Wednesday, June 04, 2003
FREDERICK JACKSON TURNER AND GEORGE W. BUSH
There has been an undercurrent of debate since the destruction visited upon the United States on 9/11 and the war with Iraq whether we as Americans have chosen or been forced to assume the role of a new world-dominating empire. I am not sympathetic to that viewpoint but it is a growing and popular one and I recognize that the comparisons drawn by scholars like Donald Kagan between the magnitude of American power today and that of Rome of the ancient world have validity. At a minimum there seems to be a great popular consensus that the nation hovers on the brink of a great turning point in our history, one that could change the character of our Republic for good or ill. This brought me back to the first modern American historian to think in these terms, Frederick Jackson Turner whose paper on the end of the American frontier had an electrifying effect on the history profession and influenced men like Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson who themselves went on to shape history itself. It occurred to me that while the " Frontier thesis " is part of what E.D Hirsch might call Cultural Literacy, outside of history seminars few intelligent people have actual read Turner firsthand. Therefore, here it is, a historian's examination of America at a turning point - Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis
¶ 8:27 AM
There has been an undercurrent of debate since the destruction visited upon the United States on 9/11 and the war with Iraq whether we as Americans have chosen or been forced to assume the role of a new world-dominating empire. I am not sympathetic to that viewpoint but it is a growing and popular one and I recognize that the comparisons drawn by scholars like Donald Kagan between the magnitude of American power today and that of Rome of the ancient world have validity. At a minimum there seems to be a great popular consensus that the nation hovers on the brink of a great turning point in our history, one that could change the character of our Republic for good or ill. This brought me back to the first modern American historian to think in these terms, Frederick Jackson Turner whose paper on the end of the American frontier had an electrifying effect on the history profession and influenced men like Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson who themselves went on to shape history itself. It occurred to me that while the " Frontier thesis " is part of what E.D Hirsch might call Cultural Literacy, outside of history seminars few intelligent people have actual read Turner firsthand. Therefore, here it is, a historian's examination of America at a turning point - Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis
¶ 8:27 AM
