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Africa and the American West*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Michael McCarthy
Michael McCarthy
Affiliation:
Rutgers University
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Extract

The American West has traditionally held a special appeal for the imagination of the citizens of the United States because it has come to represent so much for them. Not only has the vast expanse of land lying roughly to the west of the Mississippi River been the home of a number of America's most celebrated figures — Buffalo Bill and Billy the Kid, Sitting Bull and General Custer — and many of the country's national symbols — the six-gun and the Stetson hat, the homesteader and the pioneer, the cowboy and the Indian — but the “ western experience ” itself has also been looked upon as a basic theme in American life. From Frederick Jackson Turner's now-famous essay of 1893, which served to move discussions of Western America into academic circles, to Henry Nash Smith's analysis of 1950, which examined the mythical and symbolic dimensions of America's “ virgin land,” the story of the West has been viewed as one of the most enduring organizing concepts for understanding America's development and the characteristics of its people. While much of this matter is well-known today and common to the study of the United States, it is but little known that the cluster of ideas associated with the American West has also had implications for what might seem, at first mention, a somewhat unlikely place: Africa.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 11 , Issue 2 , August 1977 , pp. 187 - 201
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1977

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References

1 Turner, Frederick Jackson, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1920)Google Scholar; Smith, Henry Nash, Virgin Land: the American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1950, reprinted in 1970)Google Scholar. See also Smith, Henry Nash, “American Emotional and Imaginative Attitudes Toward the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, 1803–1850” (Ph.D., Harvard Univ., 1940)Google Scholar.

2 The best histories of the American West are Billington, Ray Allen, Westward Expansion; a History of the American Frontier, 4th ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1974)Google Scholar, and Hine, Robert V., The American West; an Interpretive History (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown, 1973)Google Scholar.

3 This conclusion is based on my analysis of over 450 books, articles, and journals written by Americans during this period. See my “Africa and America: A Study of American Attitudes Toward Africa and the African During the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries” (Ph.D. Univ. of Minnesota, 1975).

4 See Betts, Raymond F., ed., The Scramble for Africa: Causes and Dimensions of Empire (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath and Co., 1972)Google Scholar; and Rotberg, Robert I., ed., Africa and Its Explorers; Motives, Methods and Impact (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1970)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This, of course, does not include the American back-to-Africa movements of the time. See Redkey, Edwin S., Black Exodus: Black Nationalist and Back-to-Africa Movements, 1890–1910 (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1969)Google Scholar.

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6 I am grateful to Professor George Shepperson of Edinburgh University for confirming my suspicions about the connections between America and Africa. See Shepperson, George, “The United States and East Africa,” Phylon 13 (1st Quarter, 1952), 25–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 This view of Africa has been treated by Curtin, Philip D., The Image of Africa; British Ideas and Action, 1780–1850 (Madison, Wisconsin: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1964)Google Scholar; Davis, David Brion, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, New York: Cornell Univ. Press, 1966)Google Scholar; Genovese, Eugene D., “A Georgia Slaveholder Looks at Africa,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 51 (06 1967), 186–193Google Scholar; George, Katherine, “The Civilized West Looks at Primitive Africa: 1400–1800,” ISIS 49 (1958), 62–72CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; and Herskovits, Melville J., “The Image of Africa in the United States,” Journal of Human Relations 10 (Winter-Spring, 1962), 236–245Google Scholar.

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9 Malcolm, X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Grove Press, 1966), p. 7Google Scholar. Readers are also directed to a fine work by McKinley, Edward H., The Lure of Africa: American Interests in Tropical Africa, 1919–1939 (Indianapolis and New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1974)Google Scholar.

10 Although Mark Twain's brief visit was restricted to South Africa, and Charles Francis Adams's travels were confined mainly to Egypt and to the Sudan, their visits, nonetheless, suggest an increased American interest in things African. See Twain, Mark, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World (Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing Co., 1897)Google Scholar, and Adams, Charles Francis, “Reflex Light from Africa,” Century Magazine 72 (05 1906), 101–11Google Scholar.

11 See also, Gardner, Joseph L., Departing Glory: Theodore Roosevelt as Ex-President (New York: Charles Scribner, 1973)Google Scholar, especially Ch. 7, “Through Darkest Africa,” 107–37.

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14 My understanding of the interaction of mind and environment has benefited from reading Goodwin, Craufurd D. W., The Image of Australia: British Perception of the Australian Economy from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century (Durham, North Carolina: Duke Univ. Press, 1974)Google Scholar; Tuan, Yi-Fu, “Images and Mental Maps,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 65 (06 1975), 205–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ProfessorTuan, 's Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes and Values (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1974)Google Scholar.

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21 Bigelow, Poultney, White Man's Africa (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1900), p. 231Google Scholar.

22 I am thinking here of such works as Brooks, George E. Jr, Yankee Traders, Old Coasters and African Middlemen: A History of American Legitimate Trade with West Africa in the Nineteenth Century (Boston: Boston Univ. Press, 1970)Google Scholar; King, K. J., Pan-Africanism and Education: A Study of Race, Philanthrophy, and Education in the Southern States of America and East Africa (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971)Google Scholar.

23 These are just a few highly-compressed facts. A more complete history of the region can be found in Harlow, Vincent, Chilver, E. M., Smith, Alison, ed., History of East Africa, Vol. II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965)Google Scholar; Oliver, Roland and Mathew, Gervase, eds., History of East Africa, Vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963)Google Scholar; Wilson, Monica and Thompson, Leonard, eds., The Oxford History of South Africa, 2 vols. (New York and Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1969–1971)Google Scholar.

24 An interesting study of the changing meanings of “frontier” in America is Juricek, John T., “American Usage of the Word ‘Frontier’ from Colonial Times to Frederick Jackson Turner,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 110 (02, 1966), 10–34Google Scholar.

25 For a fuller discussion, see Gossett, Thomas F., Race: the History of an Idea in America (Dallas, Texas: Southern Methodist Univ. Press, 1963)Google Scholar.

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28 Powell, , The Last Frontier, p. 195Google Scholar. See also, Bigelow, , White Man's Africa, p. 20Google Scholar; and Bigelow, Poultney, The Children of the Nations (New York: McClure, Phillips and Co., 1901), pp. 169, 178Google Scholar.

29 Bronson, Edgar Beecher, In Closed Territory (Chicago: A. C. McClurg and Co., 1910), p. 225Google Scholar.

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35 For the popularity of the theme of the West in America, see, for example, Smith, Virgin Land.

36 On another occasion, I hope to say something useful about this popular view of Africa in America: the unprecedented amount of Tarzanalia, the recreations of African “safari-lands” in the worlds of Walt Disney and others, and their cumulative effect on American perceptions of African realities.

37 Travel accounts were a major part of many colonial American libraries. See, for example, Brayton, Susan S., “The Library of an Eighteenth-Century Gentleman of Rhode Island,” New England Quarterly 8 (06 1935), 277–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jordan, Winthrop, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1968)Google Scholar.

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39 As evidenced in such works as Benezet, Anthony, A Short Account of that Part of Africa Inhabited by the Negroes (Philadelphia: W. Dunlap, 1762)Google Scholar; see also, Wax, Darold D., “A Philadelphia Surgeon on a Slaving Voyage to Africa, 1749–1751,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 92 (10 1968), 465–93Google Scholar.

40 Genovese, “A Georgia Slaveholder Looks at Africa,” p. 186; Fredrickson, George M., The Black Image in the White Mind (New York: Harper and Row, 1971)Google Scholar.

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42 See the introduction to Goodwin's The Image of Australia; and also Kuklick, Bruce “Myth and Symbol in American Studies,” American Quarterly 24 (10 1972), 435–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43 Reading, Joseph H., A Voyage Along the Western Coast or Newest Africa (Philadelphia: Reading and Co., 1901), p. 17Google Scholar.