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Anglo-American Aesthetes and Native Indian Corn: Candace Wheeler and the Revision of American Nationalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Mary W. Blanchard
Affiliation:
Department of History, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08903, U.S.A.

Extract

Recently, revisionist scholars of the “new Western history” have challenged the frontier thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner who, in 1893, canonized a view of the American West as wild and uncivilized, an area penetrated, conquered and subdued by the rugged individual fighter. These historians point out that highly developed Indian civilizations existed in the West, that “cultural convergence” not conquest was the historical reality, and that women played a prominent role in the over-all story. What has gone unnoticed by these revisionist scholars, however, was an earlier attempt by a Victorian woman artist to re-write the myth of the West in her own time, a re-telling much like the new Western scholars of today.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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