It has been said that after the long, difficult push across the American continent--destroying and creating, but always expanding--the United States reached the Pacific and, having nowhere else to go, had to turn and face itself. This, it seems to me, capsulizes the American experience as neatly as any idea I have come across in my two years of American Studies. It evokes the heedless, headlong advance in geographical terms that was coupled with a limitless faith in the general notion of unending technological and economic progress. But it also points up what was ignored during those pursuits and hints at how during the twentieth century, "the American Century," these previously disregarded problems made themselves known in increasingly strong ways. Those who believed most firmly in, and who benefited most from, the drive and bustle of America's first centuries now found themselves in the position of men as described by Sojourner Truth in her famous "Ain't I a Woman" speech (1851) on slaves' and women's rights: "man is in a tight place, the poor slave is on him, woman is coming on him, he is surely between a hawk and a buzzard" (118).
In the flow of information, even in courses organized around particular themes, it is sometimes very difficult to step back and get a perspective on the American experience as a whole. The clue to the perspective I have developed came with the discussion of the ideas of the historian Frederick Jackson Turner in the reading for the seminar on the literature of the American West.
In the 1890s Turner, looking for a way to stress the full historical significance of the American West, which was being ignored by academic historians, noted the government's official "closing" of the American frontier and concluded that "the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development" (quoted in Etulain 39). The Turner th...