Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement (Paperback)

~ David H. Fischer (Author), James C. Kelly (Author) "ON A HOT CHICAGO DAY, July 12, 1893, a great crowd gathered in the gleaming pavilions of the World's Columbian Exposition to celebrate the 400th..." (more)
Key Phrases: cavalier elite, portable planter, distressed cavaliers, Sir William Berkeley, Northern Neck, New England (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Bound Away offers a new understanding of the westward movement. After the Turner thesis which celebrated the frontier as the source of American freedom and democracy, and the iconoclasm of the new western historians who dismissed the idea of the frontier as merely a mask for conquest and exploitation, David Hackett Fischer and James C. Kelly take a third approach to the subject. They share with Turner the idea of the westward movement as a creative process of high importance in American history, but they understand it in a different way.

Where Turner studied the westward movement in terms of its destination, Fischer and Kelly approach it in terms of its origins. Virginia's long history enables them to provide a rich portrait of migration and expansion as a dynamic process that preserved strong cultural continuities. They suggest that the oxymoron "bound away" ---from the folksong Shenandoah--captures a vital truth about American history. As people moved west, they built new societies from old materials, in a double-acting process that made America what is today.

Based on an acclaimed exhibition at the Virginia Historical society, the book studies three stages of migration to, within, and from Virginia. Each stage has its own story to tell. All of them together offer an opportunity to study the westward movement through three centuries, as it has rarely been studied before.

Fischer and Kelly believe that the westward movement was a broad cultural process, which is best understood not only through the writings of intellectual elites, but also through the physical artifacts and folkways of ordinary people. The wealth of anecdotes and illustrations in this volume offer a new way of looking at John Smith and William Byrd, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, Daniel Boone, Dred Scott, and scores of lesser known gentry, yeomen, servants, and slaves who were all "bound away" to an old new world.

About the Author

David Hackett Fischer is Warren Professor of History at Brandeis University. James C. Kelly is Assistant Director for Museums at the Virginia Historical Society.

Product Details

• Paperback: 366 pages
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press (March 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0813917743
• ISBN-13: 978-0813917740
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #207,380 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #85 in

  Books > History > United States > State & Local > Virginia

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

53 of 54 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Virginia Is For Lovers (Of History), March 17, 2000

By	Bruce Loveitt (Ogdensburg, NY USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

What an excellent book! The last I knew Fischer was working on a big book concerning plantation life in the south and I assume this is a book that developed out of the research he is doing for that book. This book concerns migration from Britain to Virginia, migration within Virginia and then migration from Virginia to other states. Most of the book deals with the 1700's up until just before the Civil War. I can't do justice to all the interesting information that is in this book during the course of a brief review. The authors explain how people migrated from different parts of Britain and settled in different areas of Virginia. For example, people from Northern England and the Scottish border area tended to settle in southern Virginia. They brought their customs with them which tended to make southern Virginia different from other areas settled by different people. For instance, the Tidewater area was settled by younger sons of the English nobility. These people came over to Virginia because under English law they were not going to inherit estates back home as the first born sons had that right. Different speech patterns developed in different areas as well as different ways of cooking and different forms of architecture, etc. The book also deals extensively with the lives of slaves and the institution of slavery and how the mass migrations out of Virginia involved many, many slaves being taken to other states with their masters or being sold. When the Virginia tobacco based economy began to falter in the late 1700's the sale of slaves to settlers in other states was a great source of income to the white people in Virginia who had fallen on hard times. Many famous people had ancestral origins in Virginia, such as Lincoln, Henry Clay, Stephen Austin, Sam Houston and General Patton amongst countless others. There are many firsthand accounts quoted in the book from the settlers so you get a real feel for the times and there are a number of wonderful black and white photos, also. This short book is packed with fascinating details. Thank you Mr. Fischer and Mr. Kelly.

26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Maintains his high standard!, July 27, 2002

By	Michael K. Smith (Gonzales, Louisiana) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

Fischer wrote _Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America,_ which is one of the best works published in several decades in comparative and local U.S. history, and in many ways this is a continuation of the "Virginia" section of that book. Which is a bit surprising, since the author is a New Englander and previously showed considerable preference for the folkways of Massachusetts over those in the South. Since I have numerous forebears in Virginia, I was particularly interested in the first three chapters: "Migration to Virginia," "Migration in Virginia," and "Migration beyond Virginia." All of those apply to my people and Fischer's coverage of the in-through-and-out process is first-rate. As before, he's an old-fashioned historian, spending a lot of time describing the concrete experiences of particular individuals and families, not spinning out historiographical theory. This is a must-read for anyone interested in Virginia's first couple of centuries.

28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great extension of the English Folkways, September 20, 2000

By	Don Steiny (Santa Cruz, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

After reading Albion's Seed I was eager to read more about the English folkways. This book expands on that with information about German folkways and African folkways. This books gives a sense the people that expanded westward. There is also a philosophical current about the nature of historial inquiry. He addresses various ideas about frontiers and shows that the process of expansion is not open to one-size-fits all explainations. Though Fischer depricates purely materialist explainations of history, the interplay between the cultural values of the Virginians and the physical limitations of the land is a compelling explaination of the westward expansion.