ABSTRACT
In Charles A. Beard's popular history, The Rise of American Civilization, are frequent bits of irony and sarcasm that remind us of another great historian, one of the first who chose to make history the study of a social organism rather than a mere chronology. If Beard had looked a little further, he might have discovered that certain other realities of American history are not hidden but are rather openly and honestly disclosed in the familiar vocabulary, or linguistic pattern, of the American people. In Turner's theory, sectionalism is thus organic in the American establishment, but in a creative rather than a negative and destructive sense. Democracy assumes a cultural as well as a political meaning, and the old diversity of American patterns takes on a new significance which in turn sheds a new light upon old tendencies in art and letters.
