Frontiers of Historical Imagination

Narrating the European Conquest of Native America, 1890-1990

Kerwin Lee Klein

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Edition: 1
• Year: 1997
• Topic: Histoire
• Print ISBN:
  9780520204638
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Amérique du Nord
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520924185

The American frontier, a potent symbol since Europeans first stepped ashore on North America, serves as the touchstone for Kerwin Klein's analysis of the narrating of history. Klein explores the traditions through which historians, philosophers, anthropologists, and literary critics have understood the story of America's origin and the way those understandings have shaped and been shaped by changing conceptions of history.

The American West was once the frontier space where migrating Europe collided with Native America, where the historical civilizations of the Old World met the nonhistorical wilds of the New. It was not only the cultural combat zone where American democracy was forged but also the ragged edge of History itself, where historical and nonhistorical defied and defined each other.

Klein maintains that the idea of a collision between people with and without history still dominates public memory. But the collision, he believes, resounds even more powerfully in the historical imagination, which creates conflicts between narration and knowledge and carries them into the language used to describe the American frontier. In Klein's words, "We remain obscurely entangled in philosophies of history we no longer profess, and the very idea of 'America' balances on history's shifting frontiers."


The American frontier, a potent symbol since Europeans first stepped ashore on North America, serves as the touchstone for Kerwin Klein's analysis of the narrating of history. Klein explores the traditions through which historians, philosophers, anthropol

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• BOOK ONE The Language of History What Was the Frontier Thesis?
• Histories and Hypotheses
• Explaining History
• Systems and Paradigms
• Narrative Explanations
• BOOK TWO From Spirit to System An American Dante: Frederick Jackson Turner
• Frontier Dialectics
• The Folly of Comedy
• Provincial Politics
• John Dewey and the Frontier Tragedy
• Pragmatism’s Conception of Emplotment
• Merle Curti’s Corporate Frontier
• BOOK THREE Time Immemorial The Indian Trade in Universal History
• William Christie MacLeod and the Tragic Savage
• Ruth Benedict and the Cultural Turn
• Ramon’s Frontier Tale
• Friedrich Nietzsche and the American Indians
• The End of History: A World without Culture
• The Science of Acculturation
• Ethno-History
• The Double Plot of Edward H. Spicer
• The Trouble with Tragedy
• Margins, Borders, Boundaries
• The End of Ethnohistory
• BOOK FOUR Histories of Language The Fourth Frontier of Henry Nash Smith
• Culture versus Art: Leo Marx
• Myth, Method, and Manliness
• Queer Frontiers
• Dialéctica Fronterizos: Gloria Anzaldúa
• A Note on Form
• Postwestern
• The Predicament of Culture
• The Problem of History
• AFTERWORD Language Is Story
• Notes
• A Bibliographic Note
• Index