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The myth of the frontier in the USA
Values and norms of American culture
The impact of the American frontier
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Recommended: The myth of the frontier in the USA
The Impact of the American Frontier Maryanne Kearny, Joann Crandall, and Edward N. Kearny write about the impact of the American frontier in their book the American Ways. They mention the core role of the frontier heritage in shaping the American values, and how the majority of the contemporary people tend to reveal the character of life on the frontier. Furthermore, the authors explain how the movies and the TV shows represent the cowboy as a hero, and they left behind the fact about the frontier behavior with the American Indians. Finally, the writers represent the basic values of frontier society, such as, self-reliance, inventiveness, and equality of opportunity. However, the most significant issues from the book that I would like …show more content…
to discuss the self-reliance and the rugged individualist, American heroes in the media, and inventiveness in the frontier society. Today, more than ever the Americans certainly use the ideal values of the frontier society, in addition, they can recognize who is the heroes, regardless what the media show. The first significant issue is about the self-reliant and the rugged individualist in the western frontier.
The authors mention that the west frontier people live as free from the society’s rules. Also, they had been some skills to deal with the frontier life. In addition, the authors wrote about two types of a heroic rugged individualist. For example, Daniel Boon, who explored Kentucky for two years. Moreover, he had some fighting with the native Indians, but the Americans admired Boon as the person who won in encountering the challenges of the wilderness. Actually, I agree with the authors. The majority of the Americans are more aware of the frontier society history.In fact, they decline the darker side of the west society, and they look on the ideal values of the frontier as the base of the Americans culture. The second significant issue is American heroes in the media. The authors write about the TV shows and movies which represent the story of rugged individualist. They promote to use of the gun to solve problems. Also, the writers mention that the majority of the Americans worry about lives and imagination of their children. I agree with them in this point. The TV shows have a negative impact on the young people, and, in so doing motivate the younger to use the guns to solve their issues. In fact, the majority of the movies use violence story to show the cowboy lives. In my opinion, it is not rights. The frontier use the guns to protect their families
in the past. Nowadays, the Americans still use the guns to protect themselves, and the sale of the guns rise by the time. Eventually, the third significant issue is inventiveness in the frontier society. The writers mention that the western frontier people respected the individual creative. Also, they encouraged the society to inventiveness, and encounter the complexity of the wilderness lives. The authors used one of the best expression for Alexis de Tocqueville said that “no other country in the world more confidently seizes the future than the United States”. I think, rugged individualist supported the frontier people to create special tools to deal with their environments. In addition, this value is the evidence of the frontier society take a huge part in evolving the United States character. In conclusion, The Americans believe that the frontier society placed the Americans values into practice successfully. In this way, some of the frontier values considered a national values. Finally, the Americans trend to use the frontier heritage, and act as western frontier in wide range of their lives.
The West is a very big part of American culture, and while the myth of the West is much more enticing than the reality of the west, it is no doubt a very big part of America. We’re constantly growing up playing games surrounded by the West such as cowboys and Indians and we’re watching movies that depict the cowboy to be a romanticized hero who constantly saves dames in saloons and rides off into the sunset. However, the characters of the West weren’t the only things that helped the development of America; many inventions were a part of the development of the West and helped it flourish into a thriving community. Barbed wire, the McCormick reaper and railroads—for example—were a large part of the development in the West—from helping to define claimed land boundaries, agricultural development and competition, and even growth of the West.
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.
In the introduction, Hämäläinen introduces how Plains Indians horse culture is so often romanticized in the image of the “mounted warrior,” and how this romanticized image is frequently juxtaposed with the hardships of disease, death, and destruction brought on by the Europeans. It is also mentioned that many historians depict Plains Indians equestrianism as a typical success story, usually because such a depiction is an appealing story to use in textbooks. However, Plains Indians equestrianism is far from a basic story of success. Plains equestrianism was a double-edged sword: it both helped tribes complete their quotidian tasks more efficiently, but also gave rise to social issues, weakened the customary political system, created problems between other tribes, and was detrimental to the environment.
This historical document, The Frontier as a Place of Conquest and Conflict, focuses on the 19th Century in which a large portion of society faced discrimination based on race, ethnicity, and religion. Its author, Patricia N. Limerick, describes the differences seen between the group of Anglo Americans and the minority groups of Native Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanics Americans and African Americans. It is noted that through this document, Limerick exposes us to the laws and restrictions imposed in addition to the men and women who endured and fought against the oppression in many different ways. Overall, the author, Limerick, exposes the readers to the effects that the growth and over flow of people from the Eastern on to the Western states
Patricia Nelson Limerick describes the frontier as being a place of where racial tension predominately exists. In her essay, “The Frontier as a Place of Ethnic and Religion Conflict,” Limerick says that the frontier wasn’t the place where everyone got to escape from their problems from previous locations before; instead she suggested that it was the place in which we all met. The frontier gave many the opportunities to find a better life from all over the world. But because this chance for a new life attracted millions of people from different countries across the seas, the United States experienced an influx of immigrants. Since the east was already preoccupied by settlers, the west was available to new settlement and that was where many people went. Once in the western frontier, it was no longer just about blacks and whites. Racial tension rose and many different races and ethnic groups soon experienced discrimination and violence based on their race, and beliefs instead of a since of freedom at the western frontier.
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.
Somewhere out in the Old West wind kicks up dust off a lone road through a lawless town, a road once dominated by men with gun belts attached at the hip, boots upon their feet and spurs that clanged as they traversed the dusty road. The gunslinger hero, a man with a violent past and present, a man who eventually would succumb to the progress of the frontier, he is the embodiment of the values of freedom and the land the he defends with his gun. Inseparable is the iconography of the West in the imagination of Americans, the figure of the gunslinger is part of this iconography, his law was through the gun and his boots with spurs signaled his arrival, commanding order by way of violent intentions. The Western also had other iconic figures that populated the Old West, the lawman, in contrast to the gunslinger, had a different weapon to yield, the law. In the frontier, his belief in law and order as well as knowledge and education, brought civility to the untamed frontier. The Western was and still is the “essential American film genre, the cornerstone of American identity.” (Holtz p. 111) There is a strong link between America’s past and the Western film genre, documenting and reflecting the nations changes through conflict in the construction of an expanding nation. Taking the genres classical conventions, such as the gunslinger, and interpret them into the ideology of America. Thus The Western’s classical gunslinger, the personification of America’s violent past to protect the freedoms of a nation, the Modernist takes the familiar convention and buries him to signify that societies attitude has change towards the use of diplomacy, by way of outmoding the gunslinger in favor of the lawman, taming the frontier with civility.
The United State of America, established by the Founding Father who lead the American Revolution, accomplished many hardship in order to construct what America is today. As history established America’s future, the suffering the United State encountered through history illustrate America’s ability to identify mistakes and make changes to prevent the predictable. The 2nd Amendment was written by the Founding Father who had their rights to bear arms revoked when they believe rising up to their government was appropriate. The Twentieth Century, American’s are divided on the 2nd Amendment rights, “The right to bear arms.” To understand why the Founding Father written this Amendment, investigating the histories and current measures may help the American people gain a better understanding of gun’s rights in today’s America.
If Daniel Boone was destined to become a man of the wild, an explorer of unmapped spaces, his boyhood was the perfect preparation. He came to know the friendly Indians in the forests, and early he was marking the habits of wild things and bringing them down with a crude whittled spear. When he was twelve his father gave him a rifle, and his career as a huntsman began.
In 1893, when Frederick Jackson Turner delivered his speech on the significance of frontier at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, he was addressing an audience that had witnessed the drastic changes that swept through the country over the past sixty or so years. The United States had gone from the agrarian nation of Jefferson’s vision—one with a relatively balanced division of wealth, a population of homogenous skilled workers, and a narrow definition of equality based on a broad definition of freedom—to the highly industrialized urban nation glorified by the World’s Fair itself—one of polarized wealth, vast and increasing numbers of unassimilated, unskilled workers, and a demand for a return to the old equality at the expense of the old concept of freedom. Turner’s thesis was threaded with observations of these changes, and made an attempt to account for them in terms of the changing geography of America. “Each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas,” Turner wrote (Turner, 17).
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.
The West has always held the promise of opportunity for countless Americans. While many African Americans struggled to find the equality promised to them after the Civil War, in the West black cowboys appeared to have created some small measure of it on the range. Despite this, their absence from early historical volumes has shown that tolerance on the range did not translate into just treatment in society for them or their families.
In America guns have been a part of the country’s society since it’s birth. Throughout history the citizens of the US have used firearms to protect the nation, protect their families, hunt for food and engage in sporting activities. The issue of Guns and gun control is complex. Weighing the rights and liberties of the individual against the welfare and safety of the public has always been a precarious balancing act. In the United States, gun control is one of these tumultuous issues that has both sides firmly entrenched in their positions. Those parties in favor of gun ownership and the freedom to use and keep arms, rely on the fact that the provision for such rights is enshrined in their constitution. In this climate of growing violence, rife with turmoil and crime, gun advocates feel more than ever that their position is justified. As citizens of the “Land of the Free” possessing a gun is a fundamental right, and may even be a necessity... Anti- gun lobbyists point to the same growing violence and gun related crimes in an effort to call on the government to take action. By enacting more laws and stricter control, these people not in favor of guns feel society would be better safer.
The cowboys of the frontier have long captured the imagination of the American public. Americans, faced with the reality of an increasingly industrialized society, love the image of a man living out in the wilderness fending for himself against the dangers of the unknown. By the end of the 19th century there were few renegade Indians left in the country and the vast expanse of open land to the west of the Mississippi was rapidly filling with settlers.