Szia Mónika!
Ez nagyon,nagyon jó volt!!!
Köszönöm a gyerekek nevében is ,hogy lehetővé tetted.:)
Az jutott eszembe,hogy ha lehet ezt a prezentációt át tudnád
nekem küldeni,hogy holnap a gyerekekkel még át-
nézzük,illetve a 8. osztályokba is megyek helyettesíteni és ott
is bemutatásra kerülhetne?
Köszönöm!
Üdv:Anita
3. The notion of the frontier
The Frontier and American Character
The frontier has long held a special place in the hearts and minds of
Americans. Since shortly after the first colonies were founded on
the Atlantic coast, the frontier has beckoned to settlers. The frontier
was the wilderness just outside the civilized towns; it offered people
an opportunity to strike out and succeed on their own. In Europe, a
serf (a laborer who works the land and is owned by the lord who
owns the land) could never think of leaving his allotted plot of land
to rise from poverty, nor could a shopkeeper's son ever hope to run
his own store before his father's death. But in America, a hardy
immigrant could determine his or her own destiny on the unknown
frontier.
To venture into the wilderness took daring and courage. Pioneers
carried their belongings until they found a spot worth claiming.
Whole families or groups of people gathered to venture out into the
unknown with a wagon train of supplies. Forging their own way or
following others' dusty tracks, pioneers braved Indian attacks and
unknown environments to find a satisfactory plot of land. After
trekking hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles, the pioneers
built their homes and other necessary buildings, gathered and
hunted the bounties of the new land or cleared fields for crops, and
set about establishing the rules for their new life on the frontier.
Each of these tasks made up the process of "frontiering." Despite
the difficulties of frontiering—forging into unknown territory,
battling hostile enemies, braving harsh weather, suffering countless
dangers and possibly death in order to build a new life—pioneers
displayed an untiring optimism that things would go their way.
Defining the frontier
By definition, the American frontier meant the vast unclaimed land
west of white civilization. As whites spread westward from the
Atlantic coast, the boundary of the frontier also moved farther west.
As each group of pioneers carved out their spot on the frontier,
communities soon developed around them. The land became
"civilized" as pioneers forced Indians to move farther west, and the
small settlements grew into thriving towns. The newly civilized land
now bordered on the frontier.
From the first settlements at Jamestown in 1607, the process of
frontiering was repeated for three hundred years until the entire
continent was settled. For the first settlers, the West began at the
edge of Massachusetts Bay or Chesapeake Bay. By the colonial
period, civilization had reached the crest of the Appalachian
Mountains. After the War of 1812 (1812–14) settlements civilized
the land up to the banks of the Mississippi River. But it was not
until the mid-1800s that large numbers of settlers ventured farther
than the Mississippi River. These settlers arrived on the Pacific
coast and, in 1850, established the state of California. From that
point, on the frontier—the wild, unclaimed land—consisted of the
Great Plains, the desert Southwest, and the Rocky Mountains.
Four centuries after the discovery of America, the frontier had
disappeared. The hardiest fur traders and mountain men had
explored and settled parts of the West long before the mass western
emigrations demanded complete American control of the territory
between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. While the fur traders and
mountain men arrived first, and in some cases established American
claims to territories, mass emigrations do more to illustrate the
extraordinary pull of the frontier. Between 1800 and 1870, nearly
half a million Americans set out across the frontier. Trappers,
traders, farmers, and families set out on a journey of discovery. The
pioneers traveled across plains and deserts and over high mountain
passes, taking a chance that there was a better life somewhere to
the west. They endured weeks and even months of arduous travel in
order to reach their destination and build the communities that
defined the American West.
The call of the West
On the American frontier, as in few other places on earth, a person
amounted to the sum of his or her skills and endurance. Without the
established lines of ancestry and wealth that made up the social
structure in Europe, success on the American frontier, with its
wealth of natural resources and fertile lands, was open to anyone
strong enough or courageous enough to master it. Never before had
a society offered all its citizens the opportunity for success. In the
American West, "all men were future 'gentlemen' and deserved this
designation, all women were prospective 'ladies' and should be
treated as such. 'With us,' one frontiersman stoutly maintained, 'a
man's a man, whether he have a silk gown on him or not,'".
The American character
America is a young nation compared to European countries and
certainly an infant when measured against the ancient cultures of
China and Japan. The immigrants (mostly European) who raced to
America's shores during its first century brought with them their
own traditions and histories. Though the cultures these immigrants
brought with them were centuries old, the American continent
transformed the immigrants' way of life so dramatically that a new
American culture came to dominate their lives.
The frontier was the force that changed the lives of many
Americans. Historian Frederick Jackson Turner (1861–1932) first
described how the American frontier transformed these immigrants
to make the American character and culture unique. On July 12,
1893, Turner asserted that the call of the West played a bigger part
than the cultural legacies of Europe in forming American culture.
The trials and tribulations suffered by people who dared to enter an
unknown wilderness made them stronger, more self-reliant, and
more inventive. Turner maintained that the experience of picking up
their belongings to forge a new life in a new place made Americans
uniquely American. Turner credited the frontier with giving
Americans a "coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and
inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find
expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the
artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous
energy; that dominant individualism working for good and for evil;
and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes from
freedom." Each of these adventurous and self-reliant traits
continues to be associated with the American character.
Turner's thesis revolutionized the way Americans thought of
themselves. Between 1830 and 1870, a little more than 2 percent of
history textbooks cited the importance of the West in shaping the
American character, while the majority explained it in terms of
European ancestry. After Turner's thesis became widely accepted,
the Western experience became a rich source that historians could
mine for clues about the American character. Between 1900 and
1925, 93 percent of published student textbooks named the frontier
as the most influential force in the nation's development, according
to Paul O'Neil in The End and the Myth.
Spreading the myth
Some of the best evidence of the frontier's influence on the
American character comes from popular culture. In paintings and
sculpture, literature, dime novels, pulp magazines, live
performances, film, and television, western life was exaggerated
and glamorized. These retellings formed a western myth. The
heroes and villains who conquered the West lived such
extraordinary lives that their legends still thrive more than a
century after their deaths.
In 1823, novelist James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) introduced
his fictional frontier hero, Natty Bumppo, in The Pioneers. The
stories explore the conflicts between civilization and freedom and
between law and nature: wore buckskins, lived alone in the
wilderness, befriended some Indians and killed others, fought wild
animals, and remained modest throughout their exploits. Although
Cooper never visited the West, his character Leather-stocking
became one of the most influential and enduring characters in
American literature.
The heroes and outlaws of the real West inspired many of the
writers, who wrote about both real and imaginary westerners. The
novels did much to establish the western legend in the public's mind
with stories about circling wagons, U.S. Cavalry battles, rustlers,
cowboys, and strong (and beautiful) pioneer women. The Street and
Smith publishing house dedicated its dime novels to stories about
Buffalo Bill Cody (1846–1917).
The Wild West show
In 1883, Buffalo Bill Cody became the first real westerner to try to
cash in on the western myth. In his three-hour Wild West show,
Buffalo Bill, dressed in buckskin, offered audiences displays of
marksmanship and horsemanship. He hired real Native Americans
to wear warbonnets and reenact battles with sharpshooting scouts
or cowboys. Audiences flocked to the shows to get a glimpse of
what they thought were accurate slices of frontier life. Although
Cody did hire "real" cowboys and Indians, the show did not
realistically depict western life. These shows live on in the public
rodeos that started in the mid-1800s as relaxing festivals for real
cowboys. Today, rodeo continues as a sport that is far removed from
the task of bringing beef to market. Nevertheless, the public still
thrills to see displays of western skill.
