Does the Frontier Experience Make America Exceptional? - Historical Analysis & American Identity Exploration | Perfect for History Students, Researchers & Book Clubs

Go to the town of Concord, Mass., the first inland settlement of the Bay colony and as Donald Worster points out in this delightful book and "you will learn that it too, is, or has been, in the realm of the West." The "west" for Americans is less geography and more of a definition of themselves -- the desire and ability to find "Liberty" within the framework of a great society. Even the Mormons, who fled "west" to escape America and create their own "Deseret" kingdom, they learned in time that American values were the bedrock of their society. Liberty. Curiosity. Innovation. The ability to build anew. These are the qualities of America. It is an attitude, not a geographic destination. The frontier, for centuries and to this day, is the symbolic "clean slate" of being able to start over fresh and unhindered by the mistakes and boundaries of the past. Frederick Jackson Turner portrayed the "frontier' in terms of geography, true enough in 1893 when he began the discussion of the significance of the frontier in American history. But the "intellectual frontier" never closed; it is as open, untamed, unruly and unlimited as ever. Take your pick: New York is as newly invented during the past 50 years as Phoenix, Arizona. In recent years, the "frontier" is often thought of as lands west of the Mississippi. This is not what Turner had in mind. Worster quotes from a Turner letter written in the 1920s, "the 'West' with which I dealt, was a process rather than a fixed geographical location." The final essays suggest the "West" -- not the frontier -- is changing. Gerald Thompson writes, "the West as a region lacks an overreaching single historical or cultural experience that crystallizes its identity." Elliott West says the West "was the most polyglot of the republic during those years," once again referring to the past. The weakness of this book is the frequent assumptions of the frontier as a time and place, instead of a frame of mind that began when the first boatload of illegal immigrants left England. They did not come looking for a New Britannia; they came to build a new city upon a hill that would be a beacon of enlightenment to the world. The strength is the range of ideas; it is anything but a limiting set of definitions meant to lock historians or the public into a single frame of reference. The great strength of America is the will to build anew. It is well represented in the diversity of these views.