"Bound Away offers a new understanding of the westward movement. After Frederick Jackson Turner's thesis celebrating 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." "Whereas 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." "The wealth of anecdotes and illustrations in this volume offers 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."--Jacket.

"This book began as a catalog for an exhibition, at the Virginia Historical Society, to mark the centenary of Frederick Jackson Turner's thesis on 'the significance of the frontier in American history'"--Preface.

Introduction -- Migration to Virginia -- Migration in Virginia -- Migration beyond Virginia -- Problems of cause and consequence -- African-American migration -- The cultural legacy -- Conclusion.