Suggested Readings and Assignments for Chapter 6—“The Frontier: How Do We
Imagine the West?”
Week 1:
Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History”
(1893), 529-53
Week 2:
C.W. Dana, From The Great West; or the Garden of the World 555-57
Theodore Roosevelt, From Ranch Life in the Far West 557-62
Patricia Nelson Limerick, “Denial and Dependence” 571-86
Photograph of a “Dugout” Home, exterior 561
Photograph of a “Dugout” Home, interior 561
Plenty Coups, “Plenty Coups Travels to
Washington” 562-64
Albert Yava, “We Want to Tell You Something” 564-69
Map of Native American Diasporas 566
Photograph of Leadville, Colorado, ca. 1890 568
Week 3:
Leslie Marmon Silko, “America’s Debt to the Indian Nations: Atoning for a Sordid Past”
615-19
Silko, “The Border Patrol State” 619-24
N. Scott Momaday, “The American West and the Burden of Belief” 625-39
Week 4:
Jane Tompkins, “At the Buffalo Bill Museum, June 1988” 587-603
PBS Film on Cody (??)

Assignment 1: Summary and Evaluation (4-6 pages)
Option 1:
Our text suggests that the history of the West is the history of an expansion by people with European, Asian and African ancestries into a land populated by people with very different ancestries. For Frederick Jackson Turner this intersection of cultures on the frontier formed “a composite nationality for the American people” (541). In other words, he believes that the frontier experience made Americans a distinct people different from
Europeans. The frontier and all it means created a national identity. Turner sees only good in the traits of character he believes the Western frontier forced people to develop as they moved further away from the cities of New England.
Turner claims that “the over-mountain men grew more and more independent”
(539). This independence could be seen in his time as a demand for states rights rather than a strong federal government. It can also be seen in the need for self-reliance to develop into a desire for more control by citizens and less control by government. Life on the frontier demanded different behaviors than life in a city.
Summarize Turner’s argument being sure to include those characteristics he deemed constitute an American identity. Then select a current issue facing American citizens—the recession and recovery, the right to carry a gun, the attempts to provide better health care or the school voucher program. Evaluate Turner’s point that the characteristics of the people living on the frontier still continue in the national identity of
Americans today by explaining the position taken by Republicans and Democrats on the issue of your choice. Do you think our national identity continues to be shaped by these character traits?
You will want to use newspaper or magazine articles to identify the Republican and Democratic positions.
Option 2:
Popular Culture reflects a nation’s beliefs and values. Look at advertisements on
TV, in magazines or on the internet. Select two characteristic Turner says define our national identity and determine whether they are still reflected in current advertising.
To complete this assignment you will want to look at several popular advertisements which can be found on the internet (or elsewhere) to see if and in what ways characteristics Turner addresses are valued. If advertisers use them, then advertisers must believe that consumers will shop if they can identify with those characteristics.
Option 3:
After watching a current movie discuss the ways the main character possesses the qualities Turner so admires and decide in what ways these values serve that character

well and in what ways they do not. One film you may wish to analyze is Gone Baby
Gone.
To complete this assignment successfully, you may want to consider the motivating forces behind the actions of the main characters. What makes them act as they do?
Assignment 2: Argument and Counter Argument (4-6 pages)
Overview
To complete this assignment successfully, you must take a position, use two sources from
Chapter 6 of Cultural Conversations and two other sources such as newspaper or magazine articles, identify a contrary position to the one you argue and respond to that contrary position.
Turner describes the movement of New Englanders to the west as “winning the wilderness” and as providing “new opportunities” for the settlers (550). He describes the frontier as “the meeting point between savagery and civilization” (531) and suggests that each movement of the frontier westward was “won by a series of Indian Wars” (534).
In her essay “America’s Debt to the Indian Nations,” Leslie Marmon Silko sees the history of the American frontier in a very different way. Unlike Turner who believed that the frontier brought civilization to the west, Silko believes that the frontier represents a list of broken treaties and suffering for the indigenous population. She claims that the frontier never closed and that the “Indian Wars. . .have never really ended” (624). You may also consider Silko’s other essay, “The Border Patrol State,” included in Chapter 6.
Write an argumentative essay taking a position on the ways the mythology of western expansion used in Popular Culture does or does not continue to widen the gap between the Native American Nations and the rest of America. To support your argument consider literature by Native Americans and advertisements using Native Americans and cowboys to sell various products and to represent sports teams.
Assignment 3: Synthesis (6-8 pages)
Overview
In the third essay, you must develop a position about the way human beings should judge the past, synthesize material so that the sources you use from Cultural Conversations and from other places “talk” to one another, refer to several sources within one paragraph, and organize a sustained argument. You must also present a brief counter-argument which you will refute.
To support your position or to present the counter argument, you are required to use two scholarly sources as well as three essays from Chapter 6 of our text.
When Jane Tompkins toured the Buffalo Bill Historical Center she found that she was ambivalent in her feelings about what she saw and heard. She was disturbed by the

words of Buffalo Bill who wanted to be remembered not as an entertainer but as a man
“who opened Wyoming to the best of civilization” because currently the history of the frontier is being questioned for its treatment of the indigenous people, animals such as the buffalo and the landscape (588). However, Tompkins questions judging the past by the standards of the present when she writes, “Must we throw out all the wonderful qualities that Cody had, the spirit of hope and emulation that he aroused in millions of people because of the terrible judgments history has passed on the epoch of which he was part?”
(602)
Should the past be judged? Consider Tompkins statement: “It is not so much that we cannot learn from history as that we cannot teach history how things should have been” (602). Buffalo Bill is not the only historical figure to be re-imagined. Consider
Christopher Columbus. On the one hand Christopher Columbus, like Buffalo Bill, inspires adventure and fearlessness and on the other he represents imperialism and its destruction of other cultures.
Using at least three essays from Chapter 6 and at least two outside scholarly sources, write an essay addressing this question. Does society benefit when it judges the past by current standards and values? You may wish to investigate the way Christopher
Columbus or other historical figures, who once commanded respect from the American people, have been re-evaluated in recent years.
Assignment 4: On Supplemental Text
Bill O’Reilly, Culture Warrior —Ideas go back to Turner? City vs. Frontier? Less government vs. more government? Government gets in the way vs. government is helpful and insures the welfare of the people?
James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything your American History
Textbook Got Wrong.
Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto: Fistfight in Heaven.
New York:
Harper-Perennial, 1994.