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Dissertation Information for Stephen Anthony Aron

NAME:
- Stephen Anthony Aron

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- History

SCHOOL:
- University of California, Berkeley (USA) (1990)

ADVISORS:
- None

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- None

MPACT Status: Incomplete - Not_Inspected

Title: How the West was lost: The transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay

Abstract: By orthodox understanding, the transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay encapsulates the familiar saga of "the winning of the West." What Boone, the hunter of game and Indians, helped initiate, Clay, the apostle of political compromise and economic development, helped culminate: the conversion of Kentucky and the trans-Appalachian West from "untamed" wilderness to "civilized" emporium. For generations of hagiographers and historians, the lives of Boone and Clay, and the times in which the two most famous Kentuckians played such a prominent part, illustrated the exceptional course of American history.

In reconstructing the passage of Kentucky from the world of Daniel Boone to that of Henry Clay, this dissertation reprises and revises the conventional history of frontier progress. This interpretation of times in the lives of Boone and Clay attempts to explain how the way of life associated with Daniel Boone was lost and how it was that Henry Clay and his backers--merchants, lawyers, land speculators, and slaveowners--achieved economic and political dominance. The thesis explores what the hegemony of these men of competitive and acquisitive inclinations entailed for those still wedded to subsistent ways of living and thinking. Finally, the study addresses how those left behind or left out responded to the challenges posed by commercialization in the Age of Clay.

This dissertation owes much to historians who have emphasized the conflicts accompanying the commercialization of rural life, but the study of the demise of Daniel Boone and the rise of Henry Clay also prompts revision of the revisionists. In looking back to Europe for a model of the commercialization of the North American interior, revisionist scholars have missed the exceptional aspects of the transition to capitalism in the early republic. This examination probes the unique features of Kentucky's commercial development and illuminates the internal cultural contradictions, as well as the external pressures, that transformed the worlds of Daniel Boone and Henry Clay.

MPACT Scores for Stephen Anthony Aron

A = 8
C = 7
A+C = 15
T = 8
G = 1
W = 8
TD = 8
TA = 0
calculated 2008-09-10 22:58:27

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