Page:A History of American Anthropology.pdf/22



Out of the background of a humanistic classics-loving Italy, an Arab-oppressed, Arab-emerging Spain, a middle Europe with gunpowder, printing press and alchemy borrowed from the East, to batter down the strongholds of Feudalism, and a North-western Europe wavering between the old and new, comes a new birth, in a new environment far off, by Shakespeare's "still-vexed Bermoothes."

One very important new factor in this development was the ever-present, ever-receding frontier of Western culture in the New World. The significance has been admirably stated by Frederick Johnson Turner in The Frontier in American History (1920). "Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been opened but has ever been forced upon them. He would be a rash prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life has now entirely ceased......To the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength, combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic, but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy: that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil: and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom—these are the traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier."