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AMERICA'S FRONTIER HERITAGE.
By Ray Allen Billington. Histories of
the American Frontier Series, edited
by Ray Allen Billington. (New York:
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1966.
xiv??302p.; end notes and bibliography.
$5.75.)
In his Westward Expansion, one of
the standard texts on the westward move-
ment to 1900, Ray Billington traces, in
narrative fashion and with near encyclo-
pedic detail, the history of the United
States from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
The two shortest chapters are the first,
which considers the frontier hypothesis,
and the last, which is concerned with the
frontier heritage. In a sense, the present
volume is a sequel to Westward Expansion,
since it is an assessment of the Turnerian
hypothesis as well as a detailed analysis
of the frontier heritage.
The tools of analysis which the author
employs, in addition to the conventional
ones used by historians, are those of
anthropology, sociology, social psychology,
and, to a lesser extent, demography. Un-
fortunately, readers untutored in the ter-
minologies used in these social sciences
will find the text sometimes labored and
not very clearly worded. Nevertheless,
spatial mobility and motivation are fre-
quently intertwined with behavioral pat-
terns of culture and personality and too
often overlooked by those who would better
understand the American frontier process.
At first blush there would seem to be a
paucity of raw material that is capable of
being well organized by the historian for
such an analytical study. This does not
seem to be the case, however. Billington
has tapped hundreds of travel accounts of
overseas visitors to America in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for the
discerning objectivity of as-others-see-us
commentaries. As valuable as these are,
reliance on such accounts is probably too
heavy at times, because there is a tendency
to forget that the reports are conditioned
by the prejudices, backgrounds, and train-
ing of those recording them.
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