Ray Allen Billington
Personal Information
Description
Ray Allen Billington (September 28, 1903 in Bay City, Michigan - March 7, 1981 in San Marino, California) was an American historian who researched the history of the American frontier and the American West, becoming one of the leading defenders of Frederick Jackson Turner's "Frontier Thesis" from the 1950s to the 1970s,expanding the field of the history of the American West. He was a co-founder of the Western History Association in 1961.
Books
The Far Western frontier, 1830-1860
This history presents a pageant of westward exploration, military conquest, commercial penetration, exploitation and settlement. It also considers the various types of frontiersmen, fur trappers, missionaries, Mormons, forty-niners, etc., and their types of adjustment to the new environment.
Westward expansion
Discusses the colonial frontier, the trans-Appalachian frontier, the trans-Mississippi frontier. The geographic continuity is stressed.
America's frontier heritage.
Analysis of the attitudes and behavioral traits judged to be most distinctively "American" by European travelers during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Weighs the pros and cons of Frederick Jackson Turner's "frontier thesis."