Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Frederick Jackson Turner
The little-appreciated U.S. public-land survey not only opened up our frontier but made possible our freedoms.
First heard just a century ago at the Chicago fair, Frederick Jackson Turner’s epochal essay on the Western frontier expressed a conflict in the American psyche that still tears at us.
This country’s long, acrimonious observance of the Columbian quincentenary is finally over, but it won’t be soon forgotten.
Did the Indians have a special, almost noble, affinity with the American environment, or were they despoilers of it? Two historians of the environment explain the profound clash of cultures between Indians and whites that has made each group almost incomprehensible to the other.
When the historian Richard White wrote his first scholarly article about Indian environmental history in the mid-1970s, he knew he was taking a new approach to an old field, but he did not realize just how new it was.
Did the Indians have a special, almost noble, affinity with the American environment, or were they despoilers of it? Two historians of the environment explain the profound clash of cultures between Indians and whites that has made each group almost incomprehensible to the other.
When the historian Richard White wrote his first scholarly article about Indian environmental history in the mid-1970s, he knew he was taking a new approach to an old field, but he did not realize just how new it was.
Featured Authors
