Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
The migration of native Americans
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
The frontier is as boring as a blank piece of paper. Though I have always considered myself brave and daring, I believe this frontier is fiercer than me. Although we are thriving now, the first few months were an absolute disgrace. In the beginning, food was scarce and life was terrifying; I never felt so alone. I have not slept well since we left New Jersey. But, enough from boring, old me; you are probably dying to hear about how my life has turned upside-down! We travelled across the county for three long months full of rain and wind. In June, we finally reached what Cornelius called his “Promised Land’, but I could not see how he could believe it was a gift from God! Upon arriving on the frontier, we had nothing but the few articles of clothing and bags of seeds we brought from our real home-home with you and father. We spent three weeks sleeping in our wagon while a few Confederate veterans helped us build a shelter. They told us their story: after the Union won the war, they left the army and moved west because the War destroyed their homes. They failed in fighting for their homes, so they saw this land as a fresh start. The veterans skillfully made blocks of Earth and placed them on top of each other, like a dirt igloo! They called it a “soddy.” Cornelius and I were amazed! …show more content…
After the soddy was finished, Cornelius and I were so relieved!
We finally had a home to call our own! While Cornelius worked on making our house a home,—full of furniture and decorations!—I learned how to farm. An old farmer and his wife taught me how to properly grow corn. I learned how to sow the seeds within the rills so they were safe and the farmer brought by one of his fun farmer contraptions so I could till the soil. He thought it was odd that I was the one farming and not Cornelius, but I explained that Cornelius has always been the more artistic type and that fixing up the house was more of his style. I am a much better farmer than Cornelius could ever
be! In September, I harvested my crops and sold them for enough money to help us survive the harsh winter. I also discovered that I will not have to be a dirty farmer for much longer; there are school-aged children looking for a teacher! The school will open in January of the upcoming year. Although I miss home, I am glad Cornelius and I chose to start our lives together out here on the plains. I f we stayed back home, we would still be living in that crowded apartment with you and father and the obnoxious tenants. I would still be working at the printing press and Cornelius would still be a failing cartoonist. Though I hate practicality, I believe the simple life here on the prairie has helped us mature. I hope you and father are well, send him my love. Your sister, Nina
“The Wilderness”. Saving America’s Civil War Battlefields: Civil War Trust. Civil War Trust. 2013. Web. 3 March 2014.
From the prologue through chapter one in “Wilderness and the American Mind”, the author emphasizes the affect wilderness had on the Europeans during the colonization of America. In today’s society, we are familiar with the concept of wilderness but few of us have experienced the feeling of being encapsulated in the unfamiliar territory. Today we long for wilderness, crave it even. We use it as an outlet to escape the pace of life. However, we have a sense of safety that the Europeans did not. We are not isolated in the unfamiliar, help is usually a phone call away. Though we now view the wilderness as an oasis because we enter at our own terms, in the early colonial and national periods, the wilderness was an unknown environment that was viewed as evil and dangerous.
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.
The American Civil war is considered to be one of the most defining moments in American history. It is the war that shaped the social, political and economic structure with a broader prospect of unifying the states and hence leading to this ideal nation of unified states as it is today. In the book “Confederates in the Attic”, the author Tony Horwitz gives an account of his year long exploration through the places where the U.S. Civil War was fought. He took his childhood interest in the Civil War to a new level by traveling around the South in search of Civil War relics, battle fields, and most importantly stories. The title “Confederates in the Attic”: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War carries two meanings in Tony Horwitz’s thoughtful and entertaining exploration of the role of the American Civil War in the modern world of the South. The first meaning alludes to Horwitz’s personal interest in the war. As the grandson of a Russian Jew, Horwitz was raised in the North but early in his childhood developed a fascination with the South’s myth and history. He tells readers that as a child he wrote about the war and even constructed a mural of significant battles in the attic of his own home. The second meaning refers to regional memory, the importance or lack thereof yet attached to this momentous national event. As Horwitz visits the sites throughout the South, he encounters unreconstructed rebels who still hold to outdated beliefs. He also meets groups of “re-enactors,” devotees who attempt to relive the experience of the soldier’s life and death. One of his most disheartening and yet unsurprising realizations is that attitudes towards the war divide along racial lines. Too many whites wrap the memory in nostalgia, refusing...
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.
On the east coast people were also being taken advantage of by the government. As a result of the building of the Transcontinental Railroad, the government began giving out land grants ‒through the Homestead Act of 1862‒ for Americans to live on and farm; the only problem was that another culture was already living on the land: the Sioux Nation. After the S...
...to Americans: if their prospects in the East were poor, then they could perhaps start over in the West as a farmer, rancher, or even miner. The frontier was also romanticized not only for its various opportunities but also for its greatly diverse landscape, seen in the work of different art schools, like the “Rocky Mountain School” and Hudson River School, and the literature of the Transcendentalists or those celebrating the cowboy. However, for all of this economic possibility and artistic growth, there was political turmoil that arose with the question of slavery in the West as seen with the Compromise of 1850 and Kansas-Nebraska Act. As Frederick Jackson Turner wrote in his paper “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” to the American Historical Association, “the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.”
When looking at the vast lands of Texas after the Civil War, many different people came to the lands in search for new opportunities and new wealth. Many were lured by the large area that Texas occupied for they wanted to become ranchers and cattle herders, of which there was great need for due to the large population of cows and horses. In this essay there are three different people with three different goals in the adventures on the frontier lands of Texas in its earliest days. Here we have a woman's story as she travels from Austin to Fort Davis as we see the first impressions of West Texas. Secondly, there is a very young African American who is trying his hand at being a horse rancher, which he learned from his father. Lastly we have a Mexican cowboy who tries to fight his way at being a ranch hand of a large ranching outfit.
Part of the mythology every schoolchild in the United States learns…is that the colony of Virginia achieved quick prosperity upon the basis of slaves and tobacco. Thus, “the South” is assumed to have existed as an initial settlement, with little change until the cataclysm of the Civil War in 1861.
Slotkin, R. Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier 1600-1860. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973.
Turner, Fredrick Jackson. The Significance of the Frontier in American History. Thesis. N.p, 1893. Print.
A land has many aspects to it, it’s made up of seasons: winter, spring, summer, and fall. There are trees, waving grasses, rolling hills, parched deserts, lush forests and more. The land is moody, inconsistent, and prone to fits of temperament and few characters aside from Alexandra seem to understand the meaning and beauty of such an inhospitable display of behavior. The land can affect the way we feel and act. While reading Willa Cather 's, “O Pioneers” the story introduces a family of Swedish immigrants farming in Nebraska. The Bergson 's family faces the same difficult struggles as other homesteaders, but Alexandra Bergson is determined as ever to see what the land has to offer. After her father dies, she takes up the challenge of making the farm a viable enterprise while other immigrant families are leaving their land
All in all, the treatment of the American Indian during the expansion westward was cruel and harsh. Thus, A Century of Dishonor conveys the truth about the frontier more so than the frontier thesis. Additionally, the common beliefs about the old west are founded in lies and deception. The despair that comes with knowing that people will continue to believe in these false ideas is epitomized by Terrell’s statement, “Perhaps nothing will ever penetrate the haze of puerile romance with which writers unfaithful to their profession and to themselves have surrounded the westerner who made a living in the saddle” (Terrell 182).
... Bibliography Bowes, John and Rosier, Paul. The Trails of Tears: Removal in the South. New York: InfoBase Publishing, 2007. Burgan, Michael.
The American Frontier consisted of a vibrant and expansive land made for the opportunity of American settlement. Unfortunately, the age of exploration of the Frontier officially ended in 1890 with the U.S Census Bureau declaring that “here can hardly be said to be a frontier line." A historian, Frederick Jackson Turner, claimed that the Frontier shaped American culture and the attitude of Americans. By evaluating U.S Census Bureau statistics, he famously wrote the Frontier Thesis. Along with the Frontier Thesis, Turner contributed to the field of New History, primarily analyzing the West and Sectionalism of the United States. Today, historians acknowledge the tremendous impact Turner’s role in American Exceptionalism and the study of geographic