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BOOK REVIEWS Frederick Jackson Turner: Historian, Scholar, Teacher. By Ray Allen Billington. (New York: Oxford, 1973. Pp. x, 599. $17.50.) American Historical Explanations: A Strategy For Grounded Inquiry . By Gene Wise. (Homewood, Illinois: Dorsey, 1973. Pp. xx, 370.) One of the many ironies concerning Frederick Jackson Turner is the contrast between the comparatively small number of printed pages produced by Turner and the huge number of printed pages produced about Turner. This irony is illustrated, and furthered, in two volumes published in 1973, the massive 600 page biography of Turner by Ray Allen Billington, and the one chapter discussion of Turner in Gene Wise's book about the ways in which a number of scholars have explained the history of the United States. Taken together, the two accounts provide complementary descriptions of the historian of the frontier. Billington's Turner is almost larger than life, in the sense that through Billington's indefatigable industriousness we see many Turners—the human being, the teacher, the scholar historian, the college professor, and the general idea-man for the historical profession of his day. The reader observes each of these Turners in almost dayby -day detail: we learn what he weighed at birth, what he weighed at the age of ten weeks, what song he sang when he was three years old, what word he missed in the spelling bee at the Portage Presbyterian Church, what were the sources of his ideas concerning history, what was the reaction of the audience in 1893 when he read his famous paper, whom he voted for in the Presidential elections from 1884 through 1928, what were his attitudes toward various minority groups in the United States, how he built to eminence the department of history at the University of Wisconsin, what he wrote his wife was the reason he chose Harvard over Berkeley when he decided to leave Wisconsin, what his relations were with his Harvard colleague Edward Channing, what advice he prepared in the hope that President Woodrow Wilson would read it before the Versailles conference, how Turner proposed the Dictionary of American Biography and helped to transform his suggestion into reality, how he suggested the publication of an up-to-date atlas of United States history and assisted in shaping the volume which was published in 1932 269 270BOOK REVIEWS as the Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States (edited by Charles O. Paullin), and how he advised the trustees of the Huntington Library in the late 1920's. The details about Turner could be extended on and on without exhausting Billington's biography—in fact, Billington tells the reader that the original typescript biography was extended on and on, before pruning for publication. The original typescript, "running to some 2000 pages and with from 300 to 400 footnotes to the chapter" (p. ix), has been deposited in the Huntington Library to be used by those seeking more information. No matter how much any individual thinks he or she knows about Turner, it seems safe to predict that he or she will acquire additional information upon reading this book. Surely, if the word "definitive" is ever justified in describing a book, Billington's biography must be described as definitive so far as information about Turner is concerned. In contrast to Billington's larger-than-life Turner, Wise's Turner might be described as smaller-than-life in one sense. Wise in his chapter on Turner discusses neither the whole man, nor the whole historian, but rather the Turner revealed in the thirteen essays published originally from 1893 through 1918, and reprinted as a collection in 1920 entitled The Frontier in American History. Through his close and probing analysis of these thirteen essays, Wise achieves a striking insight into Turner's ideas. Wise focuses upon what he perceives as an intellectual dilemma which appeared in the well-known 1893 essay and reappeared without resolution throughout the other twelve essays. The dilemma became apparent, in Wise's view, whenever Turner discussed what had happened after 1890 in the United States. Turner held that the political forms or political ideas of a society (aristocracy, democracy, or whatever) reflected, and were to be explained by...

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