About this episode

The episode explores the myth of the American frontier and its implications on the national character and identity.

If America is the last, best hope of earth, one reason is the frontier. The frontier has been imagined as the place—or perhaps the process—through which the American character is forged—rugged individualism, the possibility of acquiring land and wealth, where happiness is pursued. For the historian Frederick Jackson Turner in the 1890s, the frontier was what made Americans different. Democracy was not born of a theorists dream, Turner said, nor was freedom something transplanted by Puritans from England, it was forged every time Americans found new frontiers. The frontier gave Americans a restless, nervous energy, a sense of purpose and direction. The frontier was, perhaps above all, a way that Americans, uniquely, could escape the bounds of history, the constraints of resources, of space of land that hampered less favoured nations – it was therefore a way of talking about the future and the endless barrelling forward of their raucous, capitalist, populist society. But where did the myth of the frontier come from? How does it relate to the reality of western expansion, if it does at all? And what of today? How does the optimistic myth of a frontier as a place of possibility…

People in this episode

Host: Adam Smith

Guest: Patrician Nelson Limerick

Topics covered

• American history
• frontier myth
• western expansion
• democracy
• individualism
• historical analysis

Keywords

• frontier
• American character
• rugged individualism
• western expansion
• historical myth
• democracy
• ICE agents
• border walls

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: University of Colorado, Boulder

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