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result(s) for
"Frontier thesis."
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The end of the myth : from the frontier to the border wall in the mind of America
\"A[n] ... interpretation of the meaning of the frontier, from early westward expansion to Trump's border wall ... historian Greg Grandin explores the meaning of the frontier throughout the full sweep of U.S. history--from the American Revolution to the War of 1898, the New Deal to the election of 2016\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Desire for a Home: Individualism in Louis L’Amour’s Dark Canyon
Individualism is a hallmark descriptor of American culture. Frederick Jackson Turner’s seminal Frontier Thesis argued that such individualism has its roots in the frontier. While some have questioned this, subsequent studies have found empirical support for the cultural significance of the frontier experience. It is therefore worth revisiting relevant literature to explore depictions of individualism and all of its nuances. This paper examines individualism in Louis L’Amour’s
. L’Amour’s work, spanning more than fifty years, have embodied the quintessential Western novel. This paper’s analysis is guided by a proposed framework of individualism coming from inherent traits of the American frontier. These include the following: selective migration, rugged conditions, and opportunity for advancement through hard work. The author posits that this picture of individualism is reflected and expressed in
Journal Article
Building an American empire : the era of territorial and political expansion
\" Westward expansion of the United States is most conventionally remembered for rugged individualism, geographic isolationism, and a fair amount of luck. Yet the establishment of the forty-eight contiguous states was hardly a foregone conclusion, and the federal government played a critical role in its success. This book examines the politics of American expansion, showing how the government's regulation of population movements on the frontier, both settlement and removal, advanced national aspirations for empire and promoted the formation of a white settler nation. Building an American Empire details how a government that struggled to exercise plenary power used federal land policy to assert authority over the direction of expansion by engineering the pace and patterns of settlement and to control the movement of populations. At times, the government mobilized populations for compact settlement in strategically important areas of the frontier; at other times, policies were designed to actively restrain settler populations in order to prevent violence, international conflict, and breakaway states. Paul Frymer examines how these settlement patterns helped construct a dominant racial vision for America by incentivizing and directing the movement of white European settlers onto indigenous and diversely populated lands. These efforts were hardly seamless, and Frymer pays close attention to the failures as well, from the lack of further expansion into Latin America to the defeat of the black colonization movement. Building an American Empire reveals the lasting and profound significance government settlement policies had for the nation, both for establishing America as dominantly white and for restricting broader aspirations for empire in lands that could not be so racially engineered. \"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Cowboys: Abstract Expressionism, Hollywood Westerns, and American Progress
Abstract Expressionism has been influenced heavily by the popular theory of America’s undying, progressive spirit, originally conceived by Frederick Jackson Turner and given its most potent form in Western films. Turner’s “Frontier Thesis” was embodied in stories of John Wayne and other cowboy heroes taming the supposed edges of civilization. The mythic West as constructed by Turner and these films cemented American identity as one of exploration and innovation, with the notable condition of Indigenous Americans ceding their sovereignty. While Abstract Expressionism was commonly connected to the mythic West through the origin stories of Jackson Pollock and Clyfford Still, the critical understanding of this movement as the height of painterly achievement built on Native American precedents evinces a deeper connection to Turner’s popular Frontier theory. As critics like Clement Greenberg cast flatness as the last frontier of painting, and as artists like Pollock and Barnett Newman claimed Native American ritual practices as a part of their aesthetic lineage, Abstract Expressionism proved as effective as Hollywood Westerns in corroborating and perpetuating the idea of America’s frontier spirit.
Journal Article
Negotiating the Arctic
This work draws upon the history of Arctic development and the view of the Arctic in different states to explain how such a discourse has manifested itself in current broader cooperation across eight statistics analysis based on organization developments from the late 1970s to the present, shows that international region discourse has largely been forwarded through the extensive role of North American, particularly Canadian, networks and deriving form their frontier-based conceptualization of the north.
eBook
Assessing Progress towards Public Health, Human Rights, and International Development Goals Using Frontier Analysis
Indicators to measure progress towards achieving public health, human rights, and international development targets, such as 100% access to improved drinking water or zero maternal mortality ratio, generally focus on status (i.e., level of attainment or coverage) or trends in status (i.e., rates of change). However, these indicators do not account for different levels of development that countries experience, thus making it difficult to compare progress between countries. We describe a recently developed new use of frontier analysis and apply this method to calculate country performance indices in three areas: maternal mortality ratio, poverty headcount ratio, and primary school completion rate. Frontier analysis is used to identify the maximum achievable rates of change, defined by the historically best-performing countries, as a function of coverage level. Performance indices are calculated by comparing a country's rate of change against the maximum achievable rate at the same coverage level. A country's performance can be positive or negative, corresponding to progression or regression, respectively. The calculated performance indices allow countries to be compared against each other regardless of whether they have only begun to make progress or whether they have almost achieved the target. This paper is the first to use frontier analysis to determine the maximum achievable rates as a function of coverage level and to calculate performance indices for public health, human rights, and international development indicators. The method can be applied to multiple fields and settings, for example health targets such as cessation in smoking or specific vaccine immunizations, and offers both a new approach to analyze existing data and a new data source for consideration when assessing progress achieved.
Journal Article
Aryan Cowboys
During the last third of the twentieth century, white supremacists moved, both literally and in the collective imagination, from midnight rides through Mississippi to broadband-wired cabins in Montana. But while rural Montana may be on the geographical fringe of the country, white supremacist groups were not pushed there, and they are far from \"fringe elements\" of society, as many Americans would like to believe. Evelyn Schlatter's startling analysis describes how many of the new white supremacist groups in the West have co-opted the region's mythology and environment based on longstanding beliefs about American character and Manifest Destiny to shape an organic, home-grown movement.
Dissatisfied with the urbanized, culturally progressive coasts, disenfranchised by affirmative action and immigration, white supremacists have found new hope in the old ideal of the West as a land of opportunity waiting to be settled by self-reliant traditional families. Some even envision the region as a potential white homeland. Groups such as Aryan Nations, The Order, and Posse Comitatus use controversial issues such as affirmative action, anti-Semitism, immigration, and religion to create sympathy for their extremist views among mainstream whites-while offering a \"solution\" in the popular conception of the West as a place of freedom, opportunity, and escape from modern society.Aryan Cowboysexposes the exclusionist message of this \"American\" ideal, while documenting its dangerous appeal.
eBook
The Frontier in American History
A fascinating exploration of American identity by one of the most influential historians and thinkers of the twentieth century
According to Frederick Jackson Turner, the distinct qualities of the American character are inseparable from the idea of the frontier. One of the nation's most influential historians, Turner sets forth his \"frontier thesis\" in the eight brilliant, enlightening, and provocative essays that make up his seminal work, The Frontier in American History—a book which profoundly altered the way Americans viewed themselves.
Disputing the traditionally held emphasis on European cultural influences, Turner argues that the American frontier fostered self-reliance, optimism, ingenuity, individualism, restlessness, materialism, and democratic ideals—traits that collectively shaped the national character. His groundbreaking work continues to influence American culture, politics, and history more than eighty years after it was first published.
eBook
De-Suturing the Cinematic American West: Pushing Beyond Revision and Exploring a Re-Spatialization of the Frontier
This project looks at Frederick Scott Turner’s Frontier Thesis which posits the Western United States as a crucible of American identity formation and uses it to analyze the cinematic representations that unfold in the scope of the Western Genre, seeing traditional Westerns as socially limited in their portrayal of the frontier. Using spatial theory of Edward Soja’s Thirdspace and film theory of Stephen Heath’s “Narrative Space”, this work highlights the problems of the Western as it dominates and excludes the possibilities for alternatives of spatial understanding of the region by using popular revisionist films, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Dances with Wolves and Unforgiven. Seeing how these films fall short of reinterpreting space and instead reinforce exclusionary, problematic perspectives, this thesis looks to Meek’s Cutoff, Smoke Signals and My Own Private Idaho as films that create Thirdspaces in constructing spatial meanings with those in alignment with perspectives of people marginalized by hegemonic power structures rampant in Western film and its mythic structure. Following this, Paris, Texas and Chungking Express will be explored as each offers us a new frontier of understanding of space and cinema by highlighting the problems of mediated spatial meaning. Their characters find freedom in de-suturing myth from space and media and ultimately provide an example for how to actively create a Thirdspace of a culturally laden locus.
Dissertation