Category: Culture

American Exceptionalism

American Exceptionalism

by Justin Durand ♥ 1 Comment

White supremacists make a basic mistake about history. They imagine we live in the same world our ancestors did. They’re just wrong.

Our ancestors in America had to learn how to live on the Frontier. The Indians knew how to live here, but the settlers didn’t. In the process of adapting the settlers created a new culture. They stopped being Europeans and became a different people with a different culture.

This idea is the “Frontier Thesis”, an idea popularized by Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932) in his book The Frontier in American History (1920). The basic idea is the frontier gave Americans a unique character and culture.

The Frontier Thesis is part of a larger narrative framework that America is different (“American exceptionalism”).

Modern historians generally don’t like these meta-narratives that supposedly explain the forces behind historical events. And, it’s clear just on the face the Frontier Thesis is essentially and almost completely a White Anglo narrative. Americans Indians wouldn’t see it that way. The Spanish in California and the Southwest wouldn’t see it that way. And the immigrant populations in the cities wouldn’t see it that way.

Yet, the idea of an America formed by the frontier lingers in the popular imagination. The rise of the Frontier Thesis is the main reason we had so many Westerns on television in the early 1960s, and its decline is the main reason those shows disappeared in the 70s.

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Think About Culture Changes

Think About Culture Changes

by Justin Durand ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Let’s take some time to think about how culture changes over time. Justin King talks a bit here toward the beginning about White American Southerners who tried to save their culture by moving to Brazil. It didn’t work. They assimilated.

And that’s exactly what happens to people in the European diaspora. Our ancestors might have been European but we are something else.

I’m choosing to link to this particular example because it sets assimilation in a political context rather than a purely esoteric woo-woo land where we might get lost in the glitter.

Faerie Lore Among the Scots-Irish

Faerie Lore Among the Scots-Irish

by Justin Durand

More from Barry McCain on faeries. I look forward his posts, and I like the way he introduces the idea of faeries and faerie lore:

After talking about the immigration of Ulster Scots to America in the 18th century, he says, “Some of the Faeries from Ireland followed these people to the Colonies. From the early 1700s into the early 1900s belief in Faeries endured. It was in the Southern Uplands and Backsettlements that these beliefs survived the longest and there are still a few people in these areas that see things and believe.“

My single memory about fairies comes from Aunt Betty, my mother’s sister. When I was growing up, I spent summers at her house, and other times of the year we visited fairly often. I say now that we went there for the weekend every 6 weeks, or so. Might not have been that often.

Anyway. Every night after dinner we’d clear the table and put the dishes in the sink, then take a break. Longer if there was company, shorter if it was just her family (and me). Then, Aunt Betty would say something along the lines of, “It doesn’t look like the fairies are going to do the dishes, so I’d better do them.” And she did.

Once in a while she would mention the fairies in another context, but the basic idea was always that the fairies were connected to chores. The “little people” might have done a particular chore, but they didn’t do it, or at least hadn’t yet done it.

Sometime in my teens Aunt Betty stopped making her jokes about fairies — after my mom made a joke about the word fairies not having the same meaning it had when they were growing up. Maybe Aunt Betty didn’t really stop saying it, but she stopped saying it around my mother.

I don’t remember either Mom or Grandma ever joking about fairies, or mentioning them in any context. I thought it might be that fairies were something Aunt Betty picked up when she was a nursing school. She went to a Catholic school in Idaho — St. Alphonse, I think — and came out with some sayings that no one else in the family has. Things like saying “Judas Priest” when she was exasperated.

I don’t know why Aunt Betty would adopt the idea of fairies from a Catholic college, but it doesn’t seem impossible. It took me a long time before I thought to ask Mom if they had this idea of fairies doing housework when she was growing up.

It seems they did, but I haven’t been able to get any good stories. The whole thing seems pretty vague. It must have been exactly the way Aunt Betty did it. Just something people say, but no sense behind it of anything more. Maybe connected to the tomte, a Swedish house elf, or maybe not. Maybe part of the same set of superstitions that include not sweeping the floor after dark. I can’t tell.

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Romanticizing Cowboys

Romanticizing Cowboys

by Justin Durand

In the 1880s, “America was no more impressed by a cowboy than by a railroad employee or a shopkeeper,” according to Lynn Jacobs. That will come as a surprise to almost everyone I know, because cowboys are the embodiment of our regional heritage and culture. But that all comes from Teddy Roosevelt’s deep-seated insecurity about his own masculinity. 

“Before Roosevelt, no one wrote about cowboys with anything but disdain. They were migrant workers, seasonally employed, badly paid, ill-treated, ‘the very picture of malnutrition,’ living outdoors in miserable conditions, herding big, dumb, easily spooked, dangerous animals across inhospitable land. The cowboy came in all colors, white, black, Hispanic, Indian, but mostly he was ‘a sad spectacle,’ Lynn Jacobs wrote in Waste of the West, a history of public lands ranching. ‘He was scraggly, dirty man with tattered, ill-fitting clothes and an unmistakable smell. His poor sanitary habits, inadequate diet, alcoholic tendencies, and excessive time in the saddle made him weak and sickly. . . . When not doing mundane ranching chores, he spent his time drinking and smoking, playing cards, and generally doing little one could call exciting, heroic, romantic.'”

Updated May 21, 2020 to add link.