1619 vs.

Patriotic education
 Mitch McConnell 4/30/2021
"Americans do not need or want their tax dollars
diverted from promoting the principles that unite our
nation toward promoting radical ideologies meant to
divide us," McConnell wrote. "Our nation's youth do
not need activist indoctrination that fixates solely on
past flaws and splits our nation into divided camps.
Taxpayer-supported programs should emphasize the
shared civic virtues that bring us together, not push
radical agendas that tear us apart."
National Museum of African American Art
HIYA HIYA
 Student Questions
1. What is a myth? Do myths have any power to
shape the way we view ourselves and the world
around us? Explain.
2. When you think of “The West,” what images
come to mind?
3. Give some examples of books, films, television
shows, or other media that have helped shape
your image of the West.
4. What is the appeal of the West? Why does the
West hold such an important place in the
American imagination?
 Myth
A “meaning story”
A symbolic narrative that creates
a world of meaning (worldview)
 The West, 1865-1900
“Looking over the yet uncivilized scene, the mind’s eye
may see far into futurity. Where the wolf roams, the
plough shall glisten; on the gray crag shall rise temple
and tower - mighty deeds shall be done in the new
pathless wilderness; and poets unborn shall sanctify the
soil.”

Thomas Cole, Essay on American Scenery (1836)

United States History

Albert Bierstadt, The Sierra Nevada in California (1869)
Francis Palmer, Across the Continent (1868)
John Gast, American Progress (1872)
Emmanuel Luetz, Westward Course of Empire Taken Its Way (1831)
 Geography of the West
Three distinct environmental regions:
1. Trans-Mississipi West (From the Mississippi River to the 98th Parallel)
2. Great Basin (Between Rocky Mountains and Sierra Nevada)
3. Far West (Sierra Nevada and Cascade Mountains to the Pacific Ocean
The American “Frontier”

Original 13 colonies become the United States in 1783.

The American “Frontier”

Land received from Great Britain at end of Revolutionary

War from the Treaty of Paris.
The American “Frontier”

Purchase - Thomas Jefferson purchased the Louisiana

Territory from France in 1803 for $15 million
The American “Frontier”

The Convention of 1818 sets border between Canada and the U.S.
at the 49th parallel. U.S. and England swap land.
The American “Frontier”

Spain cedes Florida to the US for $5 million in claims against

Spain in 1819.
The American “Frontier”

1836 - Texas defeats Mexican forces and declares

independence; 1845 - Texas joins the Union
The American “Frontier”

U.S. and Great Britain maintain joint occupation of Oregon

Territory. In 1846, they divide Oregon at the 49th parallel.
 The American “Frontier”

U.S. defeats Mexico in the Mexican-American War.

1847 - Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, U.S. gives Mexico $15 million
The American “Frontier”

Gadsden Purchase, 1853 for $10 million. Needed flat land

for railroad from New Orleans to west coast.
Frederick Jackson Turner – 1890
• “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,
” 1890
• 1890 census finds there is no longer a continuous
frontier line that could be drawn
• Turner argued that expansion into the frontier had
made Americans the distinctive people they were
• The West as a place of individualism, innovation, and
democratic renewal (“free land making free men”)
• Shaped not just the West, but the nation as a whole
• Closing of the frontier created uncertainty, for if the
frontier no longer existed, how would American
democratic development be maintained?
• American democracy was formed by the frontier
Frederic Remington, The Stampede (1908)
 • The central images of the “Old West” from our

Myth and the West popular culture, depict self-reliant, rugged

individualists (the myth of the “self-made
man”) that conquered and civilized a virgin land
• Examples? Yoeman farmers, independent
miners, and cowboys (all Anglo-American)
• The fact of life in the West was not
independence and self-reliance, but rather
cooperation and interdependence in a diversely
populated territory

THE REALITY?

F-word = frontier
Patricia Limerick - 1973
• The West had never been a “frontier” in the sense he
meant the term: an empty, uncivilized land awaiting
settlement – elaborate and highly developed societies
already inhabited the region – constant competition
and interaction among diverse peoples
• Less triumphant and masculine than Turner described:
bravery and success coexisted with fear, oppression,
violence, greed, and failure
• The West was inextricably tied to a national and
international capitalist economy (did not develop in a
vacuum)
• Western pioneers were never “self-sufficient,” they
depended on government-subsidized railroads for
access to markets, federal troops for protection from
Indians, and government-sponsored programs for their
land
• History of the West as a region still being written? The
city as a “new frontier”?
Parker Lancer