ATDTDA (2): Freddie Turner (52.31)

[Tim Strzechowski]

"Back in July my colleague Freddie Turner came out here from Harvard and gave a speech before a bunch of anthro people who were all in town for their convention and of course the Fair.  To the effect that the Western frontier we all thought we knew from song and story was no longer on the map but gone, absorbed -- a dead duck" (p. 52)



The World's Columbian Exposition defined American culture. Its World's Congress Auxiliary presented lectures and discussions by prominent political activists and intellectuals about subjects as wide-ranging and pressing as religion and science, labor, and women's rights. Historian Frederick Jackson Turner gave his famous paper on the significance of the frontier in American history to a meeting of historians held in conjunction with the fair. [...]

http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/1386.html



Frederick Jackson Turner (November 14, 1861 - March 14, 1932) was, with Charles A. Beard, the most influential American historian of the early 20th century. He is best known for The Significance of the Frontier in American History.

[...]

Turner is remembered for his "Frontier Thesis", which he first published July 12, 1893 in a paper read in Chicago to the American Historical Association during the Chicago World's Fair. In it, he stated that the spirit and success of the United States is directly tied to the country's westward expansion. According to Turner, the forging of the unique and rugged American identity occurred at the juncture between the civilization of settlement and the savagery of wilderness. This produced a new type of citizen - one with the power to tame the wild and one upon whom the wild had conferred strength and individuality.

Turner gave a famous lecture on how the frontier had shaped American development, concluding that the "first period" of American history--the period that had nurtured individualism, democracy, and widespread opportunity for economic autonomy--had come to an end.

His essays are collected in The Significance of Sections in American History, which won the Pulitzer Prize in History in 1933. Turner's sectionalism thesis had almost as much influence among historians as his frontier thesis. He argued that different ethno-cultural groups had distinct settlement patterns, and this revealed itself in politics, economics and society. [...]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Jackson_Turner


"The Significance of the Frontier in American History" is a seminal essay by the American historian Frederick Jackson Turner which advanced the so-called Frontier Thesis of American history. It was presented to a special meeting of the American Historical Association at the World's Columbian Exposition on July 12, 1893, in Chicago, Illinois, and published later that year first in Proceedings of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, then in the Annual Report of the American Historical Association. It has been subsequently reprinted and anthologized many times, and was incorporated into Turner's 1921 book, The Frontier in American History, as Chapter I.

The thesis describes his views on how the idea of the frontier shaped the American being and their characteristics. He talks about how the frontier drove American history and that is why America is how it is today. Turner reflects on the past to prove his point by noting human fascination with the frontier and how expansion to the American West changed peoples' views on their culture. It is a thesis that has been respected in the historical circle for many years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Significance_of_the_Frontier_in_American_History

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/TURNER/home.html


And finally ...


[...] The figurative use of the term 'dead duck' is recorded from 1829. The New York Courier has a piece from June that year:

"There is an old saying 'never waste powder on a dead duck'; but we cannot avoid flashing away a few grains upon an old friend, Henry Clay."

The description of it as an old saying suggests an earlier origin, although I can't find any earlier record of it.

http://www.phrases.org.uk/bulletin_board/50/messages/351.html
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