Description
Book SynopsisExplores the traditions through which historians, philosophers, anthropologists, and literary critics have understood the story of America's origin and the way those understandings have shaped and been shaped by changing conceptions of history.
Table of ContentsPREFACE
INTRODUCTION: HISTORY,NARRATIVE, WEST
Book One
The Language of History
What Was the Frontier Thesis?
Histories and Hypotheses
Explaining History
Systems and Paradigms
Narrative Explanations
Book Two
From Spirit to System
An American Dante: Frederick Jackson Turner
Frontier Dialectics
The Folly of Comedy
Provincial Politics
John Dewey and the Frontier Tragedy
Pragmatism's Conception of Emplotment
Merle Curti's Corporate Frontier
Book Three
Time Immemorial 129
The Indian Trade in Universal History
William Christie MacLeod and the Tragic Savage
Ruth Benedict and the Cultural Turn
Ramon's Frontier Tale
Friedrich Nietzsche and the American Indians
The End of History: A World without Culture
The Science of Acculturation
Ethno-History
The Double Plot of Edward H. Spicer
The Trouble with Tragedy
Margins, Borders, Boundaries
The End of Ethnohistory
Book Four
Histories of Language
The Fourth Frontier of Henry Nash Smith
Culture versus Art: Leo Marx
Myth, Method, and Manliness
Queer Frontiers
Dialectica Fronterizos: Gloria Anzaldua
A Note on Form
Postwestern
The Predicament of Culture
The Problem of History
Afterword
Language Is Story
NOTES
A BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTE
INDEX
