Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.1 | The History Cooperative

Frederick Jackson Turner: Strange Roads Going Down. By Allan G. Bogue. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. xviii, 557 pp. $34.95, isbn 0-8061-3039-3.)

This biography revises previous interpretations of Frederick Jackson Turner's intellectual legacy. Replying especially to commentary since the 1970s, Allan G. Bogue finds it ungrounded in study of all of Turner's writing—published and unpublished. Additionally, commentators have not "rigorously used the massive collection of Turner materials in the Henry E. Huntington Library . . . to trace his development as a historian and thinker." Bogue has fulfilled those obligations, enabling him to establish commendable authority for new perspectives on this American history icon. 1

In an intellectual and professional genealogy, rather than a biography focused on Turner's personal and family life, Bogue traces more exactly than previous scholars the discursive context of his 1893 "proclamation" frontier essay. Bogue rejects several prevailing hypotheses about origins, cause and effect, influence, and long-term implications. Moreover, he decenters the significance of the frontier itself as a weighty category that ongoingly preoccupied Turner's thirty-year struggle to complete "the book." Rather than an analysis of "the frontier," its mission was an interdisciplinary examination of section and sectionalism in American development. . . .

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