Bound Away, David H. Fischer
Bound Away, David H. Fischer
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Bound Away
Virginia and the Westward Movement

Author: David H. Fischer, James C. Kelly

Narrator: Bruce Miles

Unabridged: 8 hr 51 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 12/14/2010


Synopsis

Bound Away offers a new understanding of the westward movement. After the Turner thesis which celebrated the frontier as the source of American freedom and democracy, and the iconoclasm of the new western historians who dismissed the idea of the frontier as merely a mask for conquest and exploitation, David Hackett Fischer and James C. Kelly take a third approach to the subject. They share with Turner the idea of the westward movement as a creative process of high importance in American history, but they understand it in a different way.Where Turner studied the westward movement in terms of its destination, Fischer and Kelly approach it in terms of its origins. Virginia's long history enables them to provide a rich portrait of migration and expansion as a dynamic process that preserved strong cultural continuities. They suggest that the oxymoron "bound away" —-from the folksong Shenandoah—captures a vital truth about American history. As people moved west, they built new societies from old materials, in a double-acting process that made America what is today.Based on an acclaimed exhibition at the Virginia Historical society, the audiobook studies three stages of migration to, within, and from Virginia. Each stage has its own story to tell. All of them together offer an opportunity to study the westward movement through three centuries, as it has rarely been studied before.Fischer and Kelly believe that the westward movement was a broad cultural process, which is best understood not only through the writings of intellectual elites, but also through the physical artifacts and folkways of ordinary people. The wealth of anecdotes in this volume offer a new way of looking at John Smith and William Byrd, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, Daniel Boone, Dred Scott, and scores of lesser known gentry, yeomen, servants, and slaves who were all "bound away" to an old new world.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Martin on December 08, 2015

I liked this book a lot, but since I read “Albion’s Seed” quite recently, the first third of the book was somewhat redundant. Industrious poor folk were attracted to woods and frontier by unregulated settlements, hoping to get good land of their own. Richer folk were attracted by the potential to in......more

Goodreads review by Michael on December 02, 2014

Fischer wrote Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, which is one of the best works published in several decades in comparative and local U.S. history, and in many ways this is a continuation of the “Virginia” section of that book. Which is a bit surprising, since the author is a New Engla......more

Goodreads review by Don on November 09, 2022

This book will be of interest only to those interested in American history, particularly its social history. If you count yourself among this group I highly recommend. The author D.H. Fischer begins by disputing historian Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis, in which the frontier environment......more

Goodreads review by Joseph on December 28, 2022

Tremendously fascinating both for its overview of Virginia’s early history as well as for how that history helps one reassess major aspects of Frederick Jackson Turner’s well-known “frontier thesis.”......more