Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 [Paperback]

Richard Slotkin (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0806132299 | ISBN-13: 978-0806132297 | Publication Date: April 15, 2000

In Regeneration Through Violence, the first of his trilogy on the mythology of the American West, Richard Slotkin shows how the attitudes and traditions that shape American culture evolved from the social and psychological anxieties of European settlers struggling in a strange new world to claim the land and displace the Native Americans. Using the popular literature of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries-including captivity narratives, the Daniel Boone tales, and the writings of Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Melville-Slotkin traces the full development of this myth.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

On the basis of his sweeping 1975 survey of American Colonial and early Republican literature, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860, Richard Slotkin has approached the pop guru status of archetypal excavators such as Joseph Campbell, despite the fact that his work emphasizes the dark undercurrents of American culture. His argument in Regeneration is that, as the British colonists established their own societies in the wilderness, they expressed their regional desires for territorial expansion and self-rule by reinventing their history. Their narratives, according to Slotkin, revolved around frontiersmen who internalized, then disciplined, the "savagery" of their new environments, using their newfound mastery of nature to transform the wilderness into a revitalized civilization. Slotkin begins by examining how narratives of King Philip's War transformed New England from a demon-haunted Puritan enclave to a region where Indian killing represented progress and prosperity. Daniel Boone's paradoxical backwoods mixture of aggression and reflection serves as an icon for the rest of Regeneration, which emphasizes sectional variations of the Indian hunter myth, while analyzing the more "serious" literary endeavors of Cooper, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Melville.

Regeneration reads at times like a noir-ish variation on Frederick Jackson Turner's influential The Frontier in American History, a vision in which genocide, white supremacy, and environmental exploitation are the real engines driving the nation's expansion. At a time when even the bloodiest of war films extols family values in the midst of combat, Slotkin's grim tour of the United States' collective cultural history demands a wide audience. --John M. Anderson END --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Richard Slotkin is Olin Professor of English and Director of American Studies at Wesleyan University. He is the author of Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 and Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of Frontier in Twentieth-Century America, published by the University of Oklahoma Press.

Product Details

• Paperback: 680 pages
• Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press (April 15, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0806132299
• ISBN-13: 978-0806132297
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #139,681 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Slotkin's vision will change the way you think about America, January 15, 1999

By 

[e-mail] (New York City) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Paperback)

Slotkin analyzes the popular texts of early American life--"capitivity narratives" of women abducted by Native Americans, dime novels, etc.--to show how early Americans came to rationalize the gap between their religious ideology and the reality of the wilderness they were meant to transform into the "city on the hill." His careful study of the documents seems almost academic at first, and is sometimes rough going, but when I let his argument sink in (as a student in Slotkin's undergraduate class which used this book as its text), it profoundly and permanently transformed the way I saw American culture and history. This book is revelatory for anyone interested in "American Studies," the creation of our national mythology, and in what makes America America.

18 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Review of "Regeneration Through Violence" by UH Grad Student, September 16, 2004

By 

J. A. Hernandez (San Antonio, Texas United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Regeneration through violence;: The mythology of the American frontier, 1600-1860 (Unbound)

1999 marked an "average year" for North American fixation on violence, sexual imagery, and an added combination of technological paranoia as a result of the new millennium. For the most part, television screens tuned in to the daily media circus showcasing the latest "experts" on youth violence, gang activity, and the Psychic Friends Network. The student shooting at Colorado's Columbine high school, however, gripped the nation and left the "experts" scrambling for explanations, counselors, and an array of gun-control measures.

Of all the propositions these so-called experts put forth, none discussed the historical culture of violence that has become the foundation of our country's consciousness. Instead of real explanations and solutions, we endured Senator Diane Feinstein and other "politicians" anxious to defend their domain at the public dole. Many failed to connect the bullets flying in American classrooms with the bombs dropping on civilians in Kosovo. Indeed, they missed the forest for the trees when instead of searching for the root cause of the problem (the culture of violence), they resorted to simplistic cosmetic trimming (more gun control). Richard Slotkin's monograph on the mythology of the American frontier examines the origins of this "frontier mentality" and the making of our national character.

In Regeneration through Violence, Richard Slotkin argues that the North American frontier mythology is a major force in shaping the national character of the country. By building on the theoretical constructs of Frederick Jackson Turner's "Frontier Thesis," Slotkin argues that the frontier was not so much a "regeneration" of democratic principles as much as it was one of violence. Unlike Turner's notion of the frontier as a European and Socialist cleanser, Slotkin offers a more palatable thesis by incorporating the influence and conflict with various Native American populations. The conclusions, nonetheless, are not that simple. American settlers were "not simply an idiosyncratic offshoot of English civilization" but became "Americanized" or "Indianized" in their contact with the indigenous peoples of the continent. By tracing the origins of violence and freedom Slotkin concludes that various European and North American mythologies influenced the early settlers before, during, and after Native American contact.[1] Europeans who settled on the North American continent disembarked with an assortment of adopted ideas and mythologies from their native homeland(s). In this particular context, Slotkin's analysis on European cultural baggage is worth quoting at length:



"The Europeans who settled the New World possessed at the time of their arrival a mythology derived from the cultural history of their home countries and responsive to the psychological and social needs of their old culture. Their new circumstances forced new perspectives, new self-concepts, and new world concepts on the colonists and made them see their cultural heritage from angles of vision that non-colonists would find peculiar. The internal tension between the Moira and Themis elements in their European mythologies (and the psychological tensions that is the source of this myth-duality) found an objective correlative in the racial, religious, and cultural opposition of the American Indians and colonial Christians. This racial-cultural conflict pointed up and intensified the emotional difficulties attendant on the colonists' attempt to adjust to life in the wilderness. The picture was further complicated for them by the political and religious demands made on them by those who remained in Europe, as well as by the colonists' own need to affirm-for themselves and for the home folks-that they had not deserted European civilization for American savagery." [pg. 15]

Much like Reginald Horsman's monograph on the origins of American racial Anglo-Saxonism, Slotkin understands that European settlers did not approach the New World with a cultural clean slate; or as Professor Buzzanco would say: tabula rasa. Europeans carried with them centuries of cultural baggage and transported those ideas to the American continent, particularly the concept of Volkgeist.[Horsman, 25-42]
The new settlers underwent the logical process of a cultural tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis, or "times change and we change with them." Racial prejudice, however, was not the only cultural and social "element" present at the time of contact. Religious nuances and distorted comparisons between Catholicism and Native American blood rites provided an added cultural wedge between the two. Slotkin believes that many of the above mentioned traits found fertile ground in North American literature, specifically in the accounts of Indian wars and captivity narratives. According to Slotkin,

"The cultural anxieties and aspirations of the colonists found their most dramatic and symbolic portrayal in the accounts of the Indian wars. The Indian war was a uniquely American experience. Moreover, it pitted the English Puritan colonists against a culture that was antithetical to their own in most significant aspects. They could emphasize their Englishness by setting their civilization against Indian barbarism; they could suggest their own superiority to the home English by exalting their heroism in battle, the peculiar danger of their circumstances, and the holy zeal for English Christian expansion with which they preached to or shot at the savages. It was within this genre of colonial Puritan writing that the first American mythology took shape-a mythology in which the hero was the captive or victim of devilish American savages and in which his (or her) heroic quest was for religious conversion and salvation. As their experience in and love for America grew, however--and as non-Puritans entered the American book-printing trade-the early passion for remaining "non-American" (or non-Indian) became confused with the love the settlers bore the land and their desire to gain intimate knowledge of and emotional title to it. If the first American mythology portrayed the colonist as a captive or a destroyer of Indians, the subsequent acculturated versions of the myth showed him growing closer to the Indian and the wild land. New versions of the hero emerged, characters whose role was that of mediating between civilization and savagery, white and red. The yeoman farmer was one of these types, as were the explorer or surveyor and. later, the naturalist."[pg. 21]

The European contrast between civilization and nature found other outlets to vent differences between "civility" and "savagery." Myths such as the ones mentioned above facilitated the aggressive westward expansion of the nineteenth century, particularly during the U.S.-Mexican War (1846-1848). Additionally, questions regarding early captivity narratives and the fictitious nuances that they engender pose interesting comparisons between those of the early Spanish settlers in New Mexico.

Placed against Hietala's monograph on "manifest design," however, Slotkin's study on the mythology of the American frontier is complimented by additional factors absent from his own book: diplomacy, politics, partisanship, economics, divisions between free labor and slave labor, and logistics. In defense of Slotkin, however, the author is primarily interested in excavating the origins of North American frontier mythology whereas Hietala's interest focuses on the question of "Manifest Destiny" during the Jacksonian period.

The benefit of Slotkin, in my opinion, has more to do with his understanding of the North American mentality and how those psychological underpinnings influence decisions outside of our own cultural distinctions, i.e. political, economic, diplomatic, and otherwise. More importantly, and like I've mentioned before, the question over mythology is, in my estimation, one of the fundamental obstacles obscuring our peregrino (peregrinate) to an open-minded discussion regarding many of our current social, economic, and political issues. The question over how mythology becomes part of our national character requires a crucial understanding of not only the origins of North American mythology itself, but also the ability to propose an alternative, practical model to take its place. The latter, in my opinion, is much harder than the former.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thought-provoking historical and literary analysis, February 16, 2009

By 

Roger Berlind (NY, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Paperback)

Regeneration Through Violence is the first volume of a trilogy by historian Richard Slotkin which focuses on the mythology of the Frontier in American History. He originally wrote this book which covers the years 1600-1860 in 1973 and then followed it with the sequels "The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890" in 1985 and "Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America" in 1992. The main thesis of this first volume is that the existence of the western frontier and the Indian shaped an American mythology in which regeneration through violence (including fighting Indians and hunting wildlife) became "the structuring metaphor of the American experience". He connects the myth of regeneration through violence to contemporary problems in American society including crime and exploitation of the environment. To quote from the final chapter:

"This confounding of the figures of the hunter-wastrel and the farmer-cultivator has had disastrous social consequences. It enables us to exploit and lay waste the land as a means of transforming and improving it and converting it into the ideal world of our dreams. It enables us to express our love of the land and its potential by destroying it."

In his final paragraph, he refers to "the warfare between man and nature, between race and race, exalted as a kind of heroic ideal; the piles of wrecked and rusted cars, heaped like Tartar pyramids of death-cracked, weather-browned, rain-rotted skulls, to signify our passage through the land." Wow! I don't know if you'll accept his thesis, but the man can certainly write.

It is important to realize that this book is not a typical history of the period. Instead, Slotkin provides extensive analysis of the literature of the period where "literature" is meant in a very broad sense and includes many forms of writing including religious sermons, narratives by colonists who had been captured by Indians, histories of various conflicts with Indians, biographies of figures like David Crockett and Daniel Boone, and actual attempts at artful literature including poetry, short stories, and novels. The legend of Daniel Boone plays an especially important role in Slotkin's analysis which ultimately concludes (in the first volume) with Herman Melville's "Moby Dick".

Another important thing to realize is that this book is dense with many ideas and is not an easy read, despite being well written. Additionally, it would be advisable to read a few books about America's colonial, revolutionary, and pre-Civil-War history before reading this book. I read this 24 years after graduating high school and felt myself to be on shaky ground with regard to the history that Slotkin assumes his readers know.

In fact, reading this book lead me to begin an ongoing (and very stimulating) project of extensive reading in American history. Originally, I envisioned reading 5 or 6 books covering all of American history. However, as I began reading the first few books I purchased, I found many other books that I also wanted to read. So, after 8 months, I've read 18 books and am only up to 1808 and know that I want to go back and read a few other books about the colonial period. What's funny about this is that I originally purchased this book at a used book sale for $1 in 1987 and had it on my bookshelves for 21 years before finally reading it. That $1 investment has now become over $250 with all the extra books I have been inspired to buy on Amazon. But the investment has given me tremendous intellectual satisfaction, and for that I am grateful. Once I get through all of 19th century American history, I'll read the second and third volumes of Slotkin's trilogy. I fully expect that they will be as rewarding as this first volume was.