Exceptionalism and globalism: Travel writers and the nineteenth-century American West

Historian

Volumn 68, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 431-460

  Wrobel, David M ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61249546840     PISSN: 00182370     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6563.2006.00154.x     Document Type: Review

References (41)

1. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978)
2. Elliott West, "Thinking West," in The Blackwell Companion to the American West, ed. William Deverell (Malden, Mass., and Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 25-50
3. Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton, The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500-2000 (New York: Viking, 2005), emphasize how the realities of territorial acquisition undermine the rhetoric of exceptionalism, xv
4. On Stephen A. Douglas's use of the phrase, see John Mack Faragher and Robert Hine, The American West: A New Interpretive History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), 199
5. Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950) (emphasizes early Anglo exploration of the West as a search for trade routes to the Orient)
6. and Walter Prescott Webb's The Great Frontier (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952) are classic examples of the early global contextualization of Western American history
7. Gunther Peck, Reinventing Free Labor: Padrones and Immigrant Workers in the North American West, 1880-1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
8. For an excellent example of the successful forays of a historian of the U.S. West into Pacific World history, see David Igler, "Diseased Goods: Global Exchanges in the Eastern Pacific Basin, 1770-1850," American Historical Review 109 (June 2004): 693-719
9. For more on American exceptionalism see Michael Kammen, "The Problem of American Exceptionalism: A Reconsideration," American Quarterly 45 (March 1993): 1-43
10. Ian Tyrrell, "American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History," American Historical Review 96 (October 1991): 1031-55
11. David Noble, Death of a Nation: American Culture and the End of Exceptionalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002)
12. and Deborah L. Madsen, American Exceptionalism (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998)
13. Richard Slotkin, in Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1800 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973)
14. Benjamin Franklin, "The Internal State of America: Being a True Description of the Interest and Policy of that Vast Continent," in The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Albert K. Smythe, vol. 10 (New York: Macmillan, 1907), 117-18
15. See also James Paul Hutson, "Benjamin Franklin and the West," Western Historical Quarterly 4 (October 1973): 425-34
16. For the Jefferson quotation see Gilbert Chinard, Thomas Jefferson: The Apostle of Americanism (Boston: Little, Brown, 1929), 80-2
17. James C. Malin, The Contriving Brain and the Skillful Hand in the United States (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Edwards Brothers, 1955)
18. John L. O'Sullivan's article "Annexation," addressing the opposition of European powers to the annexation of Texas, appeared in the Democratic Review 17 (July-August 1845): 5-10
19. David M. Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Annexation: Texas, Oregon, and the Mexican War (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1973)
20. Robert W. Johannsen, "The Meaning of Manifest Destiny," in Manifest Destiny and Empire: Antebellum American Expansionism, eds. Sam W. Haynes and Christopher Morris (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1997), 7-20
21. and Julius Pratt, "The Ideology of American Expansion," in Essays in Honor of William E. Dodd: By His Former Students at the University of Chicago, ed. Avery Craven (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1935), 335-53
22. Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" (1893), in The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1920), 1-38
23. Dorothy Ross, "Historical Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century America," American Historical Review 89 (October 1984): 909-28
24. Francis Parkman, The Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and Rocky-Mountain Life (Boston: Little, 1872; orig. pub. 1849)
25. James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1893-1895)
26. The pertinent Tocqueville writings in the volume are: "Essay on Algeria" (October 1841), 59-116
27. "First Report on Algeria" (1847), 129-73
28. See also Ray Allen Billington, Land of Savagery, Land of Promise: The European Image of the American Frontier in the Nineteenth Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981)
29. and Allan Nevins's American Social History as Recorded by British Travelers (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1923) was published another decade and a half later
30. Robert G. Athearn, Westward the Briton (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962, 1969)
31. Thomas D. Clark, "The Great Visitation to American Democracy," Mississippi Valley Historical Review 44 (June 1957): 3-28
32. and John William Ward, Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955), are particularly notable examples
33. Daniel Boorstin, The Genius of American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953)
34. David M. Potter: People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954)
35. and Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955)
36. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 70
37. Gerstäcker, Gerstäcker's Travels, 231-33
38. See for example, Richard Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: The Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Peoples, 1800-1930 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003)
39. and Benjamin Madley, "The Yuki of California and the Question of Genocide in America," unpublished paper
40. Gerstäcker, Narrative of a Journey Round the World, 216
41. See Eric Sterling, "George Catlin," in DLB vol. 189, 55-64