The west :: essays papers

The westThe West was a form of caller rather than an area. It is the term utilise to the region whose social conditions result from the application of older institutions and ideas to the transforming influences of free land. By this application, a new environment is suddenly entered, freedom of opportunity is opened, the stripe of custom is broken, and new activities, new lines of growth, new institutions and new ideals, are brought into existence. The state of nature disappears, the West proper passes on to a new frontier and, in the former area, and a new society has emerged from this contact with the backwoods. Gradually this society loses its primitive conditions, and assimilates itself to the type of the older social conditions of the East but it bears inside it enduring and distinguishing survivals of its frontier experience. Decade after decade, West after West, this conversion of American society had gone on, and left its traces behind it, which reacted on the East. The business relationship of our political institutions, our democracy, is not a history of imitation, of simple borrowing it is a history of the evolution and adaptation of organs in response to changed environment, a history of the origin of new political species. In this sense, therefore, the West has been a constructive force of the highest significance in our life. The West, as a mannikin of social organization, began with the Atlantic coast, and passed across the continent. But the colonial tidewater area was in close touch with the Old World, and soon lost its Western aspects. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the newer social conditions appeared along the upper waters of the tributaries of the Atlantic. present it was that the West took on its distinguishing features, and transmitted frontier traits and ideals to this area in later on days. On the coast were the fishermen and skippers, the merchants and planters, with eyes turned toward Europe. Beyond the falls of th e rivers were the introduce farmers, largely of non-English stock, Scotch-Irish and German. They constituted a distinct people, and may be regarded as an expansion of the social and economic life of the middle region into the backcountry of the South. These frontiersmen were the ancestors of Boone, Andrew Jackson, Calhoun, Clay, and Lincoln. working capital and Jefferson were profoundly affected by these frontier conditions. The forest clearings have been the semen plots of American character.