The Term "West"
The frontier line--the outer line of settlement—moved steadily westward from the 1630s to the 1880s (with occasional movements north into Maine and Vermont, south into Florida, and east from California into Nevada). The "West" was always the area beyond that boundary. Most often, however, the term "American West" is used for the area west of the Mississippi River during the 19th century. Thus, the Midwest and parts of the American South, though no longer considered "western," have a frontier heritage along with the modern western states.
Read more about this topic: American Frontier
Famous quotes containing the words term and/or west:
“Most literature on the culture of adolescence focuses on peer pressure as a negative force. Warnings about the “wrong crowd” read like tornado alerts in parent manuals. . . . It is a relative term that means different things in different places. In Fort Wayne, for example, the wrong crowd meant hanging out with liberal Democrats. In Connecticut, it meant kids who weren’t planning to get a Ph.D. from Yale.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“The west was getting out of gold,
The breath of air had died of cold....”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)