LECTURE I: TO 1750

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, east coast city dwellers in the United States had difficulty repressing a sense of their own persistent cultural inferiority vis-à-vis London and Paris. At the same time a great many old-stock Americans were dismayed by the stream of immigrants coming to these shores whose diversity called the future cohesion of the Republic into question almost as seriously as the issue of slavery had done in the decades before the Civil War. In such a climate of opinion, the unabashed provinciality of Frederick Jackson Turner's (1861-1932) paper "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," delivered at a meeting of the newly founded American Historical Association in connection with the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1892), began within less than a decade to resound like a trumpet call, though whether it signalled advance or retreat remained profoundly ambiguous.

On the one hand, if Turner were to be believed, effete easterners need not have worried about lagging behind European civilization. Instead, a new nation, with a sturdy character of its own, had already formed under western skies, since "the advance of the frontier has meant a steady movement away from the influence of Europe, a steady growth of independence along American lines." National unity and national identity were safe and sound too, because "In the crucible of the frontier the immigrants were Americanized, liberated and fused into a mixed race, English neither in nationality nor characteristics." Persistent cultural difference from Europe was therefore evidence not of inferiority, but of a unique and indigenous response to free land and other freedoms of the frontier, since it is "to the frontier that the American intellect owes its striking characteristics."

On the other hand, as Turner was careful to remark in both his first and last sentences, the Bureau of the Census had officially declared the frontier extinct in 1890. What did that portend for the future of American civilization? Might not the frontier-generated uniqueness of the United States decay as rapidly as it had arisen? In Turner's own words: "He would be a rash prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life has now entirely ceased. ... But never again will such gifts of free land offer themselves."

The frontier thesis therefore appealed to optimists and pessimists, westerners and easterners alike. The extraordinary attention Turner's idea continues to receive attests the breadth of its resonance within our society.

Some two generations later, Walter Webb (1888-1963) extended Turner's thesis beyond American borders by propounding the idea of a Great Frontier extending all the way around the globe. Webb argued that this Great Frontier had the effect of bringing windfall profits into the European metropolis, and these profits in turn sustained a prolonged era of economic expansion from 1500 onward. Windfalls came in the form of free land for European settlers in Asia, Africa, and Australia as well as in North and South America, and also as a vast treasure trove of easily exploited gold and silver. But after about 1900 frontier windfalls became a thing of the past. The depression of the 1930s, in the midst of which Webb conceived his book, therefore registered the end of the frontier-based era of easy times not just in American but also in world history. In Webb's hands the frontier thesis thus became unambiguously pessimistic as to the future. Partly for that reason, perhaps, his idea has been far less influential than Turner's, and, except in Texas, was soon rejected by historians and forgotten by the public.

There were compelling reasons for this rejection. World War II and the thirty-year boom that followed certainly seemed to invalidate Webb's gloomy economic prophecies. In addition, after World War II American historians decided that the expansion of Europe was no longer a respectable field of academic endeavor. Instead, it became fashionable to assist the peoples of Asia and Africa in throwing off European imperialism by writing their histories for them. Accordingly, Webb's synoptic vision met short shrift. Experts found that frontiers in Australia, South Africa, and Latin America were not the same as the frontier in North America, where the behavior of French and English pioneers also differed. Meanwhile, Europe itself faded from historians' purview. National, regional, and thematically specialized research took pride of place as professors of European history at American colleges and universities responded to the breakup of European world power and to cheaper transatlantic air fares by trying to rival European scholars at their own game of improving accuracy by exhausting the archives.

There was, however, an oddly isolated intellectual counter-current in the postwar American academic scene. It stemmed from an effort, funded and sponsored by the Social Science Research Council, to transcend the traditional fragmentation of social studies as embodied in university departments by bringing the entire spectrum of humanistic and social science sensibilities to bear upon the study of a particular human society or some geographical region. Cross disciplinary area studies therefore nurtured large views without ever quite achieving academic respectability.

This was the situation that stimulated Louis Hartz to draw on his American studies background at Harvard to write a provocative book titled Founding of New Societies: Studies in the History of the United States, Latin America, South Africa, Canada, and Australia (New York, 1969). Hartz and his associates (for he farmed out detailed analysis of Latin America, South Africa, Canada, and Australia to like-thinking colleagues) found a meaningful pattern in the very diversity of frontier experiences. The local differences that, according to others, discredited Webb's synthetic idea made sense to Hartz because he saw in each overseas transplant a mere fragment of the original complexity of European class structures. Each such segment, torn from its original context, having rooted itself on new ground, subsequently evolved according to a logical dynamic of its own, and departed from the European norm and from other patterns of frontier development because of the fragmentary, lopsided character of the initial transfers.

Such a view affirmed the central importance of the European heritage in determining subsequent social and cultural development. Simultaneously, it emphasized deficiencies in what had been transferred to new ground. Hartz's vision of American culture and society therefore implied, without explicitly affirming, an enduring inferiority of the American "fragment" when compared to the full complexity of the European matrix whence it had been excised. In so characterizing American life he gave fresh voice to cultivated easterners' longstanding alienation from the crudity of the backwoods that Turner and Webb had deemed worthy of celebration. Terms of debate altered: witness the quasi-Marxist epithets "feudal," "bourgeois," and "radical" that Hartz used to characterize his new societies. But the debate continued to pit the effete east against the brash west as before.

Hartz's portrait of frontier societies seems to me therefore quite as provincial as Turner's and just as much in need of refurbishing. And refurbish we must if the history of the United States, taken as a whole, is to become really intelligible once again. For if we want to make sense of all the local, ethnic, and thematic dimensions of the American past, to which professional historians have devoted their principal efforts of late, we very much need a framework into which the entire national experience in all its facets will somehow fit. Otherwise more and more facts, however well attested in the sources, become a burden on the memory, and the study of our history runs the risk of turning into mere antiquarianism.

The trouble is that the over-optimistic view of earlier generations who saw the meaning of American history in material progress, guaranteed and sustained by liberty as experienced on the frontier and codified into the Constitution, now seems inadequate. Too many people were left out: blacks, women, ethnics.

Class consciousness, even in Louis Hartz's modulated form, turned out to be an entirely inadequate substitute. This was not solely because, as the official ideology of an unfriendly power, Marxism carried a taint of treason in post-World War II United States. The real deficiency of Marxist views was that class differences did not accurately coincide with the rather more acute ethnic, religious, and racial fissures in American society. Moreover, a vision emphasizing class struggle disrupted nationwide unity and fellow feeling and exacerbated frictions with other human beings who were uncomfortably close at hand. Accordingly, Marxist versions of United States history have remained sectarian, quite incapable of remedying the inadequacies of the older, evangelical and liberal, vision of our past.

Professional response among historians was to concentrate on detail, hoping that from more and more facts a better portrait of the whole would somehow emerge, quite of its own accord. But histories of all the various groupings into which Americans have consciously divided themselves, and might be divided by historians in retrospect, do not add up to a history of the nation as a whole any more than separate histories of each county in each state, if set side by side on library shelves, would provide a substitute for a history of the United States. Fragmented vision and close attention to detail do not necessarily improve accuracy. Focusing on separate trees may obscure the forest; preoccupation with an infinitude of differing leaves may allow the tree itself to disappear from view. Every increase in historical detail, in other words, risks losing sight of larger patterns which may be more important for public action and understanding than anything segmented sub-histories can discover.

The opposite extreme of looking at the history of this nation as part of a far larger process of European expansion may seem calculated to deprive the United States of its uniqueness. But if appropriately modulated to recognize both differences and uniformities, it seems to me that this perspective provides a far more adequate and comprehensive vision of our past than anything older nationalistic histories of liberty and prosperity had to offer. It puts the United States back into the world as one of a family of peoples and nations similarly situated with respect to the old centers of European civilization. Moreover, by taking seriously the Great Frontier phenomenon of modern times, we will find plenty of room for the downtrodden and poor as well as for the rich and successful, and thus avoid one of the main reproaches leveled against the liberal, establishmentarian version of the American past.

Here lay Webb's great achievement. He offered an appropriate framework for reappraising the history of this country by recognizing that our past was part of a global process of civilizational expansion. Progress and liberty, so dear to our forebears, played a part in the process; but so did their opposites — slavery and the destruction of all those non-European cultures and societies that got in the way. By accepting such a framework, therefore, the successes and the failures can all find appropriate scope in our history if we are wise and sensitive enough to see the persistent double-edgedness of change — destroying and preserving, denying and affirming established values of human life, everywhere and all the time.

Foolhardy though it may be, this is what I propose to undertake in these lectures. Foolhardy — but not impossible: for what matters is perspective and proportion, not detail.

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Webb's Great Frontier, like Turner's, was a region where men with skills derived from Europe met Amerindians and other "savage" peoples who were quite unable to resist the advances of white settlers. The "free land" that white men appropriated was land once used by others. The expansion of one society occurred only at the cost of another's destruction. As such, the American frontier was merely an extreme case of contact and collision between societies at different levels of skill — a pattern that runs throughout recorded history, and constitutes one of the main themes of the human past.

When peoples of approximately equal levels of skill, numbers, and organization meet on a frontier, drastic geographical displacements are unlikely. Minor fluctuations in the demarcation zone can be expected, with fluctuations in the incidence of victory and defeat. But as long as the parties remain nearly equal, no very drastic change can, by definition, occur. Minor borrowing back and forth is to be expected. Techniques and ideas that for some reason have novelty value may pass from one society to its neighbor. But it is only when inherited institutions on one side of the demarcation line cease to work well that more fundamental change becomes in the least likely, for most human beings most of the time prefer the safe and familiar to anything new. When, however, institutional decay weakens effective resistance to alien pressure, world-historical changes may ensue. Civilizational benchmarks like those signalized by Alexander's conquests of western Asia and Egypt, the Germanic invasions of the Roman empire, or the Moslem conquests of the Middle East and northern Africa record these extraordinary shifts.

Such events are rare and exceptional inasmuch as they fall outside the range of everyday encounters. An ordinary and therefore more important frontier phenomenon arose whenever one society abutted upon another that was somewhat less or more skilled. When the skill-short participant in such an encounter became aware of the difference, efforts to borrow skills needed to catch up and overtake the stronger neighbor were likely to follow. Alternatively, the weaker party might undertake measures to strengthen home defenses against an alien way of life that seemed to threaten something precious in the local cultural heritage. Far-ranging, deep-going social transformations may be triggered by either reaction.

This, indeed, seems to me to be the principal drive wheel of historic change. Encounters with strangers whose ways were different, and often threatening as well, were in all probability the main factor provoking and propagating inventions from the most ancient times to the present. And from the time when crossroads societies first achieved skills distinctly superior to those of their neighbors, i.e., since civilization first appeared on this earth, incessant interaction between more skilled and less skilled peoples has been in train. The upshot, despite numerous back-eddies and local breakdowns of civilized complexity, has been an ineluctable expansion of the portions of the globe subjected to or incorporated within civilized social structures.

Inside any given civilization an analogous interaction may also be detected between center and periphery, capital and provinces, upper and lower classes. For civilized societies were created and are sustained by dint of occupational differentiation and specialization. Varying skills and conflicting interests therefore divide civilized communities against themselves. Such internal frictions and differentiation merge with the polarity between civilized and fringe "barbarian" communities by almost imperceptible degrees, for civilizational boundaries are always imprecise.

My proposition boils down to the assertion that cultural differentiation generated historical change, whether within a civilized society, or across its borders. Climatic and other limits of course checked the interactive process. Agricultural skills could not readily be transferred to desert land. Disease barriers were also often important in checking expansion of dense forms of human settlement onto new ground. Protection costs against hostile military harassment were sometimes too high for cultivators to sustain on ground otherwise propitious for them. For all these reasons, the cultural landscape of the earth never approached uniformity, even though the high skills initially confined to a few civilized centers did tend to spread to new places as the generations succeeded one another.