Frontiers of Historical Imagination

by Kerwin Lee Klein

• ISBN13: 9780520204638
• ISBN10: 0520204638
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2023-11-15
• Publisher: University of California Press

Summary

The American frontier, a potent symbol since Europeans first stepped ashore on North America, serves as the touchstone for Kerwin Klein's analysis of the narrating of history. Klein explores 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. The American West was once the frontier space where migrating Europe collided with Native America, where the historical civilizations of the Old World met the nonhistorical wilds of the New. It was not only the cultural combat zone where American democracy was forged but also the ragged edge of History itself, where historical and nonhistorical defied and defined each other. Klein maintains that the idea of a collision between people with and without history still dominates public memory. But the collision, he believes, resounds even more powerfully in the historical imagination, which creates conflicts between narration and knowledge and carries them into the language used to describe the American frontier. In Klein's words, "We remain obscurely entangled in philosophies of history we no longer profess, and the very idea of 'America' balances on history's shifting frontiers."

Author Biography

Kerwin Lee Klein is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
Introduction: History, Narrative, West	p. 1
The Language of History	p. 13
What Was the Frontier Thesis?	p. 13
Histories and Hypotheses	p. 22
Explaining History	p. 31
Systems and Paradigms	p. 37
Narrative Explanations	p. 47
From Spirit to System	p. 58
An American Dante: Frederick Jackson Turner	p. 58
Frontier Dialectics	p. 78
The Folly of Comedy	p. 88
Provincial Politics	p. 92
John Dewey and the Frontier Tragedy	p. 99
Pragmatism's Conception of Emplotment	p. 108
Merle Curti's Corporate Frontier	p. 113
Time Immemorial	p. 129
The Indian Trade in Universal History	p. 129
William Christie MacLeod and the Tragic Savage	p. 144
Ruth Benedict and the Cultural Turn	p. 148
Ramon's Frontier Tale	p. 153
Friedrich Nietzsche and the American Indians	p. 161
The End of History: A World without Culture	p. 170
The Science of Acculturation	p. 174
Ethno-History	p. 183
The Double Plot of Edward H. Spicer	p. 186
The Trouble with Tragedy	p. 195
Margins, Borders, Boundaries	p. 205
The End of Ethnohistory	p. 209
Histories of Language	p. 213
The Fourth Frontier of Henry Nash Smith	p. 213
Culture versus Art: Leo Marx	p. 229
Myth, Method, and Manliness	p. 238
Queer Frontiers	p. 245
Dialectica Fronterizos: Gloria Anzaldua	p. 261
A Note on Form	p. 271
Postwestern	p. 273
The Predicament of Culture	p. 278
The Problem of History	p. 287
Afterword: Language Is Story	p. 297
Notes	p. 301
A Bibliographic Note	p. 367
Index	p. 373
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