Why a "frame" for the 1850s? Why the indefinite article? Why not an interpretation or even a theory? The reasons begin in the nature of historical, literary, and cultural studies. They lie at the opposite end of the sprectrum of human knowledge from plane geometry. Euclid set out a definite set of axioms from which the geometer could derive the complete set of theorems. All relations within the system are stable and all are known. As a result, one can "prove" that two figures are congruent or that two lines will ultimately meet. "Prove" here means establishing as a certainty. In history and other wayward disciplines that seek insight into how and why people act, think, and feel, there is no comparable set of axioms, no theorems, no proof. Much crucial evidence is unrecoverable. The objects of our study, furthermore, learn. Their own grasp of their situation changes as their experience (much of which is forever closed off to us) deepens. Since they act, to some immeasurable degree, based upon their understandings of the choices they face, we can never truly see through their eyes, even though that is one of our chief goals. Finally, so as not to belabor what I hope is already obvious, there is the "butterfly effect." In predicting the weather it is possible that a butterfly landing on a flower in Sumatra can influence rainfall in Sudan. Forecasters ignore this as a merely theoretical possibility. They assume the minute effects of vast numbers of butterflies cancel out. Students of human behavior cannot make a comparable assumption. A single precipitous act, Preston Brooks caning Charles Sumner, had an enormous effect on the emergence of the Republican Party. Sudden, violent acts are the most obvious examples. But there are any number of less visible individual acts, none of which could have been foreseen, which have had profound consequences. Emily Dickinson writing poems in her room is a case in point. How many lives did she change? will she change?

What this indeterminacy, to give it a name, at the heart of our disciplines means is that we can never establish the "causes" of the Civil War. We can never "define" lyric poetry. To return to the butterfly metaphor, we can never pin down the prize specimen and put it on display.

For the historian narrative is as close to explanation as he or she can get. So too in literary and cultural studies. We can never write: Q.E.D.

"Ill-structured" fields like ours require what some cognitive psychologists call "cognitive flexibility." If you have seen one equilateral triangle, you truly have seen them all. Not so with revolutions or poems or sentiments. Religion mattered a great deal in the 1850s in the United States. So did the transportation and communication revolutions, the uneven but rapid pace of industrial development, the growth of cities, the coming of Irish and German immigrants, and the growing sense in the white South that it was losing power to the North. So did a host of other developments. To make some sort of sense of all this requires the student to cultivate a special kind of intellectual agility. The very different types of sources require their own methodologies. The questions that can illuminate the "mechanic's ideal" do not fit the emergence of an apology for slavery as a "positive good."

How can we keep indeterminacy from degenerating into confusion and then chaos? How can we encourage cognitive flexibility? Frames are ways of ordering which can highlight events, ideas, cultural developments, actions, and so forth. They allow us to explore interactions among these factors. They do not aim at closure. Like Navaho blankets, the well-constructed frame has an unfinished corner, an opening which can lead to new connections and which can admit new evidence and new questions. No frame can be completely open, or it could not order our thinking. So none can provide "the" key to the 1850s. The test of a frame is pragmatic: How well does it help us to make sense of the diverse array of issues we seek to comprehend?

In line with this test we have collected a very wide variety of resources bearing upon numerous aspects of American history and culture. We have written introductory materials employing the approach taken in "A Frame For Making Sense of the 1850s." We have designed "initial questions" and other pedagogical materials reflecting this way of understanding the past. We have also, again in keeping with our approach and with our view of what students of history, literature, and culture actually do, made these resources both freestanding and linked to each other. The user, in other words, can with impunity pluck any one element from the site and use it as found. Alternatively he or she can explore links in whatever directions seem most interesting. The idea is to provide a frame. Within it the user can move freely.