frederick jackson turner's thesis held that the frontier

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Frederick Jackson Turner

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• Wisconsin Life - Frederick Jackson Turner and the History of the American West
• Weber State University - Biography of Frederick Jackson Turner
• National Humanities Center - The Significance of the Frontier in American History 1893
• Frederick Jackson Turner - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)

Frederick Jackson Turner (born November 14, 1861, Portage , Wisconsin , U.S.—died March 14, 1932, San Marino , California) was an American historian best known for the “ frontier thesis.” The single most influential interpretation of the American past, it proposed that the distinctiveness of the United States was attributable to its long history of “westering.” Despite the fame of this monocausal interpretation, as the teacher and mentor of dozens of young historians, Turner insisted on a multicausal model of history , with a recognition of the interaction of politics, economics , culture , and geography. Turner’s penetrating analyses of American history and culture were powerfully influential and changed the direction of much American historical writing.

Born in frontier Wisconsin and educated at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Turner did graduate work at Johns Hopkins University under Herbert Baxter Adams . Awarded a doctorate in 1891, Turner was one of the first historians professionally trained in the United States rather than in Europe. He began his teaching career at the University of Wisconsin in 1889. He began to make his mark with his first professional paper, “ The Significance of History” (1891), which contains the famous line “Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time.” The controversial notion that there was no fixed historical truth, and that all historical interpretation should be shaped by present concerns, would become the hallmark of the so-called “New History,” a movement that called for studies illuminating the historical development of the political and cultural controversies of the day. Turner should be counted among the “progressive historians,” though, with the political temperament of a small-town Midwesterner, his progressivism was rather timid. Nevertheless, he made it clear that his historical writing was shaped by a contemporary agenda.

Turner first detailed his own interpretation of American history in his justly famous paper, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” delivered at a meeting of historians in Chicago in 1893 and published many times thereafter. Adams, his mentor at Johns Hopkins , had argued that all significant American institutions derived from German and English antecedents . Rebelling against this view, Turner argued instead that Europeans had been transformed by the process of settling the American continent and that what was unique about the United States was its frontier history . (Ironically, Turner passed up an opportunity to attend Buffalo Bill ’s Wild West show so that he could complete “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” on the morning that he presented it.) He traced the social evolution of frontier life as it continually developed across the continent from the primitive conditions experienced by the explorer, trapper, and trader, through maturing agricultural stages, finally reaching the complexity of city and factory. Turner held that the American character was decisively shaped by conditions on the frontier, in particular the abundance of free land, the settling of which engendered such traits as self-reliance, individualism , inventiveness, restless energy, mobility, materialism, and optimism. Turner’s “frontier thesis” rose to become the dominant interpretation of American history for the next half-century and longer. In the words of historian William Appleman Williams, it “rolled through the universities and into popular literature like a tidal wave.” While today’s professional historians tend to reject such sweeping theories, emphasizing instead a variety of factors in their interpretations of the past, Turner’s frontier thesis remains the most popular explanation of American development among the literate public.

For a scholar of such wide influence, Turner wrote relatively few books. His Rise of the New West, 1819–1829 (1906) was published as a volume in The American Nation series, which included contributions from the nation’s leading historians. The follow-up to that study, The United States, 1830–1850: The Nation and Its Sections (1935), would not be published until after his death. Turner may have had difficulty writing books, but he was a brilliant master of the historical essay. The winner of an oratorical medal as an undergraduate, he also was a gifted and active public speaker. His deep, melodious voice commanded attention whether he was addressing a teachers group, an audience of alumni, or a branch of the Chautauqua movement . His writing, too, bore the stamp of oratory; indeed, he reworked his lectures into articles that appeared in the nation’s most influential popular and scholarly journals.

Many of Turner’s best essays were collected in The Frontier in American History (1920) and The Significance of Sections in American History (1932), for which he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1933. In these writings Turner promoted new methods in historical research, including the techniques of the newly founded social sciences , and urged his colleagues to study new topics such as immigration , urbanization , economic development , and social and cultural history . He also commented directly on the connections he saw between the past and the present.

The end of the frontier era of continental expansion, Turner reasoned, had thrown the nation “back upon itself.” Writing that “imperious will and force” had to be replaced by social reorganization, he called for an expanded system of educational opportunity that would supplant the geographic mobility of the frontier. “The test tube and the microscope are needed rather than ax and rifle,” he wrote; “in place of old frontiers of wilderness, there are new frontiers of unwon fields of science.” Pioneer ideals were to be maintained by American universities through the training of new leaders who would strive “to reconcile popular government and culture with the huge industrial society of the modern world.”

Whereas in his 1893 essay he celebrated the pioneers for the spirit of individualism that spurred migration westward, 25 years later Turner castigated “these slashers of the forest, these self-sufficing pioneers, raising the corn and livestock for their own need, living scattered and apart.” For Turner the national problem was “no longer how to cut and burn away the vast screen of the dense and daunting forest” but “how to save and wisely use the remaining timber.” At the end of his career, he stressed the vital role that regionalism would play in counteracting the atomization brought about by the frontier experience. Turner hoped that stability would replace mobility as a defining factor in the development of American society and that communities would become stronger as a result. What the world needed now, he argued, was “a highly organized provincial life to serve as a check upon mob psychology on a national scale, and to furnish that variety which is essential to vital growth and originality.” Turner never ceased to treat history as contemporary knowledge, seeking to explore the ways that the nation might rechannel its expansionist impulses into the development of community life.

Turner taught at the University of Wisconsin until 1910, when he accepted an appointment to a distinguished chair of history at Harvard University . At these two institutions he helped build two of the great university history departments of the 20th century and trained many distinguished historians, including Carl Becker , Merle Curti, Herbert Bolton , and Frederick Merk, who became Turner’s successor at Harvard. He was an early leader of the American Historical Association , serving as its president in 1910 and on the editorial board of the association’s American Historical Review from 1910 to 1915. Poor health forced his early retirement from Harvard in 1924. Turner moved to the Huntington Library in San Marino, California , where he remained as senior research associate until his death.

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The frontier in American history

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Literature/Film Quarterly

Frontier mythographies: savagery and civilization in frederick jackson turner and john ford (2007), arthur redding, editor’s note:.

This is the first installment in a new series of articles from the archives of LFQ . I chose this article by Arthur Redding from 2007 for two primary reasons: first, I have repeatedly used the article in teaching my classes on the western and how that genre resonates within specific political and historical contexts; and second, I was curious about how Redding would look back on this work in light of our current moment where it seems like the rules of political engagement have been redrawn.

-- Elsie Walker

Preface to “Frontier Mythographies: Savagery and Civilization in Frederick Jackson Turner and John Ford”

In the early 2000s, when I was writing about American culture during the Cold War (a project of which “Frontier Mythographies” formed a part), I was struck by the ways in which contemporary political and cultural discourses drew on the available repertoire of mythic American images, icons, and narratives, the myth of the frontier prominent among them. Whatever else they signified, the terror attacks of 9/11 had shattered easy complacencies about America’s dominance over what President George Bush Seniorhad termed the “New World Order” that emerged with the collapse of the Soviet Union. As I saw it, attempts were being made (with equivocal success) to resurrect somewhat shopworn mythic narratives about America in order to make sense of contemporary life after 9/11 and to legitimate American actions in the world.

In the late 1940s and 50s, the golden age of Hollywood westerns, filmic narratives about the American frontier had buttressed a Cold War logic of heroic American expansionism. During the early sixties, however, many assumptions of Cold War culture began to dissolve. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance reflected those fractures, exposed the mythic (as opposed to historical and material) construction of American power, even as director John Ford aimed (paradoxically enough) to endorse a Kennedy-esque recalibration of frontier myth to render the story of western conquest humane, inclusive, and tolerant.

According to this Imaginary, Kennedy could still function as an ideal, masculine, and benevolent protector: as both East coast elite (Stoddard/Stewart) and frontier hero (Doniphon/Wayne)—a man capable of deploying extreme violence in defense of righteousness—but also a man with a heart, with compassion, with an intellect. At the same time, the film exposes his pretense to competence and power.. The mythic ideal of the good leader, the film acknowledges, cannot be sustained: “the man who shot Liberty Valance” is a construct, a myth, a phony, a media creation.

What remains of the mythic frontier narrative in 2019, I wonder, as I look back on the early 1960s, on the early part of the 21st century? And what remains of those Bush-era efforts to resuscitate myths of a virile America that was both benevolent and heroic?

In certain ways, Frederick Jackson Turner’s mythic mapping of America still holds firm: in 2016, we could still map voting patterns more or less along the lines Turner drew: blue states huddled along the coasts, red states on the far side of Turner’s frontiers. Westerners remain devoted to what they understand as liberty. (This pattern holds true at least for older white voters; changing demographics are rapidly changing the politics of states across the American South, Midwest, and West). Even so, libertarian-inflected American populism has chosen a mighty strange hero to carry its banner. One wonders what repertoire of mythicized American masculinity his persona draws upon. Beloved as he may be in the heartland, Donald Trump is hardly a cowboy hero. Unlike Bush, unlike Reagan, unlike Kennedy, he doesn’t even pretend to be.

And westerns may no longer have a whole lot to say. While it is true that excellent westerns continue to be made and such television serials as Deadwood (2004-06) have had their share of popularity, Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992) may well be the last western movie of any genuine political significance. Unforgiven can be read effectively as an elegy for the Cold War: the “good guy” effectively wins the day, but no good can be salvaged. All pretense to moral clarity, righteousness, or justice, has been abandoned by film’s end, as Will Munny (Eastwood) proclaims to Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman) just before murdering him: “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.” No-one has made credible claims about the revival of the western since then. Even Eastwood, who in real life dissimulates nostalgia for an Eisenhower-era model of straitlaced Republicanism—he endorsed Mitt Romney, but has been blessedly mum about Trump—has largely abandoned the genre.

No doubt Trump has his mythic antecedents in American lore: the snake oil salesman, a huckster, a swindler, a braggart, a liar. Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry, P.T. Barnum, perhaps, George C. Parker, a touch of Gatsby, a dose of L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz (and a dollop of MGM’s). Mark Twain, were he writing today, would do Trump justice, so too would Ambrose Bierce. To his adoring fans, Trump comes off as an impish but loveable boaster and braggart, a plucky loser, who doesn’t quite know he is a loser: Harold Hill, in The Music Man , Thurber’s Walter Mitty. To his enemies, he is a villain: Melville’s diabolic Confidence Man, perhaps, but not Liberty Valance. Trump is hardly a cowboy hero, unless he might have held a minor role on the television comedy F-Troop . Jim Backus might have played him as part Mr. Magoo, part Thurston Howell.

The most prophetic film contemporaneous with Liberty Valance turns out to be John Frankenheimer’s paranoid political thriller, The Manchurian Candidate (1962): the right-wing nutter ascending to the White House really is a KGB asset, unwittingly working on behalf of communist China! In that film, at least, Major Marco (Frank Sinatra) was able to save the day, preventing foreign agents from taking over the presidency. Even Hollywood, it seems, pales before the chaos that is American politics. Perhaps mobster films come closest to describing the universal corruption and inanity of Trumpism. And gangster movies are enjoying something of a resurgence today: Scott Cooper’s Black Mass (2015); Andrea Di Stefano’s The Informer (2019); Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman (2019). But, in what film does the con man make it all the way to the Presidency? In what farcical world is vice so rewarded? In what universe, we might ask, does a schlub like Donald Trump get to be an alpha male?

The answer is simple: in the Marvel Universe. Ever heard of Peter Parker?

As contemporary allegories of power and justice, Hollywood superhero films are to post-Cold War America what Hollywood westerns were to Cold War America. The Hollywood western was ascendant from the formative years of the Cold War between, say, 1948 (the year the two most classic instances of the form were produced: Ford’s Fort Apache and Howard Hawkes’ Red River ) through to 1962 ( Liberty Valance ), when, as I argue, the ideological buttresses of Cold War liberalism began to founder. We can read the popular trajectory of the superhero film along the same lines. Since 1989 (the year Tim Burton’s Batman appeared and the year the Berlin wall came down), we have witnessed the ascent of genre; and the years between 9/11/01 and 2019 mark the apex of their popularity. Not only are superhero movies cinema ( pace Scorsese!), they may well be the most telling cinema of our times, in terms of how they dramatically expose our political unconscious.  They are moral fables and fantasies where an almost unlimited imperial power is only haphazardly yoked to an ethics of universal righteousness: time and again, in these movies, has the superhero to measure her or his moral fitness to wield the superpowers with which she or he has been endowed. And so too America. Like the Cold War western, too, superhero films cover a broad spectrum of ideological positions, from the cynical left libertarianism of Zack Snyder’s The Watchmen (2009) to the anarcho-nihilism of Matthew Vaughn’s Kick-Ass (2010) to the Afrofuturism of Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther (2018).

We can push the analogy even further: what The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance was to Kennedy’s America, so Todd Phillips’s 2019 Joker is to Trump’s America. On the one hand, the film functions an unqualified endorsement of Trump’s politics of white ressentiment . Read across the grain, however, Joker exposes and laments the ideological barrenness and vacuity of Trumpism.

In an age of “fake news,” I can’t let the depiction of the fourth estate in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance go unremarked. Note that Ford’s movie presents a heroic vision of the press as speaker of truth to power, in the form of Shinbone Star publisher Dutton Peabody (Edmond O’Brien), who is terrorized for his commitment to unveil public corruption. Yet, later, in the hands of editor Maxwell Scott (Carleton Young), we witness the Star as propagandist, as spinner of ideological yarns, as toady to the impostures of the powerful.  Can the press be both? Much as Trump claims to despise MSNBC, he would not hold office but for the airtime he was given by the liberal press. Trump is as purely a creature fabricated by the popular media as is the legendary man who shot Liberty Valance.

-- Arthur Redding

“T his is the West, sir,” declares the newspaperman Maxwell Scott (Carleton Young), editor of the Shinbone Star, toward the conclusion of John Ford’s classic western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) (see Figure 1). “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” In this iconic and iconographic scenario Scott tears up his notes and decides not to print the “true story” of Liberty Valance, thus accentuating the media’s complicity in defining and perpetuating the myth of the American frontier. As Catherine Ingrassia notes, “the film demonstrates the unreliability of categories like ‘news,’ ‘history,’ and even ‘identity’ while affirming the power of language to construct a reality based on deception” (5). Legend becomes fact. On the frontier, myth or legend usurps the place and power of history; we might even say that the frontier exists fundamentally as myth.

And it is a myth that is at the very core of American self-understanding, as such different thinkers as Henry Nash Smith, Patricia Nelson Limerick, and Richard Slotkin insist. For Smith, whose 1950 Virgin Land virtually defined the “myth and symbol school” of American Studies that was to dominate Cold War representations of American identity, competing thematic understandings of the frontier—as the key to international trade, as character forming crucible of the American character, and as “garden of the world”—dominated nineteenth-century efforts to build and defend the nation. Such struggles, mythologized in works of literature, film, and history, continue to provide the defining materials within an evolving repertoire of American self-conceptions. Limerick writes:

As a mental artifact, the frontier has demonstrated an astonishing stickiness and persistence. […] Packed full of nonsense and goofiness, jammed with nationalist self-congratulation and toxic ethnocentrism, the image of the frontier is nonetheless universally recognized and laden with positive associations. […] Somewhere in the midst of this weird hodgepodge of frontier and pioneer imagery lie important lessons about the American identity, sense of history, and direction for the future. (94)

Limerick, a historian of the American west, wants to repeal the mythic stature of the frontier and replace it with a clearer sense of what actually happened—and still happens—in the American west. But the legend is already in print; the west was written as myth; that is, any deployment of the language of the frontier resurrects an entire mythic apparatus of American genesis, character, and values. Even today, Limerick writes, “the scholarly understanding formed in the late nineteenth century still governs most of the public rhetorical uses of the word ‘frontier’” (94). The scholar she indicts as primary mythmaker is Frederick Jackson Turner.

Frederick Jackson Turner’s notorious and troubling 1893 paper, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” set out the fundamental structural tensions underlying these myths of American genesis. His famous “frontier thesis,” which makes the extravagant and sweeping claim that the frontier, given “its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain[s] American development” (55), places the frontier at the heart of the American self-imagination. The frontier, which he defines variously as “the existence of an area of free land” (55) and “the meeting point of savagery and civilization” (56), furnishes the environmental conditions under which “Americans” come into being. In his methodological synopsis, Turner insists that the historian’s task is to reveal the underlying “vital forces […] behind constitutional forms and modifications,” that determine the “evolution” of social, economic, political, religious, and cultural institutions from simple into “complex organs” (56). In keeping with the great nineteenth-century endeavor of transforming history into a “science,” Turner reveals himself as a rigorously Darwinian thinker; he applies the same systematic approach to explain the evolution of new social and historical species—the American—as Darwin applied to natural history: natural selection and the struggle for survival, survival of the fittest under conditions of scarcity, adaptation, and the development from primitive to complex organisms. The agonistic, dynamic model of complex evolution traces out the genesis of the American as a new organism, a new historical species, in a very real sense:

The wilderness has been interpenetrated by lines of civilization growing even more numerous. It is like the steady growth of a complex nervous system for the originally simple, inert continent. If one would understand why we are today one nation, rather than a collection of isolated states, he must study this economic and social consolidation of the country. In this progress from savage conditions lie topics for the evolutionist. (62-63)

The uniqueness of American development, according to Turner, lies in the manner in which society and social beings were perpetually compelled to re-adapt themselves to ever-changing environmental conditions; pioneers were forced to either “adapt or perish” (53). This openness to adaptation, for Turner, “this fluidity of American life” is what distinguishes “a new product that is American” (57).

Dominant among the features of this new “American” was a cherished system of American values, which still figures largely in political and cultural discussions of American life. Two of these values are tolerance and individualism, which, according to Turner’s framework, must be understood as evolving from the conditions of frontier settlement rather than merely being transplants of Enlightenment ideas originally developed in Europe. According to one distinct strain of Jeffersonian thinking, for example, a functioning republican democracy demands vast quantities of space, a notion that in part underwrote the western expedition of Lewis and Clark. In 1803, Jefferson’s administration insisted upon making the Louisiana Purchase, which he considered not simply an investment in land and natural resources, but equally a broad experiment in the national character-building necessary to produce a healthy and functioning citizenry. The virtuous citizen must, like the virtuous nation itself, be independent, self-reliant; Jefferson’s ideal yeoman farmer was envisioned as the male head of a household who could produce enough food to feed his own family and household, effectively training him in the frugal but strenuous exercise of responsibly administering one’s own freedom. Such landowners would be wise and effective statesmen and legislators, it followed. But individual land ownership—and the desire to own one’s own home is even today at the core of the “American dream”—also formed the moral basis for enhancing what we today would call an acceptance of diversity. “The larger our association,” explains Jefferson in his second inaugural address as he defends his expansionist policies, “the less will it be shaken by local passions” (318). Freedom of speech and of thought, freedom of the press, and certainly freedom of religion, depended on people living far enough apart so that their differences would not lead to bloodshed. Anyone is free to think and practice pretty much anything they like, as long as they do it “over there,” out of my sight and, preferably, out of earshot. As long as each group had its own turf, and as long as there was enough space between the different neighborhoods, freedom of religion, for example, could be accommodated (the process repeats itself in the history of American urbanization, as different religious and ethnic groups mark their own geographical neighborhoods and their own cultural and labor territories as well). A nation could tolerate even mutually hostile viewpoints if there was a frontier, if there was free land, according to Jeffersonian thinking. Jefferson—whom Smith terms “the intellectual father of the American advance to the Pacific” (15), and whose political lineage he traces in such subsequent advocates of western mobility as Thomas Hart Benton, Asa Whitney, William Gilpin, and even Walt Whitman—and Turner were early advocates of what would come to be known as the “safety valve” theory of American development. 1

According to the “safety valve” argument, the existence of the frontier allowed the United States to cultivate a functioning democracy by avoiding full-scale violent conflicts between competing social and economic forces. As long as there was open territory into which antagonists might expand, final conflict between contending forces might be avoided: “so long as free land exists, the opportunity for competency exists” (Turner 73). In America, for example, labor and capital confronted each other in a long series of struggles. However, the revolutions that shook Europe all through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century never took place in the US. The idea was that the expanding labor force, composed increasingly of European immigrants by the end of the nineteenth century, did not have to confront capital in an enclosed territory. Tensions and working conditions were as dismal in the company towns of New England as in Manchester, of course; but immigrants unhappy with their lot could simply pack up and move west, transforming themselves into homesteaders and farmers. Their right to avail themselves of land in the territories was secured by the Homestead Act of 1862; the life and conditions of Slavic and German plains settlers are perhaps best described in the novels of Willa Cather. My Ántonia , for example, envisions a progressive and functioning “multi-cultural” society overseen by the benevolent patronage of tolerant aristocrats (embodied primarily in the character of Jim Burden), where the economic and political power of the elite east-coast trusts is reinvigorated by the spiritual and cultural resources of Midwest immigrant populism. (And despite Turner’s contention that the frontier closed in 1890, the government, in collusion with the railroads, kept bringing displaced Europeans to the plains well into the twentieth century.)

The frontier promotes individualism; if arms and munitions were the means to self-sufficiency (and the frontier was a violent place), open land and space nonetheless ensured that differences can be tolerated with a minimum of bloodshed, according to this logic. At the same time, however, Turner points to the “nationalizing tendency of the West” (71). “The legislation which most developed the powers of the national government […] was conditioned on the frontier” (68). The need to regulate commerce and administer land in the newly opened territories necessitated the construction of a strong federal government, whose power would ultimately be secured by Lincoln’s administration when the North won the Civil War. It was the federal government that legislated internal improvements in the west and distributions of the lands, while it also secured the power of the railroad; it was the federal government that regulated interstate and inter-territorial commerce; it was the federal government that ultimately appropriated the right to adjudicate between competing social groups and to police the West. Once the federal army had become, under Lincoln, a constitutional fait accompli , once the nation-state had secured for itself what the sociologist Anthony Giddens terms a “monopoly on violence,” troops were sent to the Plains and the Northwest to settle the “Indian” question in a series of wars that effectively ended with the massacre of the Teton Sioux at Wounded Knee in 1890.

And it is in 1890, argues Turner, that the frontier was closed. The nation was effectively finished, and the new species, an American, had evolved. “And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history” (77). While most commentators underline Turner’s optimism about the continuing vitality of frontier virtues, Turner in fact closes his essay with a series of prophetic and rather pessimistic speculations about the shape of the future. Tolerance and individualism, he points out, are perpetually in conflict. What he warns of, precisely, are the dangers that will follow once the safety valve has been sealed up. For the two great achievements of the frontier, the construction of a libertarian American individual and the production of centralized Federal power, are directly opposed to one another. The western individual fears and distrusts federal authority; in turn the national government, for the sake of social harmony, seeks to limit unregulated individualism. Once the frontier is closed, Turner implies, Americans must find ways to live with our differences in an enclosed space. Too much liberty cannot be tolerated.

And Turner is explicit about the dangers. “The most important effect of the frontier,” writes Turner, “has been in the promotion of democracy. […] As has been indicated the frontier is productive of individualism” (72) or what his older contemporary, Ralph Waldo Emerson, would so famously term “self-reliance.” But these same values that ensured survival under frontier conditions could now constitute a menace. “Complex society is precipitated by the wilderness into a kind of primitive organization based on the family. The tendency is anti-social. It produces antipathy to control and particularly to any direct control. The tax-gatherer is viewed as a representative of oppression” (72). And thus “the democracy born of free land, strong in selfishness and individualism, intolerant of administrative experience and education, and pressing individual liberty beyond its proper bounds, has its danger as well as its benefits” (73). Turner lists several examples of the dangers of unregulated individualism in the nineteenth century. For the purposes of my argument, however, I want to demonstrate how Turner’s systematic theories dominate the mythic tensions of the American self-imagination all through the twentieth century.

Turner, as revisionist historians have pointed out repeatedly, is a dismal historian. His primary failure, perhaps, is that his method is far too schematic and reductive, and, though Turner was no bigot, his ideas consequently harbor the systemic racism endemic to the nineteenth century. He views the frontier as merely the dramatic struggle between “savagery and civilization,” that is, between indigenous or primitive Native Americans and a superior Anglo-American culture. But the historical record is infinitely more complex, and there were various other folks about, as contemporary western historian Sarah Deutsch points out. Neither do the civilized or the savage constitute distinctly homogenized social groups. In any social struggle, and particularly in the American west, historical

shifts not only occurred in relations between majority and minority groups but affected relations among minority groups. Spanish Americans and Mexicans also constructed definitions of “otherness.” All of the groups called the intimate connections among race, sex and gender systems into play in this process of reshaping cultural and social boundaries. They embedded this constellation of issues in a particularly western heritage of conquest and territoriality. (Deutsch 111)

What Turner offers is not a history of the west, but a damned good story of its settlement. For all his aspirations to scientism, Turner is primarily a spinner of yarns, compressing the complex of historical factions and struggles into a tight dramatic narrative of a struggle between protagonist and antagonist, between savagery and civilization. The teleological thrust of narrative, of course, ensures there will be a winner and a loser, that there is a moral dimension to the tale, that values can be assigned to various characters, and so forth. Americans are produced, we might say, not simply through historical experiences but more powerfully through the stories that we tell about them; cultural myths and stories enable us to locate our destiny and fabricate our collective and individual identities from the chaos and complexity of lived history. Who we are is less a product of our raw experience than the narrative structure that delimits and describes our experience; and so where Turner fails as a historian, he succeeds brilliantly as a mythmaker. And so, while “experience” itself is never innocent of a narrative structure, the compelling political question involves the variety of ways in which nation narrates itself and the ways in which those historical and mythic narratives are enlisted in contemporary struggles.

The American political and social imagination is still underwritten by the mythicized frontier in exactly the terms Turner lays out. The struggle between federalism and libertarianism virtually defines our national elections, for example. When a presidential candidate wants to “get big government off our backs,” he dresses up like a cowboy, as did Ronald Reagan, who twice ran successfully on an anti-federalist platform. In the west, “tax-and-spend” liberals are demonized as east-coast Washington insiders and ignorant bureaucrats, as tax-collectors, and, ultimately, as effeminate. Libertarian values are strong in the heartland; we think of ourselves as self-reliant, fiercely independent, and competent. We like guns and we like settling things for ourselves. Membership in the National Rifle Association is high; lawyers and legislators are frowned upon. Consider the two most recent presidential elections: the south and most of the Plains states were won by George W. Bush, posing as a rugged entrepreneur and oilman, as a westerner, a “good old boy.” His opponents Al Gore, who set himself up as an efficient legislator, and John Kerry, by contrast, won in New England, the Atlantic seaboard, and California. Turner’s mythic vision of federal power versus individualism describes these tensions. 2

So, too, can the mythicized language of a struggle between savagery and civilization describe the mythic dimensions of our economic and social life. The rugged individualism of the frontier serves as a metaphor for unregulated entrepreneurial capitalism. On the frontier, individual speculation can threaten the social good, and Turner describes the wildcat banking scandals of the nineteenth century in terms that prophecy the Saving and Loans scandals of the nineteen eighties. During those oil-boom years, unregulated Savings and Loans institutions (not banks, which are under federal supervision) in Texas and Louisiana (obviously) loaned money to shady venture capitalists for all sorts of crooked schemes; when the market went bust billions were simply lost. The Federal government stepped in and protected the institutions (deregulation is usually an alibi for corporate welfare, but our current president’s brother, Neil Bush, did serve time). Consider another example. Timothy McVeigh was libertarian, and hated the national government. He blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal building on 19 April 1995—where else but in Oklahoma City? The event that had most spurred McVeigh’s wrath was the 1993 standoff between the Clinton Administration and the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas. David Koresh did something as American as apple pie: just like the puritans, just like the Mormons, he founded his own religion and moved west, where he supposed that no-one would bother him. And he protected his right to do so with guns: he was initially targeted by the federal government for illegal possession of firearms. On April 19, when the federal forces moved in after a long standoff, a fire was started and the Branch Davidian compound burned to the ground. As Americans, we live out our mythic dramas in terms supplied by Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis: “the democracy born of free land, strong in selfishness and individualism, intolerant of administrative experience and education, and pressing individual liberty beyond its proper bounds, has its dangers” (73).

In his encyclopedic cultural analysis of frontier mythologies, Richard Slotkin defines myths as “those stories drawn from a society’s history that have acquired through persistent usage the power of symbolizing that society’s ideology and of dramatizing its moral consciousness—with all the complexities and contradictions that consciousness may contain” (5). Further, he argues:

the Myth of the Frontier is our oldest and most characteristic myth, expressed in a body of literature, folklore, ritual, historiography, and polemics produced over a period of three centuries. According to this myth-historiography, the conquest of the wilderness and the subjugation or displacement of the native Americans who originally inhabited it have been the means to our achievement of a national identity, a democratic polity, an ever-expanding economy, and a phenomenally dynamic and “progressive” civilization. (10)

Perhaps the purest proponent of frontier mythologies is the film director John Ford, whose various westerns in different ways dramatize the emergence of America from the struggles between savagery and civilization. His 1939 Stagecoach defines both the iconography of the west (Ford filmed this and many subsequent westerns in Monument Valley, Utah) and the quintessential western character: Stagecoach introduces the John Wayne persona, a figure whose relentless and larger-than-life individualism—the embodiment of the frontiersman—is starkly defined (see Figure 2). Never after will Wayne play anything else apart from “John Wayne.” According to Slotkin, Wayne is the cinematic version of the classic frontiersman, the “man who knows Indians.” Borrowing from James Fennimore Cooper, Slotkin defines the archetype:

As the “man who knows Indians,” the frontier hero stands between the opposed worlds of savagery and civilization, acting sometimes as mediator or interpreter between races and cultures but more often as civilizations most effective instrument against savagery—a man who knows how to think and fight like an Indian, to turn their own methods against them. (16)

On the frontier, one must be somewhat savage in order to secure and defend civilization. Wayne is the successor to a long lineage of this figure (Leatherstocking or Hawkeye, in Cooper’s romances, Daniel Boone, Davey Crockett, Huckleberry Finn, among others). In Turner’s terms, the frontiersman is both savage and civilized; he exists at the cusp of settlement. He has learned enough from Native American Indians to survive in the wilderness, and yet he puts his considerable skills to use in the service of civilization. What is key, however, is that the civilization he fights for will have no place for him; he is himself too primitive, too savage, to fit comfortably in the new social order. In cultural terms, as Smith has suggested in his genealogy of types, it is the tension between the civilized, genteel hero, who conforms to the conventions of the genteel romance and who represents civilization, and the potentially subversive character of the anarchic frontiersman, that underpins the history of the western genre. Once the frontier is closed, as Turner acknowledges, self-reliance becomes dangerous, and the frontiersman risks “pressing individual liberty beyond its proper bounds” (73). Leatherstocking, Crockett, and Finn continually light out for the territories, seek new frontiers, new adventures. There is no place for them in a newly civilized society.

And so too will Wayne’s character, Tom Doniphon, be sacrificed in Ford’s film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence . This movie represents a Kennedy-esque tweaking of the mythic frontier heritage, and best dramatizes the tensions between an imagined communal consensus, overseen, administered, and protected by a benign federal power, and a menacing western libertarianism that must be subdued if the community is to survive. 3 At a primary level, this film, like almost every western ever produced in Hollywood, imagines a compromise between individualism and communalism (the violent sacrifice of the savage is usually the way in which the compromise is effected). Yet, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance ironically confesses to the very limits of this vision of harmony. The mythic apparatus more or less collapses in on itself; and the film confesses that the myth is simply that: a lie that is trying to pass itself off as genuine history. “This is the West, sir,” Post announces, and “when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Until that point, the press, as embodied in the figure of Dutton Peabody (Edmund O’Brien), had served as the purveyor of truth; here the third estate confesses itself to be in the service of mythic propaganda (see Figure 3). And not only does the film self-consciously confess that Jackson’s frontier historiography amounts to legend rather than “truth,” it exposes the very limits of the legend. That is, Ford’s 1962 work acknowledges that the frontier struggle between savagery and civilization no longer provides mythic sustenance for the America of the 1960s.

The film is beautifully structured around the theme of doubles, each symbolically aligned with either “savagery” or “civilization.” The story takes place somewhere in the American southwest when, in Turner’s terms, the “ranchers’ frontier” is being definitively replaced by “the farmers’ frontier.” The political backdrop is the struggle between the lawless cattle barons who wish the region to remain a territory (the wild west, which they rule by force) and the newly arrived population of smaller farmers (many Mexican or immigrant), who wish to fence in and cultivate the land and who seek to enter the federal Republic as a state. The cattle barons, in an irony that Dick Cheney might appreciate, represent corporate power, in an unholy alliance with lawless “savagery”; they are associated with guns, wilderness, brute power, the desert. Their hired goon is the aptly named Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin), a character who is savagery personified (see Figure 4).

Valance, as his name implies, represents in Turner’s language the menace of unregulated liberty. In the town of Shinbone on the other side of the Pickaxe river the forces of civilization are arrayed: the town, the law, technological progress in the form of the railroad, representative democracy, a free press, racial tolerance, and so forth, all championed by the greenhorn from the east, Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart). The stagecoach in which he arrives is held up by Liberty Valance. A gentleman, Stoddard comes to assist one of the women Valance is terrorizing, and he is viciously beaten and left for dead in the desert. His law books, representing both an orderly society and literacy, are the central targets of Valance’s savagery: “I’ll teach you the law of the west,” Valance screams sadistically.

Stoddard is rescued by Tom Doniphon (Wayne), who finds him lying prone in the desert and carries him to town. Doniphon is both savage and civilized, ruthless and gentlemanly. He can read, for example, but not very well. He owns cattle, but his ranch is small. He lives in the desert, but sympathizes with the townsfolk. He can handle a gun, but puts his gun in the service of the law. He brings a wild desert rose to his lover, Hallie (Vera Miles). “Ever seen a real rose, Hallie?” asks Stoddard (see Figure 5). Stoddard represents law and order. He wishes to arrest the outlaw Valance, not to kill him. He hangs his shingle out as a lawyer, but ends up a schoolteacher, giving lessons on the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights to the United States Constitution. Under Doniphon’s tutelage, Stoddard’s task is to “civilize” the savage territory.

Yet the rights to civilization must be secured through violence; even the new west must be won. As in many westerns, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a drama of masculinity. If eastern civilization is too effeminate, then the west is too driven by testosterone. A compromise must be achieved, a social balance. Law and order can only be secured, according to the myth, when one is capable of violence. Civilization depends upon a small homeopathic injection of savagery. To civilize the west, then Ransom must take a page from Doniphon’s book and become a little bit savage himself. In other words, he must learn to “be a man.” The gender dynamics of the film are remarkable. Ransom Stoddard spends most of the film trying to stand erect. He is flaccid, passive, castrated at the beginning of the film and is challenged to reclaim his manhood. He must prove his right to paternal power in the new west. Early in the film he appears more or less in drag (an apron) and does women’s work (dishwashing and waiting tables). He is harassed, in a flirtatious, sexually aggressive manner, by Liberty Valance, and Tom Doniphon must come to save and defend his honor. Ultimately, Stoddard must learn to shoot, and be ready to kill Liberty Valance. Tom takes him to the desert, and instructs him in savagery. Not only does the lawyer learn to shoot, but he learns to cheat (see Figure 6). When Doniphon plays a trick on him, he tells Stoddard: “I don’t like cheating either, but that’s what you’ll have to do to beat Liberty Valance.” And Stoddard sucker-punches Doniphon.

With this act of violence, Stoddard has symbolically crossed the line into savagery. Because of this, he merits civilization. He has demonstrated his own capacity for violence and his own “lawlessness.” He has proven himself a man and thus secured his right to patriarchal privilege. With this act of violence, Ransom Stoddard becomes the new man in town; indeed he will earn the epithet “the man who shot Liberty Valance.” From here on in, the roles of Stewart and Wayne are reversed. Ransom Stoddard learns to stand on his own two feet, and Tom Doniphon is increasingly supine: Doniphon drinks and staggers, he falls over, he burns down the house he is building for his fiancée, and finally he dies. As Ransom Stoddard stands up, Tom Doniphon lies down. And Doniphon concedes power to Stoddard willingly and deliberately. The town hopes to elect Doniphon a delegate to the territorial assembly to decide the question of statehood; he persuades them instead to send Stoddard. He gives up his wooing of Hallie so that she might marry Stoddard, who has taught her to read, who civilizes her and takes her east to Washington DC when he becomes senator (see Figure 7). Doniphon’s ultimate act ceding patriarchal power to Stoddard is this: he compels Stoddard to take credit for killing Liberty Valance.

Valance beats and tortures the newspaperman, Dutton Peabody. Incensed, Ransom Stoddard picks up a gun and calls Valance out in the street for a showdown. Valance, drunk, teases Stoddard, toying with him. As Valance finally gets a bead on Stoddard, Stoddard lifts his own weapon and fires wildly. Valance falls and dies, apparently killed by Stoddard’s lucky shot. And so Ransom Stoddard becomes the town hero, “the man who shot Liberty Valance,” and rides his fame from political triumph to political triumph, eventually becoming one of the most powerful men in the country. He returns from Washington years later to attend the funeral of Tom Doniphon, who has died penniless and obscure. What actually happened, as the audience is shown in a flashback sequence, is that Tom Doniphon had saved his life. As Stoddard and Valance faced off, Doniphon, hidden in a back alley, had killed Valance with his rifle (see Figure 8). Doniphon is the man who shot Liberty Valance, but he ensures that no-one knows. This is the story Stoddard tells Maxwell Scott years later; this is the story Scott refuses to print. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

As I have mentioned, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance rewrites the myth from Kennedy’s perspective. Kennedy, who spoke famously of a “New Frontier” when he accepted the Democratic nomination in 1960, positioned himself as both military hero and statesman, both frontiersman and tax-collector. Like Ransom Stoddard, he could and would use violence to protect himself and society, but his primary commitments were not to himself but rather to community and nation. What the film points to is an ideological ideal in which excessive liberty can be purged and we can find ways to live in harmony. Dutton Peabody gives a nomination speech for Stoddard that is cribbed almost verbatim from the pages of Turner, even as it consciously echoes Kennedy’s rhetoric. African Americans are welcomed into the social compact in the film (in the character of Pompey (Woody Strode) as are immigrants and Mexican Americans (see Figure 9). The myth of the frontier argues that an effective community can only be sustained provided it maintains contact with frontier virtues (violence and self-reliance). This, in fact, is the very purpose of the Hollywood western during the Cold War years: to reconnect Americans mythically to the virtues of the frontier. One only has the right to community if one is willing to defend it, and, for Americans, our capacity to successfully defend ourselves has been tempered and proven in the frontier experience. In westerns, we return there, at least imaginatively, to rediscover our strengths and renew ourselves for the global struggle against international communism.

And yet, the film also insists, we never “had” the frontier experience, only its legend. Our experience is simply a legend, a lie. Ransom Stoddard had the courage to face the bad guy, but he did not have the skills to defeat him. Hollywood works its ideological magic by conflating virtue with individual power: the good guy always wins. It is not that “might makes right”; nor is it, simply, a question of right eventually making might, although this phenomenon is always appealed to. In Ford’s film, the people are encouraged to come together collectively to defeat the evil cattle barons, but they never do so. The hero has to face the bad guy alone. In Hollywood’s version of the frontier myth, rather, might and right become embodied in the person of the frontiersman. In most westerns, the hero has the courage to take on the bad guy and the capacity to defeat him because he has been forced, under frontier conditions, to evolve both virtue and skill: he has had to adapt or die, as Turner points out. And the frontier promotes both virtue and skill with guns in the figure of John Wayne. But in this film Wayne is sacrificed; his story is never told. All of western literature poses the same question: how might the community honorably bury its dead? Doniphon is buried dishonorably and unrecognized, however. The hero is someone willing to “die with his boots on”; significantly, in Liberty Valance , the undertaker has stolen Doniphon’s boots. The stand-in hero, Stoddard, is exposed as a little more than a good-hearted fraud. The idea that good will has prevailed is admitted to be merely a legend, a lie.

What the ending of the film exposes, ultimately, is a kind of ideological exhaustion: not only can the old myths no longer sustain us, we would be foolish to suppose that they ever could. The myth of the frontier is simply a hoax. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance was made at the beginning of the 1960s, a decade that would see all myths of American virtue crumble. By 1963, Kennedy himself would fall victim to a kind of frontier violence in Dallas, Texas; the “Cowboys versus Indians” screenplay would look laughable in a Vietnam landscape; and My Lai would turn the encounter between savagery and civilization backwards, forwards, sideways, and down. The problem, as Slotkin sees it, is not simply that myth has supplanted history, but that the prevailing myth no longer works as myth. Speaking of the Reagan administration’s efforts to resuscitate a bankrupt Cold War version of frontier mythologies, Slotkin writes:

Myth is the language in which a society remembers its history, and the reification of nostalgia in the mass culture and politics of the 1980s is a falsification of memory. If a new mythology is to fulfill its cultural function, it will have to recognize and incorporate a new set of memories that more accurately reflect the material changes that have transformed American society over the last forty years. The historical adventure of our national development will have to be reconceived to incorporate our experience of defeat and disappointment, our acquired sense of limitation, as well as the fabulous hopefulness that has perennially transformed and energized our culture. (655)

Sadly, we have seen little sign of this. In the face of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, American public discourse has been saturated with the same tired myth of savagery versus civilization. The war in Afghanistan was packaged as a frontier drama: the savages were the Taliban and al-Qaeda; the Americans and their allies were civilized. We had to be a little savage, of course, to defeat the savages in guerilla warfare; in Afghanistan, we even had our half-wild Tom Doniphon character: the Northern Alliance. But such mythic language will seem shopworn and tired in the global struggle against Islamic and third-world discontent, a struggle that will have to be carried out in the real world rather than on the silver screen, genuinely, rather than mythically. Myth is available to all parties in these struggles, of course, and will everywhere be enlisted in the cause. As Douglas McReynolds has noted, “the Old western myth is still viable. […] What we see is not a new myth or a debunked one, but changing perspectives [and] increased self-consciousness in movie-making” (47). 4 But, however much such filmic celebrations of stoicism as Blackhawk Down (2001) or the very recent Jarhead (2005) protest to the contrary, Baghdad will never be Dodge City. What remains to be seen is whether it will be Shinbone, where a fraudulent and murderous victory over “evil” is served up in an accommodating press as the legend of American triumph.

1   See chapter eleven of Robert V. Hine and John Mack Fragher, The American West: A New Interpretive History, for an elegant synopsis of the safety valve approach to the west.

2   Obviously race is the other dominant factor in national elections as Republicans rather callously mobilize white fears of blacks for easy votes; even so, the connections between a cultural logic of racial dread and libertarian fantasies of individualism and self-reliance are easy enough to trace. The genius of Reaganism, for example, was his good-natured insistence that “welfare cheats” are manipulating and abusing the national bureaucracy of the welfare state; the “savagery” against which the individualist NRA member must contend is everywhere figured as the “criminal” (read black) element.

3   Both Stanley Corkin and Alan Nadel have offered readings of Liberty Valance that explicitly reference the Kennedy administration and the Cuban missile crisis. For Nadel, Ford’s film is an explicit example of “imperialist nostalgia,” which laments that masculine heroism and a clear national moral purpose have been consigned to the past. Bob Beatty and Mike Yawn document Ford’s cynicism about reviving such heroism (although they find the roots of Ford’s pessimism rather in his personal life than in politics). Mark Roche consequently sees the film as ambivalently documenting the historical transition from Vico’s age of “heroes” (Wayne/Doniphon) to an age of men (Stewart/Stoddard). Nadel’s political interrogation is perhaps the most subtle, emphasizing the film’s implicit if ambiguous endorsement of the values represented by Stoddard, who personifies Kennedy’s rather fraudulent and even postmodern politics. Stoddard, Nadel argues, is a figure of continuity between a “golden age” of the frontier and the present rather than rupture. “That continuity is based not on the triumph of law over brute force but rather by the co-optation of legal means by physical, of direct action by covert, of self-defense by murder, of speech by action. It is also the co-optation of event by legend, that is, by writing” (196-97). Finally, in an important essay on Dorothy Johnson and John Ford, Walter Metz has demonstrated how auteur theory, itself resonant with Cold War ideologies of masculine heroism, has served to erase the author of the short story on which Liberty Valence was based, adding yet another layer of irony to the film’s insistence on how mythic realities are textually constructed.

4   McReynolds is writing in 1998, prior to the September 11 attacks, about such works as the TV miniseries Lonesome Dove (1989), City Slickers (1991), Unforgiven (1992) and others. While the genres of action-adventure thriller and the war film are flourishing, there have been curiously few “westerns” produced since the attacks.

Works Cited

Beatty, Bob, and Mike Yawn. “John Ford’s Vision of the Closing West: From Optimism to Cynicism.” Film & History 26.1 (1996): 6-19.

Corkin, Stanley. Cowboys as Cold Warriors: The Western and U.S. History. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2004.

Deutsch, Sarah. “Landscape of Enclaves: Race Relations in the West, 1865-1990.” Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past . Ed. William Cronon, et al. New York: Norton, 1992. 110-31.

Giddens, Anthony . The Nation-State and Violenc e: A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism vol. 2 . 3 vols. Berkeley: U of California P, 1985.

Hine, Robert V., and John Mack Faragher. The American West: A New Interpretive History . New Haven: Yale UP, 2000.

Ingrassia, Catherine. “‘I’m Not Kicking, I’m Talking’: Discursive Economies in the Western.” Film Criticism 20.3 (Spring 1996): 4-14.

Jefferson, Thomas. “Second Inaugural Address, 1805.” The Portable Thomas Jefferson . Ed. Merrill D. Peterson. New York: Viking Penguin, 1975. 316-21.

Limerick, Patricia Nelson. “The Adventures of the Frontier in the Twentieth Century.” The Great Plains: Writing Across the Disciplines . Ed. Brad Gambill, et al. Fort Worth: Harcourt, 2001. 78-99.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance . Dir, John Ford. Perf. John Wayne and James Stewart. Paramount, 1962.

McReynolds, Douglas J. “Alive and Well: Western Myth in Western Movies.” Literature/Film Quarterly 26:1 (1998): 46-52.

Metz, Walter. “Have You Written a Ford, Lately? Gender, Genre, and the Film Adaptations of Dorothy Johnson’s Western Literature.” Literature/Film Quarterly 31:3 (2003). 209-20.

Nadel, Alan. Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age. Durham: Duke UP, 1995.

Roche, Mark W., and Vittorio Hosle. “Vico’s Age of Heroes and the Age of Men in John Ford’s Film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance .” Clio 23 (Winter 1994): 131-48.

Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America . 1992. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1998.

Smith, Henry Nash. Vi rgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth . 1950. New York: Random, 1970.

Turner, Frederick Jackson. “The Significance of the Frontier in American History, 1893.” Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner . Ed. John Mack Faragher. New York: Holt, 1994. 31-60.

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Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad

The monument, built in the shape of a huge broken ring represents all the efforts it took to break the 900-day Siege of Leningrad . The inside of the ring is lit with gas torches and its walls feature engravings celebrating the incredible courage shown by the defenders of Leningrad. Inside the monument, in a vast underground memorial hall, there is an exhibition devoted to the Siege. An English-speaking guide is usually available, so just ask a member of the museum's staff. Make sure that you see the map of Leningrad's defenses and the museum's short documentary film, and take a look at the beautiful mosaics on the eastern and western walls of the hall.

The external wall of the monument is decorated with a freeze of sculptures representing the soldiers, sailors and civilians who did not surrender to the Nazis despite hunger, cold and the dangers of constant enemy bombardment.

How to get there? From Moskovskaya metro station walk one block South, then enter the monument via the underpass, which is located near the two tall buildings.

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Volume 3, 1982 Read casually, the opening sentence of Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment" appears to be no more than a rather matter-of-fact statement, conventionally providing expository details of setting and character: "On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge. " (1) Nevertheless, as the Russian critic Vadim K. Kozhinov has observed, this initial sentence, though almost documentary in character, also has a symbolic function; and when reconsidered in the light of what follows later in the narrative, it represents indeed "the embryo of the whole huge novel, " succinctly introducing images and motifs that are "linked organically" with Dostoevsky's total design and meaning. (2) The reference to the "exceptionally hot evening, " Kozhinov goes on to specify, is more than a weather report: it establishes not only the suffocating atmosphere of St. Petersburg in midsummer but also the infernal ambience of the crime itself. (3) The garret room, later described as a cupboard and a coffin, reappears throughout the novel as an emblem of Raskolnikov's withdrawal and isolation. Even the brief account of his slow and hesitant walk, Kozhinov notes, reveals the same irresolution that Raskolnikov will display before and after the crime, (4) Curiously, however, Kozhinov's meticulous explication of this pregnant sentence completely overlooks its final detail - namely, the bridge itself. (5) If, as the Russian critic convincingly maintains, the opening sentence is meant to serve as a kind of overture to the novel, the bridge, like the other particulars, may also be interpreted as more than a matter of documentation. In fact, its climactic position implies that the movement of Raskolnikov towards the bridge and thus to the pawnbroker's room, in a calculated "rehearsal" (p. 5) of the crime, initiates the whole complex action of the novel. As with rooms and weather, moreover, allusions to bridges recur throughout the novel, not incidentally but in connection with nodal points of the action and motivation. My purpose here therefore is to show more fully how this hitherto neglected motif of the bridge functions in Dostoevsky's dialectical orchestration. To be sure, given the topography of St. Petersburg - with its rivers, canals, and islands - bridges would naturally be mentioned in almost any novel set there. Dostoevsky's approach to the city, however, shuns reportorial naturalism. As more than one study has shown, Dostoevsky - 146 like Balzac, Baudelaire, Dickens, and Gogol - was among the first to recognize the symbolic possibilities of city life and imagery drawn from the city. In "Crime and Punishment, " particularly, St. Petersburg becomes a paysage moralis�. The actual city, "rendered with a striking concreteness, " is, to use Donald Fanger's words, "also a city of the mind in the way that its atmosphere answers Raskolnikov's spiritual condition and almost symbolizes it. " (6) The crowded streets and squares, the shabby houses and taverns, the noise and stench, all are imaginatively transformed into a rich store of metaphors for states of mind. From this standpoint, the hump-backed bridges crisscrossing Czar Peter's labyrinthine city are, as found in the novel, likewise to be viewed as metaphorical and highly suitable for marking the stages of the tortuous course of Raskolnikov's internal drama. Indeed, considered phenomenologically in terms of Gaston Bachelard's "poetics of space, " bridges are potently expressive. As Bachelard writes, "space that has been seized upon by the imagination cannot remain indifferent space subject to the measures and estimates of the surveyor. It has been lived in, not in its positivity, but with all the partiality of the imagination. " (7) Thus, "all great simple images reveal a psychic state" ; they "speak" to us. (8) Bachelard himself concentrates on houses, without any references to bridges; nonetheless, his methodology - what he calls "topoanalysis" or "the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives" (9) - may be applied to bridges. Bridges also "speak, " and with remarkable nuance. They suggest both union and separation, distance and contact. Linking and joining what would otherwise remain separate, they also evoke the "transitional, " the state of being in-between. Crossing a bridge graphically accentuates the passage from one stage to another, just as pausing on a bridge offers a vantage point for looking backward or forward, localizing the uneasiness of indecision or the finality of commitment. Such phenomenological implications of bridges are particularly relevant to Raskolnikov's peculiar psychology, his obsession with taking a "new step, " (p. 4) his vacillation between one extreme state of mind and another. All this, Dostoevsky would instinctively recognize. In selecting the bridge as a motif, Dostoevsky may also have recalled -and perhaps intended ironic allusion to - the role bridges played in two well-known contemporary Russian works, both of which advanced sociopolitical ideas antagonistic to his own. The earlier one, Alexander Herzen's "From the Other Shore, " a book Dostoevsky admired for its poetic force despite his differences with the author's politics, (10) opens with the image of a bridge as an historical metaphor for the struggles of the nineteenth century. The liberal-minded Herzen, diagnosing the abortive revolution of 1848, still held fast to his own hopes for the future, "the other shore" ; and, evidently remembering the words of his socialist friend Proudhon, who envisioned a new world where the injustices of the present would appear "comme un pont magique jet� sur un fleuve d ' o u b l i , " (11) he began his own book with a plea to his son not to remain "on this shore": 147 Dostoevsky, with aspirations towards a future antithetical to that of Herzen, might very well have relished exploiting the liberal's image in the portrayal of his own ideological dissenter, Raskolnikov. The other book, "What Is To Be Done? " by N. G. Chernyshevskij, a veritable s u m m a for the Nihilists of the 1860's and thus a target for Dostoevsky in both "Notes from Underground" and "Crime and Punishment, " opens with a dramatic scene on a St. Petersburg bridge. In the early hours of the morning, a flash is seen on the bridge, and a shot is heard. A man is then presumed to have killed himself, but when the bridge guard rushes to the spot, there are no traces of any one to be found. The suicide is now disputed, particularly because of the grotesque circumstances. "Does one blow his brains out on a bridge?" people ask. "Why a bridge? It would be stupid to do it on a bridge. " (13) In Chernyshevskij's novel, it turns out of course that there has been no suicide; Lopukhov, one of the main characters, has simply staged one to deceive his wife. (14) But this incident, as narrated, closely resembles the actual suicide of Svidrigajlov by Tuchkov Bridge, and may be a possible source for the absurd manner of its execution: "Svidrigajlov took out the revolver and cocked it. Achilles (the bridge guard) raised his eyebrows. 'I say, this is not the place for such jokes. ' " (p. 495) In any case, whether Dostoevsky was mindful of these Russian works or not, a specific bridge in St. Petersburg is often the stage for a decisive moment in "Crime and Punishment. " (Indeed, as James M. Curtis points out, to appreciate the significance of Raskolnikov's whereabouts in the novel, it is helpful to keep a map of the city in mind.) (15) In the opening, to repeat briefly, Raskolnikov's crossing Kokushkin Bridge, in the first sentence, takes him from his own neighborhood into that of the pawnbroker; in fact, her house is just on the other side of the canal the bridge spans (p. 4). His actual encounter with the suspicious pawnbroker aggravates his indecision and self-loathing; and the days following are given over to tortured introspection. Then comes a moment of spiritual insight when he dreams of the mare being beaten to death. Here the topographical details correspond to his ambivalent psychological state: The bridge he has crossed is Tuchkov Bridge, the same one later associated with Svidrigajlov's suicide. In this instance, its implications are positive: Raskolnikov's passage across the bridge from the stifling mainland of the city to the rather idyllic retreat of Peterburgskii Island 148 represents, subjectively, a transition from the calculating and inhumanly cold side of his divided self to another and superior one open to spontaneous and generous feeling. This is borne out by the imagery and incidents of the sequence. Dostoevsky's presentation of the natural imagery of the setting, as Gibian has shown, draws upon the traditional symbolism of myth: the "greenness" of the vegetation and the "freshness" of the atmosphere are manifestations of the ancient life-giving elements of earth and air. The natural surroundings, in contrast to the urban, release Raskolnikov's humane feelings, and after he falls asleep in the grass, the dream of the mare brutally slain by its master, prefiguring the murder of the pawnbroker, fills him with moral horror. Upon awakening, he abandons his criminal plan as vile and loathsome. Significantly, this decision is made on Tuchkov Bridge, the same one that brought him to the island. Now, during the moment of transformation, the bridge focuses his attention on water and light, two symbolic elements in sharp contrast with the dryness and darkness of the city: This decision - this healing of the split between intellect and feeling - is of course only temporary; the crime is actually committed just a short while later. But the sources of possible regeneration have been introduced, and like the course of the crime's preparation, key phases of its aftermath involve bridges. Raskolnikov's sense of isolation and his hostility toward everyone following the crime become painfully intensified during another bridge scene. On Nikolaevskij Bridge (p. 113), Raskolnikov walks absentmindedly in the middle of the traffic, and a coachman lashes him with a whip for nearly falling under the horses' hoofs. As Raskolnikov recovers himself by the railing, a woman crossing the bridge charitably hands him a coin of twenty copecks - "in Christ's name. " (p. 114) Her gesture is a reminder of Christian love and salvation, but at this point Raskolnikov is in too negative a mood to respond with gratitude. Indeed, the setting only accentuates his despair, for it poignantly reveals to him that his crime has divided him from his earlier self and what was best in his own past: emotion it roused in him. . . Deep down, hidden far away out of sight all that seemed to him now - all his old past, his old thoughts, his old problems and theories, his old impressions and that picture and himself and all, all. (p. 114) The images Raskolnikov sees from the bridge are rich with traditional associations: the cathedral represents orthodox religion and redemption; the waters of the Neva, the bright sunlight, the majestic beauty of the panorama - all are positive and life-giving. (17) His lingering receptivity to such images will be the source of regeneration later on; at this juncture, however, Raskolnikov gives in to despair and misanthropy: "He opened his hand, stared at the coin, and with a sweep of his arm flung it into the water; then he turned and went home. It seemed to him, he had cut himself off from every one and everything at that moment. " (pp. 114-115) In contrast to the bridge scene before the crime, this one is a spiral turning in what now seems Raskolnikov's irreversible downward course. Despair now leads Raskolnikov to consider suicide, and another bridge is pointedly made the setting for his morbid self-searching. Quarrelling with Razumikhin, he takes off on one of his solitary rambles through the city: This X-Bridge is actually Voznesenskij Bridge, which takes Voznesenskij Prospect across the canal near the house where Sonja lives. (18) Raskolnikov, standing Hamlet-like in the middle of the bridge, now faces the choice between life and suicide. These alternatives are symbolized, respectively, by "the one distant attic window on the left bank, flashing as though on fire" and "the darkening water of the canal. " As James M. Curtis has pointed out, since Sonja's room is described later on in the novel as "looking out on to the canal, " (p. 309) it is evident that it is Sonja's window that Raskolnikov looks at from the bridge; and "the fact that the ray of sunlight from her window catches his eye means that he will ultimately go to her apartment, confess his crime, and take upon himself the suffering which . . . leads to regeneration. " (19) At this moment on the bridge, however, "the darkening water" - in contrast to the way water elsewhere in the novel implies salvation - suggests death. Indeed, as he gazes from the bridge, a woman suddenly appears and leaps over the railing into the canal. The woman, who has obviously been drinking, is soon rescued, but her attempt to drown herself objectifies the possibility of suicide that Raskolnikov has been pondering as an alternative to giving himself up. But the ignobility of death by drowning repels him, and he decides to go to the police, though his departure from the bridge reveals apathy rather than determination: 150 Almost symphonically, this despair is soon counterpointed with hope. Shortly after witnessing the woman's attempted suicide, Raskolnikov enters the street where Marmeladov has been accidentally run over by a coach. Taking the dying man home, Raskolnikov meets Sonja for the first time, along with her small sister, Polenka. As he leaves, the child's grateful and affectionate embrace prompts Raskolnikov to ask for her prayers. Despair now begins to give way to hope, and it is more than a coincidence that Raskolnikov finds himself back at the same place where he considered suicide: But his hopeful realization is simply the beginning of his transformation, not its conclusion, as he here rather complacently assumes. The pride and self-confidence expressed by his words are belied by his bodily movements, for Dostoevsky immediately adds that "he walked with flagging footsteps from the bridge. " (p. 186) Actually, Raskolnikov does not yet perceive that the true source of this new hope is, not his own presumed strength of will, but Sonja, whom he has just met and who will show him how regeneration must be earned through humility. Even after his confession to Sonja, Raskolnikov still hesitates about giving himself up to the police. Till the last part of the novel he continues to oscillate between the extremes of hope and despair, now personified, respectively, by Sonja and the cynical, corrupt Svidrigajlov. (20) Toward the close of the novel, a bridge once more serves as a setting for a moment of near-paralyzing indecision. Rejecting Svidrigajlov's invitation to go for a carriage ride, Raskolnikov departs from him in disgust: " 'To think that I could for one instant have looked for help from that coarse brute, that depraved sensualist and blackguard, ' he cried. " (p. 471) What follows is another moment of melancholy soul-searching that brings to mind similar bridge scenes earlier in the novel: 151 The bridge and the water are clearly reminders that, for Raskolnikov, suicide still remains " a way out, " a serious temptation. In fact, as his notebooks reveal, Dostoevsky originally intended to have Raskolnikov kill himself in despair. (21) In the novel itself, it is Svidrigajlov, his double, who commits suicide, vicariously acting out Raskolnikov's negativity. Svidrigajlov's last movements mirror earlier ones of Raskolnikov, as the precise topographical details help to emphasize. After leaving the apartment of his child-fianc�e, which is on Vasilevskij Island, Svidrigajlov follows the identical route that Raskolnikov took before the crime: Tuchkov Bridge is of course the same one Raskolnikov crossed before the crime, and Peterburgskij Island is the place where he fell asleep on the grass and dreamed of the mare being beaten. The parallels to be found here accentuate the contrasts. Unlike Raskolnikov in the earlier scene, Svidrigajlov is incapable of appreciating nature. The storm, finally bringing relief from the summer heat and also symbolizing spiritual waters, only annoys him: Shunning the elements, he takes a room in a shabby hotel, where he has nightmares. Unlike Raskolnikov's dream outdoors, which revealed compassion for the victimized horse, these nightmares - particularly one about a small girl with the face of a harlot - only expose the depths of Svidrigajlov's depravity. Now, deciding to commit suicide without delay, he goes, not to Petrovskij Park as he intended, but back towards Tuchkov Bridge and, to the consternation of the guard, shoots himself. Thus he takes his own life, the reader is prompted to recall, near the bridge where Raskolnikov at least momentarily renounced his criminal intentions. In contrast, Raskolnikov chooses to live. Later the same day, rain-soaked by the storm Svidrigajlov found so disagreeable, he revisits Sonja and, in spite of his pride, is psychologically compelled to surrender to the police, Significantly, this decision to give himself up means crossing one more bridge. Sonja has told him that he must not only go to the authorities, but also bow down at the crossroads of the Hay Market and humbly kiss the earth, confessing his crime publicly to all. Even after he leaves her, Raskolnikov still harbors doubts about such repentance. Nevertheless, he is unconsciously forced to come to a decision: "But still he went. He felt suddenly once for all that he mustn't ask himself questions. " (p. 508) And what he finally decides is concretely dramatized in another bridge scene: 152 What immediately follows is Raskolnikov's kissing the crossroads at the Hay Market and, then, his confession in the police station. Brief as this scene may be, it is analagous in its consequences to Raskolnikov's heading toward the bridge in the first sentence of the novel. Indeed, if a map of St. Petersburg is consulted, it appears that walking along the canal away from Sonja's room would bring Raskolnikov to none other than Kokushkin Bridge, the one he crossed to go to the pawnbroker's. By crossing this same bridge twice, Raskolnikov turns, literally and metaphorically, from his crime to his punishment. (23) In his beginning is his end, just as in this end there will be a new beginning. This bridge scene is the last one in the novel. As such, it has a structural as well as symbolic function. Applying Joseph Frank's concept of "spatial form" (24) to "Crime and Punishment, " James M. Curtis has pointed out that, while each one of Dostoevsky's references to any given element has meaning within the particular context where it occurs, the juxtaposition of all the separate references in a single instant of time reveals their organizational function as a system of "linkages" and reminds the reader of how "one must understand each reference in terms of all the others. " (25) This illuminating observation is certainly relevant to the motif of the bridge. With the terminal bridge bringing to the mind the one in the opening along with the others in between, consideration of all of them together enhances the sense of the novel's formal coherence and provides a final cumulative impression transfixing Raskolnikov's phenomenal trajectory. Upon the surrender of Raskolnikov to the police, the novel proper ends, and the epilogue shifts the setting to Siberia. Nonetheless, as Leonid P. Grossman emphasizes, "Petersburg is an inalienable part of Raskolnikov's private drama. It is the canvas upon which his ruthless dialectics draws its patterns. The Czarist capital sucks him into its drinking houses, police stations, taverns and hotels. " (26) And to these portentous settings may be added the evocative bridges of St. Petersburg. 153 205. A current publication, Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), contains an extensive section on St. Petersburg and Russian Literature, pp. 173-286, with further bibliography, pp. 360-368. None of these studies, however, discuss the bridge motif as such. For specific references to Crime and Punishment and St. Petersburg having a direct bearing on my own thesis, see James. M. Curtis, "Spatial Form as the Intrinsic Genre of Dostoevsky's Novels, " Modern Fiction Studies, 18, 2 (Summer 1972), pp. 151-153. ," which might better be rendered by "transgression. " Moreover, it is not without relevance to the many crossings of bridges in the novel that this word "prestuplenie" literally means "going over, going across. " See editor's note, 8, to Kozhinov, p. 21.   155 © International Dostoevsky Society · · · Design: . 442 IMAGES The Frontier in American History PDF Frederick Jackson Turner's "Frontier Thesis" by Sophia Pierre on Prezi Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner The Frontier Thesis Analyzing "Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis" Amazon.com: The Frontier in American History (Dover Books on Americana COMMENTS Frontier Thesis The Frontier Thesis, also known as Turner's Thesis or American frontierism, is the argument advanced by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893 that the settlement and colonization of the rugged American frontier was decisive in forming the culture of American democracy and distinguishing it from European nations. He stressed the process of "winning a wilderness" to extend the frontier line ... PDF Frederick Jackson Turner, 'The Significance of the Frontier in American [Footnote in address as reprinted in Turner, The Frontier in American History, 1920] 1 In 1817 John C. Calhoun represented South Carolina in the U.S. House. Later in the year he was appointed Secretary of War by President James Monroe. [NHC note] ƒ fiAbridgment of Debates of Congress,fl v, p. 706. [Footnote in Turner, Frontier, 1920] Frederick Jackson Turner Frederick Jackson Turner, American historian known for the 'frontier thesis,' which held that the American character was decisively shaped by conditions on the frontier, the settling of which engendered such traits as self-reliance, individualism, inventiveness, restless energy, mobility, materialism, and optimism. The Significance of the Frontier in American History Frederick Jackson Turner. " The Significance of the Frontier in American History " is a seminal essay by the American historian Frederick Jackson Turner which advanced the Frontier thesis of American history. Turner's thesis had a significant impact on how people in the late 19th and early 20th centuries understood American identity, character ... PDF The Turner Thesis Frederick Jackson Turner: THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE FRONTIER IN AMERICAN HISTORY . I. N a recent bulletin of the Superintend¬ ent of the Census for 1890 appear these significant words: "'Up to and in¬ cluding 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unset¬ tled area has been so broken into by iso¬ The Significance of the Frontier in American History Summary. Last Updated September 5, 2023. "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" was written by Frederick Jackson Turner, delivered as a conference paper at the annual meeting of ... PDF Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in ... derick Jackson Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History. 1893This brief official statement marks the closing of a great historic movement. Up to our own day American h. story has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous rece. Frederick Jackson Turner, "Significance of the Frontier" Frederick Jackson Turner remains one of the most influential historians of America's past, and his famous frontier thesis is related to the above idea, in that his basic idea is that constant contact with an open frontier for almost 300 years of American history contributed to America's uniqueness—or exceptionalism. He presented his thesis ... Frederick Jackson Turner's Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis 1 5 3 movement acquires a normative meaning for American history. The fact of moving becomes normative, a vital need for society, the positive value par excellence and a yardstick against which to judge all historical facts. In order to be a positive factor of development, moreover, movement cannot The Turner Thesis and the Role of the Frontier in American History Frederick Jackson Turner be lieved that America, with all its shortcomings, was more democratic and offered more opportunity to the common man than any other nation in the world. Turner's the ory explained how the frontier in teracted with all the other primary influences to produce a unique de mocracy and a distinctive Ameri can character. Frontier Democracy: The Turner Thesis Revisited The Frontier Thesis and the National Covenant in American Historical Writing Since 1830 (Minneapolis 1965), esp. 37-55; Jack-son K. Putnam, "The Turner Thesis and the Westward Movement: A Reap-praisal," Western Historical Quarterly, 7 (Oct. 1976), 377-404; Martin Ridge, "Frederick Jackson Turner and His Ghost: The Writing of Western History," Pro- What is Frederick Jackson Turner's "frontier thesis" and its criticisms Frederick Jackson Turner produced the "Turner Thesis" in 1893 shortly after the 1890 Census had determined that the American frontier had closed. Jackson argued that the frontier was a vital part ... The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Frontier in American History, by The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Frontier in American History, by Frederick Jackson Turner ... inasmuch as a considerable part of its land was first held by Dedham, to which the grant was made as a recompense for the location of the Natick Indian reservation. ... "Winning of the West," ii, p. 398, and the letter from that frontier cited in ... The frontier in American history : Turner, Frederick Jackson, 1861-1932 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 1861-1932. Publication date 1921 Topics Frontier thesis, United States -- History, West (U.S.) -- History Publisher New York : H. Holt & Co. Collection Princeton; americana Contributor Princeton Theological Seminary Library Language English The Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner About this eBook. Author. Turner, Frederick Jackson, 1861-1932. Title. The Frontier in American History. Credits. E-text prepared by Fritz Ohrenschall, Michael Zeug, Lisa Reigel, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team. Language. PDF Frederick Jackson Turner'S Frontier Thesis Turner Thesis (1893) Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis History professor, Univ. of Wisconsin Thesis: frontier experience and westward expansion had stimulated individualism, nationalism, and democracy Suggested "frontier" had alleviated social and economic problems of an industrial society PDF (1893) -- Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis. The following viewpoint, written in 1942, remains a cogent critique. Although Pierson directly criticizes Turner's "emotion," his "too-literary" style, and his "hazy think ing," his most serious objection is that Turner ignores the eco nomic concerns of post-industrial America. Pierson ... Frontier Mythographies: Savagery and Civilization in Frederick Jackson Frontier Mythographies: Savagery and Civilization in Frederick Jackson Turner and John Ford (2007) Arthur Redding Editor's Note: This is the first installment in a new series of articles from the archives of LFQ.I chose this article by Arthur Redding from 2007 for two primary reasons: first, I have repeatedly used the article in teaching my classes on the western and how that genre resonates ... Frontier settlement and the spatial variation of civic institutions This was, of course, part of the original "frontier thesis" of Frederick Jackson Turner (2018 [1920]), who argued that the more individualistic and egalitarian institutions of the American west eventually became generalised to the country as a whole; as well as a concern of later comparative studies, such as Lipset (1990), whose comparison ... medical school essays editing Look here for rules and announcements concerning these here forums African American History and the Frontier Thesis A SYMPOSIUM ON FREDERICK JACKSON TURNER frontier held experiential possibilities for African Americans that are revealed in their writings. Moreover, current historiographical trends illustrate that for African Americans the frontier concept had a broader meaning than the Turner thesis implied, broader even than Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad From Moskovskaya metro station walk one block South, then enter the monument via the underpass, which is located near the two tall buildings. Where? Ploschad Pobedy (Victory Square) Metro: Moskovskaya. Telephone: +7 (812) 371-2951. Open: Thursday to Monday, 11 am to 6 pm, Tuesday, 11 am to 5 pm. The Bridges of St. Petersburg: a Motif in "Crime and Punishment" As more than one study has shown, Dostoevsky -. 146. like Balzac, Baudelaire, Dickens, and Gogol - was among the first to recognize the symbolic possibilities of city life and imagery drawn from the city. In "Crime and Punishment, " particularly, St. Petersburg becomes a paysage moralisй. The actual city, "rendered with a striking concreteness ... assignment essay homework paper phd report resume review speech thesis