The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 92, July 1988 - April, 1989 Page: 55
682 p. : ill. (some col.), maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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J. Frank Dobie and Walter Prescott Webb
shadow had worn a path from the Alleghenies to the Mississippi River-
my work drew enough praise from Webb when I read it to the class that
I felt I had in some measure atoned for my initial failure to meet his
expectations. But I knew that I had deliberately avoided bringing up
again the subject of elocutionary stylistics. I still cringe a little when I
remember that long-ago moment when Webb said, "Show us," and, not
being able to do so, felt that I had compromised his high standard of
historical scholarship.
In a small way in the seminar essay, however, I think I did manage to
achieve a prescription for the historian that Webb reckoned to be of
equal importance with the requirement that he seek to recover the ac-
tualities of time and place. Webb referred to this as "historical mobil-
ity." He meant the capacity to distill from fact and experience an idea
of sufficient breadth to control an expanding historical perspective. It
was this capacity that Webb demonstrated in his testing and augmenta-
tion of the Turner thesis, an idea that he expanded dramatically into a
theory of the history of the modern world in The Great Frontier. This
magnificent work comes to the somber conclusion that the end of the
great frontier that had beckoned to the European metropolis in the fif-
teenth century has not only brought a great epoch in history to termi-
nation, but has created an unprecedented historical crisis.
In 1948, well before the The Great Frontier was published, I had re-
ceived an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in American literature and American
history from Texas, having followed a degree program that anticipated
the establishment of the present American civilization program, and
had moved from Austin to Baton Rouge. During the fifteen years be-
fore his death in 1963, I saw Webb, who had served on my graduate
committee from its inception until I finished my work, a few times on
visits to the Texas campus. The time I remember best was in 1958,
when, in response to an invitation from Mody C. Boatright and Gor-
don Mills, I went to Austin to read a paper at an American studies con-
ference. Henry Nash Smith, who had been my major professor before
he had migrated to the University of Minnesota and thence to the Uni-
versity of California, had come from Berkeley to be the chief speaker,
but I had been given a space on the program large enough to allow me
to present a theory of literary and intellectual order in America that I
had brought into focus while on a Guggenheim Fellowship a year or
two earlier. Since Webb had written in support of my application to the
Guggenheim Foundation, I was particularly pleased when I saw him in
the audience as I got up to read my paper. Nonetheless, even now his
presence somehow brought to mind my embarrassment in a Garrison
Hall classroom twelve years before. I felt once again, as I had when I
had presented my paper on "The Path of the Eagle," or later when I
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 92, July 1988 - April, 1989, periodical, 1989; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101212/m1/82/: accessed April 28, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.