature and barren spaces, the author makes the midwest more engaging and alluring. …show more content…
Marquart wants to add a certain charm to her hometown of North Dakota, to inform other Americans about false generalizations previously assumed about the state.
In her passage, Marquart includes generalizations of existing ideas about residents of North Dakota and the Midwest in general, “the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma- a region that spawns both tornadoes and republicans” (Marquart, L.12-L.14). Before, people thought the midwest had closed minds to a democracy as a political standpoint. With their crazy weather conditions, Americans immediately thought of North Dakota as a hazard. To refute this generalization, the author emphasizes the greatness of North Dakota’s historical context and how much potential the state actually possesses. By including famous figures like Jefferson, Marquart adds in a significance to North Dakota. Additionally, the author keeps the image of a bare and wide-spaced location to make simplicity a glamour. This also appears in Puritan Ideology because of their desire to be one with God; not having a focus on entertainment that many societies today
do. Furthermore, an anecdote appears about Marquart’s great grandparents that had found salvation in North Dakota in earlier times of chaos within immigrants. A sense of comfort results within the reader in which many industrial cities lack. A simple life was what many immigrants fought for and found in North Dakota, like Marquart’s great grandparents from Russia. Consequently, North Dakota has remained a neutral and simple state residents can call home. Even though flash happens to be a great industrial benefit, flash does not appeal to the basic desires of the American people: a home, a family, and a sense of comfort and happiness. North Dakota’s simplicity has attracted many great historical figures throughout time and has a feeling of purity within itself, making it stand out and differ from many states in America today.
Early Thunder by Jean Fritz shows how the contrasting points of view of the Tories and Whigs in Salem had a divisive effect on this New England town, causing neighbors to turn against one another.
The Frontier Thesis has been very influential in people’s understanding of American values, government and culture until fairly recently. Frederick Jackson Turner outlines the frontier thesis in his essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History”. He argues that expansion of society at the frontier is what explains America’s individuality and ruggedness. Furthermore, he argues that the communitarian values experienced on the frontier carry over to America’s unique perspective on democracy. This idea has been pervasive in studies of American History until fairly recently when it has come under scrutiny for numerous reasons. In his essay “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature”, William Cronon argues that many scholars, Turner included, fall victim to the false notion that a pristine, untouched wilderness existed before European intervention. Turner’s argument does indeed rely on the idea of pristine wilderness, especially because he fails to notice the serious impact that Native Americans had on the landscape of the Americas before Europeans set foot in America.
One of the more romantic elements of American folklore has been the criss-crossing rail system of this country – steel rails carrying Americans to new territories across desert and mountain, through wheat fields and over great rivers. Carl Sandburg has flavored the mighty steam engine in elegant prose and Arlo Guthrie has made the roundhouse a sturdy emblem of America’s commerce.
There are many ways in which we can view the history of the American West. One view is the popular story of Cowboys and Indians. It is a grand story filled with adventure, excitement and gold. Another perspective is one of the Native Plains Indians and the rich histories that spanned thousands of years before white discovery and settlement. Elliot West’s book, Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers and the Rush to Colorado, offers a view into both of these worlds. West shows how the histories of both nations intertwine, relate and clash all while dealing with complex geological and environmental challenges. West argues that an understanding of the settling of the Great Plains must come from a deeper understanding, a more thorough knowledge of what came before the white settlers; “I came to believe that the dramatic, amusing, appalling, wondrous, despicable and heroic years of the mid-nineteenth century have to be seen to some degree in the context of the 120 centuries before them” .
According to the thesis of Fredrick Jackson Turner, the frontier changed America. Americans, from the earliest settlement, were always on the frontier, for they were always expanding to the west. It was Manifest Destiny; spreading American culture westward was so apparent and so powerful that it couldn’t be stopped. Turner’s Frontier Theory says that this continuous exposure to the frontier has shaped the American character. The frontier made the American settlers revert back to the primitive, stripping them from their European culture. They then created something brand new; it’s what we know today as the American character. Turner argues that we, as a culture, are a product of the frontier. The uniquely American personality includes such traits as individualism, futuristic, democratic, aggressiveness, inquisitiveness, materialistic, expedite, pragmatic, and optimistic. And perhaps what exemplifies this American personality the most is the story of the Donner Party.
As history cascades through an hourglass, the changing, developmental hands of time are shrouded throughout American history. This ever-changing hourglass of time is reflected in the process of maturation undertaken by western America in the late nineteenth century. Change, as defined by Oxford’s Dictionary, is “To make or become different through alteration or modification.” The notion of change is essential when attempting to unwind the economic make-up of Kansas in the 1880’s and 1890’s. Popular culture often reveres the American cowboy, which has led him to become the predominate figure in America’s “westering” experience (Savage, p3). However, by 1880 the cowboy had become a mythical figure rather than a presence in western life. The era of the cowboy roaming the Great Plains had past and farmers now sought to become the culturally dominant figure and force in the American West. Unlike the cowboys, farmers were able to evolved, organizing and establishing the Populist Party. The farmers’ newly formed political organization provided them with a voice, which mandated western reform. Furthermore, the populist ideas spread quickly and dominated western thought in the 1880’s and 1890’s. The period of the 1880’s and 1890’s marked the end of the American cowboy and gave farmers a political stronghold that would forever impact the modernization of the West.
Frontier in American History is divided in two major parts each with an introduction. The first part claims that the gradual settlement of the west is what forms American History. In the following four paragraphs the frontier is explained in details. The frontier is viewed as a moving belts
The river canyons, mountains meadows, and Great Plains of Montana have earned the state the unofficial nickname of the “last best place.” (Av2 books). Although Montana is the fourth-largest state
Miller makes clear the impact of wilderness on early American life. While the Old World mentality presented wilderness as mysterious and filled with demons, the new American nation viewed it differently. Rather than possessing a sense of fear, their belief in the divine mission to spread democracy and civilization inspired them to journey west. Accordingly, they did so with a sense of excitement and a thirst for discovery. As such, I wholeheartedly agree with Miller’s view that the early romantic images of the American landscape were expressions of a new cultural nationalism. According to Miller, these early countrymen viewed the new nation as “...a place apart, an unpeopled wilderness where history, born in nature rather than in corrupt institutions,
The monotony of life has waged war against the narrator in Alice Munro’s “Miles City, Montana.” The author depicts the narrator as a brittle woman in search of a personal identity among a community of conformity. This battle between domestic responsibility and personal satisfaction reeks havoc on the soldier of this mother and wife. Munro is a master of characterization, and through the protagonist she depicts the complexities of human nature.
This is not an attempt to defend the violent behavior of Appalachia’s residents. By examining a few significant events, it is rather an attempt to explain the complex causes for the violence and how there were underlying implications. In doing so we will find a better understanding for the history of intense violence that began after the Civil War and lasted until the 1920s. In addition, this will help us to uncover the origins of the Appalachian stereotype and that has continued to develop over the past century, beginning with the dark and bloody history of Breathitt County, Kentucky.
Montana today is place that is still very similar that of a hundred years ago. Ranching and farming out east, mining still goes on in Butte, fishing is big along the western rivers, and now there is a new boom, with oil and natural gas throughout the state. As John Steinbeck said, “I’m in love with Montana. For other states I have admiration, respect, recognition, even some affection. But with Montana it is love. And it’s difficult to analyze love when you’re in it.”
Over the years, the idea of the western frontier of American history has been unjustly and falsely romanticized by the movie, novel, and television industries. People now believe the west to have been populated by gun-slinging cowboys wearing ten gallon hats who rode off on capricious, idealistic adventures. Not only is this perception of the west far from the truth, but no mention of the atrocities of Indian massacre, avarice, and ill-advised, often deceptive, government programs is even present in the average citizen’s understanding of the frontier. This misunderstanding of the west is epitomized by the statement, “Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis was as real as the myth of the west. The development of the west was, in fact, A Century of Dishonor.” The frontier thesis, which Turner proposed in 1893 at the World’s Columbian Exposition, viewed the frontier as the sole preserver of the American psyche of democracy and republicanism by compelling Americans to conquer and to settle new areas. This thesis gives a somewhat quixotic explanation of expansion, as opposed to Helen Hunt Jackson’s book, A Century of Dishonor, which truly portrays the settlement of the west as a pattern of cruelty and conceit. Thus, the frontier thesis, offered first in The Significance of the Frontier in American History, is, in fact, false, like the myth of the west. Many historians, however, have attempted to debunk the mythology of the west. Specifically, these historians have refuted the common beliefs that cattle ranging was accepted as legal by the government, that the said business was profitable, that cattle herders were completely independent from any outside influence, and that anyone could become a cattle herder.
With constant focus on the world’s preferable locations, individuals always overlook the “unimpressive” ones. In Debra Marquart’s memoir, she places emphasize on her love for the Midwest land. Debra Marquart uses pathos, ironic juxtapositioning, and historical backing to demonstrate that Midwest is worth more than the labeled placed upon it.
Munro, Alice. "Miles City, Montana." The Bedford Introduction to Literature. 5th ed. Ed. Michael Meyer. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1999. 458-471.