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Bound away : Virginia and the westward movement / David Hackett Fischer and James C. Kelly.
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Fischer, David Hackett, 1935-
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Frontier and pioneer life.
- Territorial expansion.
- History.
- Migration, Internal.
- Population.
- Virginia--History--Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775.
- Virginia.
- Virginia--History--1775-1865.
- Virginia--Population--History.
- Migration, Internal--Virginia--History.
- Migration, Internal--United States--History.
- Frontier thesis.
- United States--Territorial expansion--History.
- Frontier and pioneer life--Virginia.
- Frontier and pioneer life--United States.
- United States.
- Physical Description:
- xvi, 366 pages : illustrations, maps, portraits ; 25 cm
- Place of Publication:
- Charlottesville : University Press of Virginia, 2000.
- Summary:
- Bound Away offers a new understanding of the westward movement. After Frederick Jackson Turner's thesis celebrating the frontier as the source of American freedom and democracy, and the iconoclasm of the new western historians who dismissed the idea of the frontier as merely a mask for conquest and exploitation, David Hackett Fischer and James C. Kelly take a third approach to the subject. They share with Turner the idea of the westward movement as a creative process of high importance in American history, but they understand it in a different way.
- Whereas Turner studied the westward movement in terms of its destination, Fischer and Kelly approach it in terms of its origins. Virginia's long history enables them to provide a rich portrait of migration and expansion as a dynamic process that preserved strong cultural continuities. They suggest that the oxymoron "bound away" -- from the folk song "Shenandoah" -- captures a vital truth about American history. As people moved west, they built new societies from old materials, in a double-acting process that made America what it is today.
- Based on an acclaimed exhibition at the Virginia Historical Society, the book studies three stages of migration to, within, and from Virginia. Each stage has its own story to tell. Together they offer an opportunity to study the westward movement through three centuries, as it has rarely been studied before.
- Fischer and Kelly believe that the westward movement was a broad cultural process best understood not only through the writings of intellectual elites but also through the physical artifacts and folkways of ordinary people. The wealth of anecdotes and illustrations in this volume offers a new wayof looking at John Smith and William Byrd, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, Daniel Boone, Dred Scott, and scores of lesser-known gentry, yeomen, servants, and slaves who were all "bound away" to an old new world.
- Contents:
- 1. Migration to Virginia 12
- 2. Migration in Virginia 74
- 3. Migration beyond Virginia 135
- 4. Problems of Cause and Consequence 202
- 5. African-American Migration 229
- 6. The Cultural Legacy 253.
- Notes:
- "This book began as a catalog for an exhibition, at the Virginia Historical Society, to mark the centenary of Frederick Jackson Turner's thesis on 'the significance of the frontier in American history'"--Pref.
- Includes bibliographical references (pages 305-340) and index.
- ISBN:
- 0813917735
- 0813917743
- OCLC:
- 41278488
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