Frontier Experience Research Articles

The impacts of foreign direct investment on total factor productivity: an empirical study of agricultural enterprises

PurposeThis paper aims to examine the impact of six possible foreign direct investment (FDI) spillover channels on the total factor productivity (TFP) of Chinese agricultural enterprises and investigate the moderating role of absorptive capacity (technological acumen) on TFP spillover effects.Design/methodology/approachBased on data from 118 agricultural and related Chinese industries, the authors employ a multithreshold regression model to empirically analyze the impact of FDI on the TFP of agricultural enterprises and the threshold effect of absorptive capacity. To overcome potential endogeneity problems, the authors select the FDI stock of corresponding USA industries and the industrial access policy index as instrumental variables and re-estimate the model.FindingsThe results suggest foreign-invested agricultural enterprises are more likely to benefit from FDI, while the “aggregate” FDI spillover effect is negative for domestic agricultural enterprises. However, once threshold effects are introduced, the authors find firms “close to” (“far from”) the technological frontier experience statistically significant positive (negative) spillover effects. Similar results are obtained for virtually all FDI spillover channels for firms in both upstream and downstream industries. FDI spillovers, when they occur, can be a two-edged sword – benefiting some firms at the expense of others.Originality/valueThe authors introduce six FDI spillover channels to examine the impact of FDI on the productivity of foreign-invested and domestic agricultural enterprises. Moreover, the authors analyze the threshold effect of firms' absorptive capacity. These findings can help formulate foreign investment introduction policies based on the characteristics of agricultural enterprises with different ownership structures. These results are also beneficial for agricultural enterprises to better exploit FDI spillover effects and improve their productivity.

Assemblage and Non-Standard Aesthetics

Deleuze and Guattari describe the body without organs as a frontier experience, as an enrichment, strata, and an assemblage of intensities. The body without organs is made through experimentation, sound production, haptic perception rather than interpretation, and visual perception, because ideas of the world, the visual are encoded and appropriated by the conceptual apparatus, by the territorial machine. At the heart of Laruelle's non-photography and his non-standard aesthetics is the attempt to withdraw onto-photo-logical causality from the visual, from object-forms. For this purpose, objects are to be considered as scientific discoveries and should be investigated using a generic science that uncovers indeterminants and scenarios. Therefore, this article discovers assemblages with the perspective of a non-standard aesthetic, to find not only in the audible material, but also in the visual material of video montages, double and multiple exposures, the non-onto-photo logical areas of perception of the organless, the imaginary, the darkening of concepts, the superpositions of experiences, and images without objects.

Local individualism culture and lower third-party guarantee loan defaults: evidence from SBA loans in the US

ABSTRACT Building on the literature on individualistic culture and entrepreneurship, we use variation in a US county’s frontier experience (rugged individualism) as a proxy for local individualism to explain variation in SBA loan default rates. For every 10-year increase in frontier experience in a county (ranging from 0 to 63 years between 1790 and 1890), the hazard of default was 0.964 times lower, a small but economically meaningful effect. The effects are more salient for sole proprietors and robust to economic shocks from neighbouring shale boom counties and placebo tests. The results indicate that expanding the eligibility requirements for SBA loans to include individuals from US counties with individualistic cultures may be beneficial.

Spoon River America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town by Jason Stacy

Reviewed by: Spoon River America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town by Jason Stacy Gregory Brown Jason Stacy, Spoon River America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2021. 234 pp. $27.95 (paper). In Spoon River America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town, Jason Stacy states that he has "treated Spoon River Anthology like a historical subject" but cautions the reader that the work's "significance lies not only in its history but also in its enduring life as a book that people read" (173). Stacy's analysis of the text is sensitive to the literary aspects of Masters's work, and it is thus useful and engaging to literary critics and historians alike. Stacy begins by tracing two distinct origin myths of the American small town: the New England version and the midwestern one. The myth of the New England small town has roots that reach back before the American Revolution and defines itself as moral, industrious, and cooperative. The midwestern small town, on the other hand, is steeped in the frontier mythos popularized by Frederick Jackson Turner and emphasizes rugged individualism. These rival mythologies "both featured an established small municipality," but "the New England village served as a founding enterprise [of the nation] and thereby preserved original values" while the "Midwestern town was the result of a mythical frontier experience" (33). Both contrasted with urban centers such as New York City, which were portrayed as "dens of hypocrisy and vice" (11). Masters's family history intersected with both myths due to Illinois's patterns of settlement. On both sides of his family tree, Masters's ancestors moved into Illinois to distance themselves from slavery; however, Masters's branch of the family shifted their political sympathies to the South after the Civil War due to increases in federal power and taxation. Stacy notes that Hardin Masters, Edgar Lee's father, "sought to enlist on the side of the North" at the age of sixteen, but by the end of the conflict he [End Page 206] supported the South, and Edgar Lee was named after the famous southern general (38). Hardin Masters was haunted by his reputation as a southern sympathizer; rumors that he had been a Copperhead cost him prestige and business. This opprobrium, Stacy demonstrates, is the seed of the character of the exile, a major trope of Spoon River. In the central chapters of Spoon River America, Stacy synthesizes the familial and cultural currents that surround the creation of Edgar Lee Master's Anthology. As Masters was turning his attention away from practicing law and fully toward a literary career, he moved to Chicago, which had become an important cultural and literary center. There, Masters became acquainted with the "'Little Room,' an informal club of artists, social reformers, and philanthropists" (61). Among the members of the Little Room was Harriet Monroe, the future editor of Poetry; nevertheless, Masters was uncomfortable among this society and faulted them for what he perceived as "haughty exclusiveness" (61). Instead, cultivating an outsider status he would uphold for the rest of his life, Masters preferred the society of the more libertine "Press Club." Through close readings of several poems, Stacy identifies character types such as the moralistic fraud, the libertine, and the exile. The character of the exile fits well with Masters's conception of himself as both a Midwesterner and a populist in post-Civil War America. This character type was also key to the popular success of Spoon River Anthology. The necessity for the exile type was clear to Masters's contemporaries: Stacy quotes a review of Masters's subsequent book, Songs and Satires (1916), wherein T. S. Eliot notes that Masters requires a "personage … detached from himself in order to give his particular meditative irony its opportunity" (113). The detached, meditative tone of Spoon River Anthology, together with its popular if imitable style, allowed readers to take from the work what they wanted. Through the concluding chapters, Stacy demonstrates how the myths that led to Spoon River Anthology continued through the twentieth century. Disneyland commercialized the small town, and...

The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier by Chris Gratien

The frontier has long been a subject of interest for historians of the Ottoman Empire, whether their focus has been on the empire’s origins, its expansion, or its efforts to assert its sovereignty as it faced the threat of European imperialism.1 Gratien’s The Unsettled Plain shows a similar interest. It examines the rationale, implementation, and legacies of various Ottoman political projects that resulted in the environmental transformation of the swampy lowlands of Çukurova in southern Anatolia into an important center of commercial agriculture from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. The book spans the late Ottoman period, the tumultuous years of World War I, and the formative decades of the Turkish Republic. This important contribution to the steadily growing body of work about the Ottoman frontier draws heavily from the methods of environmental history.2For Gratien, the Ottoman frontier was not simply the sum of regions located along the empire’s geographical limits; rather, its defining features were its spaces, “pockets of transformation within the Ottoman provinces” (14). Moreover, that transformation manifested in at least three distinct ways to create a particular type of frontier experience during the late Ottoman period—new forms of state presence in rural settings (“frontiers of state”), the settlement of millions of people (“settlement frontier”), and human-nature interactions shaped increasingly by the forces of global capitalism (“ecological frontier”) (14). Although Gratien’s use of the term frontier throughout his book departs from the more common meaning of the term, this framing effectively “reveals a common story that was central to the remaking of Ottoman society” (15–16, 14). For example, it helps scholars to describe the process of environmental change in Ottoman lands with greater specificity than that captured by more conventional terms such as “provincial reform” (14).This framing device in place, Gratien narrates Çukurova’s environmental transformation as an Ottoman frontier with great clarity, carefully outlining what this process meant for the many generations of the region’s inhabitants. As Gratien demonstrates, seasonal migration was a key facet of life in Çukurova well-before it became Ottoman territory. The reason varied, but by the Ottoman period, one of the most important was health; locals regularly retreated to the pastures in the surrounding mountains to escape the malaria-prone swamps of the lowlands during the summer months. Seasonal migration also gave rise to a particular political order in Çukurova, whereby the Ottoman state delegated the task of securing the obedience of the region’s nomadic population to local elites in the nearby mountains. By the second half of the nineteenth century, however, the Ottoman government sought to curb the power of these elites as part of a broader centralization of the empire. It also began to see pastoralism as at odds with its vision of Çukurova as a potential center for commercial agriculture in the future. Thus, from the second half of the nineteenth century forward, the Ottoman government worked to settle not only pastoralists in Çukurova but also refugees in hopes of tapping into the region’s agrarian potential, which Ottoman officials often compared to that of Egypt. Among the many unfortunate consequences of this ecological transformation was the continued exposure of the region’s inhabitants to malaria, which remained a threat during World War I and after the establishment of the Turkish Republic.Historians of the Ottoman Empire and environmental historians in general will certainly recognize the importance of The Unsettled Plain. But non-specialists interested in interdisciplinary approaches to the study of history also stand to benefit from it. Gratien includes several citations from scientific studies that further deepen readers’ understanding of Çukurova’s environmental history, especially as it concerns the types of mosquitos that transmit malaria and the conditions under which they thrive (37, 159). Indeed, Gratien’s book is just the latest to demonstrate how sophisticated the field of Middle East environmental history has become.

The Map and the Menu

This article considers Bernard DeVoto’s defense of Frederick Jackson Turner’s influential essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893). DeVoto and other western historians championed Turner’s thesis celebrating westward expansion and Manifest Destiny at the same time that Julia Child was living in France, writing Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961). While a group of heterosexual males were reviving Turner’s account of the US frontier experience in the mid–twentieth century, Child—along with a cohort of female collaborators and several gay men writing back home in the states—were positing a non-isolationist vision of America and a more cosmopolitan imaginary of its relations with other countries. They did so by writing about seemingly apolitical subjects, such as European cuisine and mixed alcoholic concoctions called “cocktails,” during World War II and the Cold War era.

The Desire for a Home: Individualism in Louis L’Amour’s Dark Canyon

Abstract 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 Dark Canyon. 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 Dark Canyon.

Rugged individualism, economic growth, and inter-county variation in entrepreneurial activity

ABSTRACT Does intra-country variation in individualism explain variations in intra-country entrepreneurial activity? Rugged individualism, a combination of individualism and anti-statism, is proxied by the total years of frontier experience in a US county between 1790 and 1890. We exploit this historic variation in tandem with present-day GDP growth in a county to test how the historic frontier experience interacts with changes in economic growth to explain the entrepreneurial activity. With small effect sizes, the findings demonstrate the greater (limited) value of rugged individualism in low (high) GDP growth conditions in driving entrepreneurial activity. Robust to a variety of specifications and a placebo test, the mechanism seems to operate through lower collective efficacy in counties with higher total frontier experience. The findings carry implications for within-country cultural variations and entrepreneurial activity.

Riding East—Western Myths, Nostalgia, and the Crossing of Generic Boundaries in Hidalgo (2004)

<i>Riding East</i>—Western Myths, Nostalgia, and the Crossing of Generic Boundaries in <i>Hidalgo</i> (2004)

Individualism during Crises

Abstract Individualism has long been linked to economic growth. Using the COVID-19 pandemic, we show that such a culture can hamper the economy's response to crises, a period with heightened coordination frictions. Exploiting variation in U.S. counties' frontier experience, we show that more individualistic counties engage less in social distancing and charitable transfers and are less willing to receive COVID-19 vaccines. The effect of individualism is stronger where social distancing has higher externality and holds at the individual level when we exploit migrants for identification. Our results suggest that individualism can exacerbate collective action problems during economic downturns.

Individualistic culture increases economic mobility in the United States

Where an individual grows up has large implications for their long-term economic outcomes, including earnings and intergenerational mobility. Even within the United States, the "causal effect of place" varies greatly and cannot be fully explained by socioeconomic conditions. Across different nations, variation in growth and mobility have been linked to more individualistic cultures. We assess how variation of historically driven individualism within the United States affects mobility. Areas in the United States that were isolated on the frontier for longer periods of time during the 19th century have a stronger culture of "rugged individualism" [S. Bazzi, M. Fiszbein, M. Gebresilasse, Econometrica 88, 2329-2368 (2020)]. We combine county-level measures of frontier experience with modern measures of the causal effect of place on mobility-the predicted percentage change in an individual's earnings at age 26 y associated with "growing up" in a particular county [R. Chetty, N. Hendren, Q. J. Econ. 133, 1163-1228 (2018)]. Using commuting zone fixed effects and a suite of county-level controls to absorb regional variation in frontier experience and modern economic conditions, we find an additional decade of frontier experience results in 25% greater modern-day income mobility for children of parents in the 25th percentile of income and 14% for those born to parents in the 75th percentile. We use mediation analysis to present suggestive evidence that informal manifestations of "rugged individualism"-those embodied by the individuals themselves-are more strongly associated with upward mobility than formal policy or selective migration.

“Rugged individualism” and collective (in)action during the COVID-19 pandemic

“Rugged individualism”—the combination of individualism and anti-statism—is a prominent feature of American culture with deep roots in the country’s history of frontier settlement. Today, rugged individualism is more prevalent in counties with greater total frontier experience (TFE) during the era of westward expansion. While individualism may be conducive to innovation, it can also undermine collective action, with potentially adverse social consequences. We argue that America’s frontier culture hampered responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Across U.S. counties, greater TFE is associated with less social distancing and mask use as well as weaker local government effort to control the virus. We argue that frontier culture lies at the root of several more proximate explanations for the weak collective response to public health risks, including a lack of civic duty, partisanship, and distrust in science.

American Catholics: A History by Leslie Woodcock Tentler

Reviewed by: American Catholics: A History by Leslie Woodcock Tentler Kathleen Holscher, Philip Gleason, Robert Trisco, Joseph M. White, Paula M. Kane, and Leslie Woodcock Tentler American Catholics: A History. By Leslie Woodcock Tentler. (New Haven: Yale University Press. 2020. Pp. xiv, 402. $30.00. ISBN 978-0300-21964-7.) Introduction Kathleen Holscher (University of New Mexico) For decades the field of American Catholic history—its scope and arc, its protagonists and problems—has been defined by a handful of sweeping studies of Catholic church and life across the span of U.S. history. With American Catholics: A History, Leslie Woodcock Tenter contributes to this genre. Tentler is, notably, the first female historian to publish a survey of this sort, and American Catholics joins and advances works by male counterparts, including Jay Dolan, Patrick Carey, James Fisher, and James O’Toole. Drawing upon her pathbreaking academic career in U.S. Catholic history (Tentler is Professor Emerita in the Department of History at Catholic University of America), and her expertise in urban Catholicism and Catholic family life, Tentler offers readers a well-organized account of U.S. Catholicism over four centuries, built from selective original research paired with synthesis of existing scholarship. American Catholics proceeds in fourteen chapters divided among five sections. Tentler opens each section with a profile of a Catholic figure whose life, and sometimes saintly afterlife, manifests themes of the section. Tentler’s choice of profiles across the book—Eusebio Kino, Samuel Mazzuchelli, Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini, John C. Cort, and Patricia Caron Crowley—demonstrates her commitment to building an account of American Catholicism in which ordained and lay actors, men and women, cradle Catholics and converts, all make defining contributions. In Part One, “On the Fringes of Empire,” Tentler departs from histories that locate the origins of American Catholicism in the Protestant British colonies. Instead, Tentler begins her story with the imperial projects of Spain and France. She introduces the Catholic Reformation in Europe as context for the work of Franciscans and Jesuits who sought to [End Page 277] transform the earthly lives and eternal souls of Native peoples in territory claimed by Spain, stretching from “La Florida” to California, and in Wendat and Iroquois territory claimed by France. Tentler considers how Natives responded to missions, and she highlights the role of Catholic sisters in New France from the mid-seventeenth century. In centering women religious early on, she establishes an important theme for her book. “Adaptable and surprisingly independent,” Tentler writes, “women religious in New France created a template of sorts for the nascent church in the United States” (42). After this foundational treatment of European imperial Catholicism, the remaining four sections of American Catholics proceed chronologically. Parts Two (“Growing with the Nation, 1815–1870”) and Three (“A Turbulent Passage, 1871–1919”) treat the long nineteenth century. Episodes that anchor Tentler’s narrative here—including the development of Catholic urban strongholds amid European immigration, the expanding presence of priests and women religious in and beyond ethnic Catholic communities, and resulting American concerns about Catholic influences in politics and education—will be familiar to scholars who regularly teach “Immigrant Church” oriented courses on U.S. Catholic history. Here too, though, Tentler finds opportunity for fresh historical consideration, notably through in-depth discussion of rural or “frontier” Catholicism as it expanded with the formation of dioceses across what is now the Midwest. “The frontier experience,” writes Tentler, left “in its wake a Catholicism open to the nation’s democratic culture and even its pluralism” (83). Tentler’s chapter on “Slavery and the Civil War,” in which she treats Catholic leaders’ critiques of the Emancipation Proclamation alongside evidence of anti-Black racism that characteried Irish Catholic regiments fighting for the Union cause, is also noteworthy (125). Parts Four and Five of American Catholics, entitled “Exuberant Maturity, 1920-1962” and “A World Unbound, 1963–2015,” span the last century of U.S. Catholic history. Here Tentler follows a U.S. Catholic Church as it develops via engagement with American social movements, and in response to its increasingly affluent, educated, and suburban white laity, even as it is rocked, midway through the period, by Second Vatican Council reforms. While Tentler...

Rugged entrepreneurs: The geographic and cultural contours of new business formation

How do geographic and historical-cultural factors shape new business formation? Using novel data on new business registrations, we document that 75% of the variation in new business formation is explained by time-invariant county-level factors and examine the extent to which such variation is driven by historical, cultural, and geographic factors. Current-day new business formation is positively related to historical attributes that presage individualist culture: frontier experience and historical birthplace diversity, as well as the county’s topographical features. The relation holds when we exploit plausibly exogenous variation in frontier experience driven by shocks to the settlement process that arise from historical immigration flows. Our study points to the fundamental role of geographic and historical-cultural features, especially rugged individualism, in explaining contemporary new business formation in the U.S.

Individualism During Crises

Individualism has long been linked to economic growth. Using the COVID-19 pandemic, we show that such a culture can hamper the economy’s response to crises, a period with heightened coordination frictions. Exploiting variation in US counties’ frontier experience, we show that more individualistic counties engage less in social distancing and charitable transfers, and are less willing to receive COVID-19 vaccines. The effect of individualism is stronger where social distancing has higher externality and holds at the individual level when we exploit migrants for identification. Our results suggest that individualism can exacerbate collective action problems during economic downturns.

Revolutionary: George Washington at War by Robert L. O’Connell

Reviewed by: Revolutionary: George Washington at War by Robert L. O’Connell W. Stephen McBride Revolutionary: George Washington at War. By Robert L. O’Connell. (New York: Random House, 2019. Pp. xxviii, 368. $32.00, ISBN 978-0-8129-9699-9.) In this lively and fast-paced history of George Washington and the American Revolution, author Robert L. O’Connell examines the motivations and actions of Washington, the political, social, and economic origins of the Revolution, and a politico-military history of the war itself. O’Connell suggests three main points of departure from earlier studies: First, that revolutionary fervor moved very rapidly across America and became accepted by a great majority because of the combination of radical Whig critiques of the British government, the ability of rebel leaders to quickly gain control of colonial legislatures and militias, and a wildly touted and believed “conspiracy theory” that the British were attempting to enslave white Americans (p. xvi); second, that the British effort to crush the American Revolution was doomed from the beginning and could not succeed (this conclusion is based on the widespread popular support for the Revolution and the British misunderstanding of this support); and third, that not only was George Washington’s military and political leadership vital in preserving and regenerating the Continental army, but also that his “rectitude and moderation” toward the enemy (British and Loyalists) and his rivals were the reasons the American Revolution was comparatively bloodless and led to a stable national republic rather than civil war (p. xxi). After an introduction, the book moves to “The Gentrification of George,” a chapter that presents a lively discussion of Washington’s upbringing, growing ambition, political and social climbing, frontier experience, including interaction with Native Americans, and finally French and Indian War diplomatic and military experience. This last experience, which, as colonel of the Virginia Regiment, included military administration, choosing officers, troop training, fortification design, and irregular combat tactics, proved vital to his later position as commander of the Continental army. In the third chapter, “Rage Militaire,” which covers the beginning of the Revolutionary War, O’Connell investigates his contention about the American fear of enslavement. O’Connell presents a well-documented discussion of American opinions about various British acts and taxes and the tremendous acceleration of revolutionary thinking after the British reaction to the Boston Tea Party and First Continental Congress. Americans’ actions, O’Connell effectively argues, are explained by their fear of losing liberty and therefore of being enslaved. The final four chapters investigate Washington’s leadership and British military strategies and actions during the war itself. O’Connell demonstrates that Britain’s often poorly conceived strategy, brutal tactics, and rough occupation could never lead to victory, but he does not, in my opinion, demonstrate that the British could not have won the war under a different strategy [End Page 137] and tactics. These chapters also present excellent summaries of many major battles of the war and examine Washington’s evolution as commander from amateur to professional; they show his many strengths in military strategy, logistics, and even fund-raising. These four chapters also illustrate some of Washington’s weaknesses, particularly his extreme class consciousness, his poor judgment of some officers, and his inability to understand the rank and file. Finally, these chapters present convincing data in support of O’Connell’s third argument, that Washington’s personality and leadership prevented the Revolutionary War from deteriorating into an internecine bloodbath or civil war; as O’Connell writes, one of Washington’s main tenets was “always behave better than they [the British] do” (p. xxiii). Only Washington had the status and clout, as “Generalissimo,” according to O’Connell, to accomplish this mission (p. xiii). Revolutionary: George Washington at War is well researched and wonderfully written, and it presents interesting and important research problems that are thoughtfully investigated and argued. It is an excellent example of the combination of military history and biography and should be read by all who are interested in not only the American Revolution but also political and military leadership and the comparative study of revolutions. W. Stephen McBride Camp Nelson Heritage National Monument Copyright © 2020 The Southern Historical Association

Landscapes of Resistance: Polar Allusion and the Northern Frontier in the Fiction of Constance Fenimore Woolson

Landscapes of Resistance: Polar Allusion and the Northern Frontier in the Fiction of Constance Fenimore Woolson Jacqueline Justice (bio) As Anne Boyd Rioux opens her biography of Constance Fenimore Woolson, she invites readers to picture Woolson, presenting seven scenes that illustrate how the author’s real-life story is far richer and more complex than the one we typically encounter. The first two seemingly reference Woolson’s childhood home (a child in a parlor and a young woman buying a newspaper for Civil War news); somewhere outside those parlor windows and just beyond the streets where the “newspaper boy [proclaims] the latest headlines of the war,” Lake Erie stretches to the northern horizon.1 As the popular nineteenth-century media represented it, the impenetrable Arctic frontier shared many qualities with Woolson’s Great Lakes childhood home; the region’s winters can be stunningly cold and the frozen lakes pile ice on the shores in jagged heaps evoking the formidable polar landscapes that popular publications favored. Beyond sharing climates and appearances, these northern frontiers symbolized landscapes of resistance that Woolson admired—landscapes where the indifferent ice regularly swallowed up the best-trained men and most technologically advanced ships. [End Page 409] When we prioritize the analytical lens of thwarted imperial obsession—the theme animating the nineteenth-century polar expedition mythos—unexpected connections appear between Woolson’s Great Lakes and Reconstruction South narratives, stories rarely analyzed together. To demonstrate these connections, this study crosses literary landscapes nearly as vast as the icy ones Woolson’s descriptions invite readers to imagine. First, I locate Woolson’s frontier within the larger context of North American frontier ideologies, exploring ways frontier symbols intersect with America’s conflicted postwar imperialist impulse. Following this contextualization, I analyze several Great Lakes narratives. Finally, I provide a close reading of a selected Southern narrative, demonstrating how Woolson uses polar imagery to express an anti-imperialist subtext that emerges as clearly in her Great Lakes romances as it does in her Reconstruction fiction. woolson’s northern frontier Constance Fenimore Woolson was born in 1840 in New Hampshire, the sixth daughter of Jarvis and Hannah Woolson. Within a month of her birth, two of her sisters died, victims of scarlet fever. Her grief-stricken parents, looking for a new start, headed west, settling in Cleveland, Ohio, part of the Western Reserve and a port town that connected the East to the Great Lakes interior. Victoria Brehm and Rioux summarize aptly the importance of this move and the way it shaped Woolson: “Constance not only grew up in Cleveland; she grew up with it.”2 Scholars frequently stress Woolson’s Great Lakes childhood, describing her as “a child of the frontier” and claiming “it would be frontiers that shaped her personal and professional lives until she died in Venice, Italy, in 1894.”3 In addition to growing up on and with the Great Lakes frontier, as James [End Page 410] Fenimore Cooper’s grand-niece she expressed the concern with frontiers (and suspicion of the imperialist agenda driving destructive frontier practices) that was an inherited component of the Fenimore Cooper literary and familial legacy.4 A frontier is essentially a border, a dividing line between what we perceive as under civilized control and what we regard as uncontrolled, wild and dangerous. Frontiers can be geographic. They can also be ideological, dividing accepted ways of thinking from disruptive or divisive ideas. In either case, frontiers are temporary—boundaries push back and wilderness submits. American culture characterizes the frontier variously. Scholars have often prioritized Frederick Jackson Turner’s version as the best articulation of mainstream attitudes in the postwar era. In his seminal essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Turner claims the frontier experience played an essential role in American culture because it “promoted the formation of a composite nationality,” “decreased dependence on England,” and supported democracy by demanding independent thinking and individual action.5 Turner insists that the struggle to subdue the wilderness and settle the American West held transformative power. Indeed, Turner argues that this experience helped shape the qualities that make Americans exceptional: “To the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics” because “coarseness and strength combined...

Frontier Culture: The Roots and Persistence of “Rugged Individualism” in the United States

The presence of a westward‐moving frontier of settlement shaped early U.S. history. In 1893, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner famously argued that the American frontier fostered individualism. We investigate the “frontier thesis” and identify its long‐run implications for culture and politics. We track the frontier throughout the 1790–1890 period and construct a novel, county‐level measure of total frontier experience (TFE). Historically, frontier locations had distinctive demographics and greater individualism. Long after the closing of the frontier, counties with greater TFE exhibit more pervasive individualism and opposition to redistribution. This pattern cuts across known divides in the United States, including urban–rural and north–south. We provide evidence on the roots of frontier culture, identifying both selective migration and a causal effect of frontier exposure on individualism. Overall, our findings shed new light on the frontier's persistent legacy of rugged individualism.

Of Peaceable Kingdoms and Lawless Frontiers: Exploring the Relationship between History, Mythology and Gun Culture in the North American West

ABSTRACTThe United States is more violent than Canada and it always has been. Even in the face of mass shootings, most Americans remain culturally and politically resistant to the sorts of gun control measures that have long existed in Canada. America’s unique gun culture is embedded in the history, imagery, and especially the mythology of the American frontier. Canada had its own frontier experience and has its own history of gun ownership, but it does not have a parallel gun culture. This article presents a comparative analysis of post-Civil War/post-Confederation frontier history and mythology, and examines the construction of contrasting cultural narratives of America’s “Wild West” and Canada’s “Mild West.” It suggests that US–Canadian differences in gun laws and gun culture—even in the borderlands region of Alberta/Montana—are better explained by the countries’ two different frontier mythologies than by their actual western histories.

Midwestern Dreams or Nightmares? An Appreciation and Critique of Caroline Fraser's Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder

Caroline Fraser's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder has won a great deal of praise from reviewers for its extensive research, wide-ranging interpretation of Wilder's life and writings, and for its felicitous writing style. At 515 pages of text and 85 pages of notes, the book is twice as long as any other book on the subject. Prairie Fires adds to our knowledge and develops more fully a number of important themes and issues related to Wilder. Many of Fraser's speculations are fruitful; others invite skepticism. Fraser develops a nuanced description of the collaborative writing process that occurred between Wilder and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, in the construction of the Little House novels. The major burden of the book is to show how the writing team mythologized and glorified the frontier experience by creating a false narrative of the Ingalls family's life in the Midwest and by making the settlement process seem much more successful than it actually was. In this, Wilder and Lane resembled other writers of "national biography," who, in the spirit of Ralph Waldo Emerson, purveyed a positive, success-oriented narrative of national progress that belied the actual difficulties, missteps, and failures that characterized Americans' lives. Two assertions stand out in the argument: first, that Wilder's childhood was dismal, unhappy, and literally "hellish"; second, that row-crop farming of the kind the Ingalls family practiced should never have been taken out onto the Dakota prairies. Neither of these hypotheses stands up to historical scrutiny.