Bound Away

Virginia and the Westward Movement

By: David Hackett Fischer, James C. Kelly

Narrated by: Bruce Miles

Bound Away offers a new understanding of the westward movement. After the Turner thesis, which celebrated the frontier as the source of American freedom and democracy, and the iconoclasm of the new western historians who dismissed the idea of the frontier as merely a mask for conquest and exploitation, David Hackett Fischer and James C. Kelly take a third approach to the subject. They share with Turner the idea of the westward movement as a creative process of high importance in American history, but they understand it in a different way.

Where Turner studied the westward movement in terms of its destination, Fischer and Kelly approach it in terms of its origins. Virginia's long history enables them to provide a rich portrait of migration and expansion as a dynamic process that preserved strong cultural continuities. They suggest that the oxymoron "bound away" - from the folk song "Shenandoah" - captures a vital truth about American history. As people moved west, they built new societies from old materials, in a double-acting process that made America what it is today.

Fischer and Kelly believe that the westward movement was a broad cultural process, which is best understood not only through the writings of intellectual elites, but also through the physical artifacts and folkways of ordinary people. The wealth of anecdotes in this volume offer a new way of looking at John Smith and William Byrd, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, Daniel Boone, Dred Scott, and scores of lesser known gentry, yeomen, servants, and slaves who were all "bound away" to an old new world.

©2000 Virginia Historical Society and David Hackett Fischer (P)2010 Redwood Audiobooks

Critic reviews

"An exciting and valuable book.... A must for all interested in the expansion of the American frontier." (Carol S. Ebel, Georgia Historical Quarterly)

Quality through line

Fresh perspective on the historiography of America. The chain migration from Virginia is a fascinating narrative.

Narrator Seemed Rushed

T he narrator needed to use pauses after captions and subcaptions. Well written and accessible

A meditation on Turner's frontier hypothesis that's also a well-crafted story

Packed with vivid tidbits placed within the arc of a compelling and multidirectional story, this book simultaneously grapples seriously with the frontier hypothesis (if you don't know what this is already, don't worry: it's all explained nicely).

The reader did an outstanding job as well, calm and steady, letting the narrative tell itself, yet never falling into monotony. My one quibble was how the reader handled dialect speech, which sometimes felt a bit caricatural -- but that's the point of dialect when so written, it's meant to be caricatural.

As a history geek, I learned a ton, but it felt accessible and step-by-step enough for a newbie too.

Detailed cultural history

This book will appeal to readers with a deep interest in American history and a curiosity about the roots of the unique cultural values and mores of each region of America. Excellent and revealing scholarship which has insughts for understanding even 21st Century life, politics, and religion.

not just "Albion's Seed" redux

If you have read "Albion's Seed," you will note many similarities. But, in concentrating on Virginia, Fischer plows a lot of new ground. And the book is short enough that the parts that seem familiar do seem neither overwhelming not boring. Fischer does talk a bit about the "folkways" of the Virginia culture, and I, for one, was quite happy to review the concept. Fischer gives multiple examples of the people that explored the frontier as settlers, founding new settlements in Virginia, and then settling outsdie of Virginia. And Fischer provides reasons for the continual movement of Virginians.
I found this to be an absorbing read/listen with a narrator whose delivery I enjoyed.