“Travelling the Genderqueer Slipstream” uses contemporary theories of time arising from western generic studies to offer a new reading of Frederick Jackson Turner’s “Frontier Thesis,” arguing that the representation of time throughout that piece is unstable. This part of the work coheres in the concept of “frontier iconicity”: that Turner created a representation of the western in time that is so far removed from linear representations of time that it constitutes an aesthetic point of entry into slipstream time-travel. This line of thinking, which follows Foucault and Baudrillard, is primarily explored through the work of Michael K. Johnson, Mark Rifkin, Grace L. Dillon and Peter Boag. The second part of the paper explores the potential of considering Native Slipstream as a reading strategy for all texts that invoke frontier iconicity, demonstrated by a recuperative approach to transmasculine, gender nonconforming and genderqueer presence in the literary western. The argument culminates with the suggestion that considering the frontier icon as fundamentally temporally unstable, has set the conditions for one of the most generative discussions of queer futurity that has been possible to date. Authors and theatre makers explored in this discussion include Willa Cather, Zane Grey, Louise Erdrich and Charlie Josephine, among others.

This research explores relationships between Louis L'Amour's literary works and the Frontier Thesis, which defined the impact of the American frontier on national character and identity. The central theme of L’Amour’s literature is rugged individualism. This is described in some detail, analyzing how it is portrayed in his selected works. Primary focus is given to the longing for a home—a recurring but overlooked theme in L'Amour's narratives. By extension, the role of women in L'Amour's writings is highlighted. Women are depicted as crucial in the establishment of homes and communities on the frontier. Strong female characters in L'Amour's works embody the essence of homemaking and resilience on the frontier. Analysis of representative works by L'Amour show how the themes of rugged individualism, the longing for a home, and the role of women are woven together. A conclusion summarizes the key findings and discusses implications for understanding the American frontier experience through literature.

Abstract In 1985 American author Cormac McCarthy published Blood Meridian, a novel that is set against the backdrop of the conquest of the West, a momentous and still relevant process that has acquired quasi-mythical dimensions throughout history and that is undoubtedly embedded in the United States’ national consciousness. In this article I will show the different mechanisms employed by Cormac McCarthy to deconstruct conventional Western narratives that glorify and sanction the Westward expansion as a courageous endeavour that shaped the American nation, hence underplaying the more devastating and pernicious side of this chapter of America’s imperialistic undertakings. To that end, I will argue that McCarthy contests the main tenets of the crucial 1893 Frontier Thesis proposed by Frederick Jackson Turner, in particular the depiction of American colonial expansion as a source of progress and democratic development; likewise I will contend that, in Blood Meridian, McCarthy aligns himself with the ideas of New Western Historians that offer a revisionist perspective of the country’s past, revealing such brutality and wickedness exerted in the appropriation of the western territories that seemed to deprive the process of any hope of God’s mercy.

Abstract During a pioneering aerial survey of the Near East in the 1920s, Father Antoine Poidebard recorded hundreds of fortified military buildings that traced the eastern frontier of the Roman Empire. Based on their distribution, Poidebard proposed that these forts represented a line of defence against incursions from the east. Utilising declassified images from the CORONA and HEXAGON spy satellite programmes, the authors report on the identification of a further 396 forts widely distributed across the northern Fertile Crescent. The addition of these forts questions Poidebard's defensive frontier thesis and suggests instead that the structures played a role in facilitating the movement of people and goods across the Syrian steppe.

Recognizing the Authentic, Documented Middle West Christopher Reed (bio) As an American historian, I view the Old West (and now the Middle West) as a place of diversity and contradictions, and as being a real place. In the historical mind, but perhaps more importantly, because of the documented record, the Old West/West/Middle West is as authentic as could be experienced, or even imagined. My personal recollection from the mid-twentieth century of the image of the Midwest is linked to an oft-told family story of how my mother's great grandmother "safely brought her little children across the mountains" into Ohio. This bit of oral history from the mid-nineteenth century, backed up by documentation in later years, depicted the Trail of Tears and left an imprint on my mind and in my imagination of the Middle West as a place of safety and security. The offshoot of this sojourner's trek as part of the displacement of the Cherokee nation eventually led to the enlistment of her offspring as combatants and participants in the liberation of an entire people by 1865. So, the Midwest carried a salutary image in my imagination despite its sometimes contradictory resistance to abolitionism counterbalanced by a willingness to embrace a civic nationalism to preserve the Union. This sentiment was embraced by many Whites despite their holding firmly to the notion of White supremacy as "White men fought a White man's war." Despite the current national rancor over censorship in all spheres of communication, the evolving world of academics allows for new interpretations to emerge as is exemplified in the foci of Imagining the Heartland on whiteness and imagination as negative influences. In this somewhat controversial piece, a coterie of writers has undertaken the task of exposing the supposed wholesomeness of the geographical Midwest as established in the popular imagination. Contributing to the latter [End Page 153] dimension, Hollywood with the Wizard of Oz, the media in its forms ranging from television to advertisements, politicians from Reagan to Trump, and leading literary publications have created an impression in the American mind of a nation with a pure regional environment that acts to both nurture and preserve whiteness. What our colleagues across disciplinary lines have advanced as a concept bears little resemblance to a provable theory. Rather than in the Midwest, White racism originated in the South as a justification for the subjugation and economic exploitation of African labor. Unfortunately, its pervasiveness is real and an integral part of the national fabric. Further, the element of racial purity had its roots in the earliest efforts at English settlement along the entirety of the North American coast. America was envisioned as a City upon a Hill, a new Jerusalem bestowed on God's favorites. This is the origin of some of the nation's most deep-seated convictions about the value of whiteness for it has led to a heritage for almost all non-Black groups, newly arrived or lengthily rooted, in which they locate cultural comfort. America's problem started with an aversion to anyone or any group unlucky enough to be considered an Other. So, it is not just the Midwest that has upheld some of the nation's most deep-seated convictions about the value of whiteness. From opposition to a recognition of the humanity of Indigenous people, it spread to "Outlandish Africans." For the latter group, it produced an indelible stain that persists even today (even with a near national aversion to use of the "N" word publicly). From the hostility in the Midwest directed against darker-complexioned (and other complexioned) peoples, whether Indigenous, Hispanic or Chinese, it seemed a likely extension of New England coastal aversion to Anabaptists, Catholics, Quakers, and Jews which was aggressively held by Englishmen. With the advent of the twentieth century, a partial acceptance of the Irish within the body of Whites led to their partial welcome by the Second World War. For historians, beginning with the decline in acceptance of Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis that featured the admirable and highly successive efforts of hardy White settlers civilizing a demographically empty land to be designated the Middle West with their muscles, good...

Reviewed by: Survival and Resistance in Evangelical America: Christian Reconstruction in the Pacific Northwest by Crawford Gribben Eileen Luhr SURVIVAL AND RESISTANCE IN EVANGELICAL AMERICA: CHRISTIAN RECONSTRUCTION IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST by Crawford Gribben Oxford University Press, New York, 2021. Maps, notes, bibliography, index. 210 pages. $32.95 cloth. In 1961, R.J. Rushdoony observed the onset of American modernity and determined that the conditions suggested imminent decline. Echoing earlier traditions of American jeremiads, Rushdoony — a dominant figure in Calvinist-influenced efforts to order American society along biblical lines — lamented, “there is . . . in each degenerating culture, and in the totality of history as it matures, a progressive degeneration of the natural man” (p. 138). Rushdoony concluded that, as state power expanded, American culture would experience turmoil, catastrophe, and — ultimately — collapse. While interventionist-minded evangelicals sought to reform American culture during the late twentieth century, Rush-doony, a postmillennialist, urged followers to survive, resist, and reconstruct American culture according to Old Testament law. By the late 1980s, Rushdoony’s repeated calls to reconstruct American culture fell to the wayside as evangelicals immersed themselves in politics. Perhaps as a result, scholars writing the history of evangelical activism have often minimized Rushdoony’s influence, choosing to focus on top-down political engagement. In Survival and Resistance in Evangelical America, Crawford Gribben, a historian at Queen’s University in Belfast, disputes these claims by tracing the “origins, evolution, and cultural reach” of Rushdoony and other Christian Reconstruction-ists (p. 13). Gribben characterizes his work as a “social history of theological ideas” that contextualizes an understudied tradition of modern conservatism within American religious, political, and cultural history (p. ix). He argues that as evangelical political efforts fragmented in the 1990s, “a much more vigorous, variegated, and entrepreneurial evangelical landscape” took its place (p. 63). Reconstructionists, also known [End Page 102] as theonomists, claimed a new relevance in this moment. Gribben counters reports of theonomy’s decline by tracing the alterations in cultural strategies and lived practices of Christian Reconstruction, which “has been revived, modified, and tempered, and, as its advocates develop savvy and strategic use of American mass culture, its ideas have a greater cultural purchase than ever before” (p. x). Second-generation Reconstruction activists sought to create “intentional communities” that lived by the demands of the Old Testament, in what one movement novelist characterized as the American Redoubt, an area including Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, eastern Oregon, and eastern Washington (p. 5). By retreating into these White-dominated areas of the Pacific Northwest, cultural separatists could better survive and resist the doomed systems of liberal democracy at the “end of white Christian America” and prepare to reconstruct a biblically aligned society on its ashes (p. ix). Using a mix of ethnographic and literary critical approaches, Gribben follows the trajectory of Christian Reconstructionism from its roots in modern libertarianism and the “third disestablishment” to its newer incarnation among cultural separatists such as Douglas Wilson, an influential pastor in the movement, who have built an array of educational, institutional, and media forms in towns including Moscow, Idaho, now considered “America’s most post-millennial town” (p. 53). Gribben describes the recalibration of theonomist ideals through chapters that describe the movement’s altered understandings of migration, eschatology, government, education, and media. The most powerful sections of each chapter come when, having explained the intellectual origins of a particular topic, Gribben draws on his fieldwork, conducted in 2015 and 2016, to describe the lived practices of migrants to Moscow. Noting that Reconstructionist strategies rely on individual regeneration rather than force, Gribben critiques political pundits who paint Reconstructionism with too broad a brush. In his pursuit to be as “objective as possible” and to allow “participants to speak in their own words,” Gribben maintains that leaders deny that their views are racist but leaves readers to draw their own conclusions regarding the racial overtones of their fascination with, for example, Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis or Confederate-friendly accounts of slavery and the Civil War (p. 146). Nevertheless, at a moment when the United States Supreme Court has handed conservatives victories on issues including school prayer, abortion, and government support for religious schools, it is useful to remember that...

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.

For decades, historians of the American West have problematized Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis in myriad ways. Coalescing in a group often labeled New Western historians, these individuals found holes in Turner's interpretation of the American West as a place where hardy pioneers constructed democratic institutions, lived independently, and assimilated into one “American” community. For his part in confronting Turner's view, Iker Saitua “challenges the idea of melting-pot homogeneity in the American West by examining the Basque immigrant experience in Nevada as a complex collectivity in a complex geographical place” (13). In so doing, Saitua examines the relatively unknown story of Basque immigration to and settlement in Nevada to demonstrate that we still have much to learn about the region and those who reside in it.As a native of the Basque country and the Basque Government Postdoctoral Fellow at both the University of the Basque Country and the University of California, Riverside, Saitua is intimately familiar with this story. The author organizes the study by separating it into three distinct parts. Saitua begins by relating the first waves of Basque immigration to the United States in the late nineteenth century, transitions into how the Basque community became a fixture in Nevada before the outbreak of World War II, and closes by looking at how labor shortages compelled American recruitment of Basque workers following the war. Each part explores how they faced distinct challenges to establish themselves in the United States. Nothing proved easy, but perhaps the most daunting issue that Saitua covers is the racialization of Basque immigrants in the aftermath of World War I and following the Johnson-Reid Act of 1924 that constructed quotas for immigrants coming to the United States. As Saitua tells it, the Basque community in the West proved largely successful in finding a niche in the Nevada ranching economy as knowledgeable and dedicated sheepherders. Unfortunately, while their contribution provided opportunities to earn acceptance by and respect from their employers and others in the state, the community became susceptible to the volatile anti-immigrant fervor that erupted in the 1920s and continued into the 1930s.World War II changed that, however. The restriction on Basque immigration left the sheep industry desperate for laborers, and that desperation compelled many Nevadans to fight to reform the restrictive quota acts. Most notably, Senator Patrick McCarran lobbied hard to ease restrictions and open opportunities for Basques to immigrate and resolve labor shortages. The consummate anti-communist, McCarran even met with Spanish dictator Francisco Franco in 1949 and advised him to emphasize Spain's resistance to communism to improve relations between the two nations. His efforts paid off in the end with both the lessening of restrictions in 1951 and the normalization of relations between Spain and the United States with the 1953 Pact of Madrid, an agreement that encouraged economic ties and “indirectly facilitated the recruitment of Basque immigrant labor” that continued beyond 1953 (249).There is much to appreciate in this book. Notably, Saitua engages labor history, conservation and land use, foreign policy, and whiteness, and he clearly ties those distinct bodies of literature back to his study of Basque community. He has taken a relatively unknown group of people and presented an exemplary case study of how the trials and tribulations of a specific community of immigrants in Nevada can help us better understand the ways that monumental shifts—the development of an agricultural industry in the West, anti-immigration trends in the 1920s and 1930s, and the rise of production demands during World War II—impacted peoples in the West. In the process, he achieves his primary goal of using the Basque story to expand the historiography of the New Western History and counter Turner's dated notion of Americanization on the frontier.Two minor issues detract from the study. First, there is no conclusion. Each chapter works well on its own, but a short conclusion that included a summary of main themes as well as the author's contributions, or perhaps even a mention to how the Basque community fared after 1954, would refocus the book. Second, it is sometimes difficult to understand the impact of these shifts on the Basque community itself. It might help had the author grounded some of these developments with a better representation of community numbers, or how they were viewed beyond Nevada, or whether the community remains viable.Minor complaints such as these will do little to detract from the book's contributions. Saitua adeptly weaves together several complicated bodies of literature to shine a light on a largely unknown story of community development and adaptation in the American West.

Reviewed by: Geographic Personas: Self-Transformation and Performance in the American West by Blake Allmendinger Christine Bold Blake Allmendinger, Geographic Personas: Self-Transformation and Performance in the American West. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2021. 215 pp. Hardcover, $55; e-book, $55. The more stories of settlers going west to transform their identities emerge, the clearer the link between acts of “personal reinvention” (10) and the systemic dispossession of Indigenous lands becomes. This is not exactly the thesis of Blake Allmendinger’s Geographic Personas, but it is, to my mind, the volume’s most consequential implication. [End Page 430] Allmendinger brings together nine stories of self-transforming performance from the mid-nineteenth- to the early twentieth-century US West. Among the transnational array of figures some are familiar (Willa Cather, German author Karl May, mixed-race actor Sylvester Long / Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, French-Canadian cowboy artist and writer Will James / Joseph Dufault), some less so (con man James Addison Reavis, Japanese poet Yone Noguchi, Polish actor Helena Modjeska), and some surprising to find in this company (geologist and nature writer Clarence King, dancer and choreographer Isadora Duncan). What this diverse group has in common is their reworkings of identity in western lands and social spaces. Allmendinger closely reads their stories for traces of performance, in his subjects’ maps, archival documents, autobiographies, fiction, visual art, theatrical style, and social relationships. Some stories bear directly on the land. Clarence King led the Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel, mapping boundary lines onto western lands that dispossessed and erased Indigenous peoples; back east he secretly straddled the color line, living as a member of an exclusive New York white men’s club and as a light-skinned Black man residing with his African American family in a segregated area of the city. James Addison Reavis invented an aristocratic Spanish lineage for himself, undergirded by forged archives and masqueraded relationships, in order to claim one of the “floating” land grants issued by Spanish colonizers (12), in this case 18,6000 square miles in New Mexico and Arizona Territories. When Joseph Ernest Nephtali Dufault of Montreal, Quebec, made himself over into Will James, cowboy, artist, writer, and Hollywood stuntman, the transformation depended both on his fictional autobiography and his larger rewriting of “the West into a fictional space bearing little resemblance to the settled territory” (51). Other stories carry different relationships to power, and the stakes in their impersonations seem quite different. Sylvester Long carried a complex lineage of Indigenous, Black, white, and Kainai (Blood) adoption; his self-identification as Buffalo Child Long Lance (naming himself first Cherokee then Blackfoot) and the fictions he performed on and off camera can be read as strategies [End Page 431] of survival, as he navigated the lines and fantasies laid down by dominant forces. Yone Noguchi arrived in California as “an educated member of the Japanese middle class” (97), but in pursuit of a career as poet and writer found himself navigating very different social structures. Employed first as hotel dishwasher, then as poet Joaquin Miller’s houseboy, he worked his way into patron-ship by members of San Francisco’s Bohemian Club, for whom he performed identities crossing classes, sexualities, and Orientalist fantasies, including authoring The American Diary of a Japanese Girl (1902). After his return to Japan, Noguchi reflected on his identity performance: “two people, the Oriental and the Occidental, on one pair of shoulders are too painful to carry about” (106). In 1876 actor Helena Modjeska fled her own multiple and fractured identities, as well as the oppression of Poland under partition, to found an agricultural commune in California. When the experiment failed, she went on the American stage as a “self-styled Polish countess” (112), a layering of identities novelized in Willa Cather’s My Mortal Enemy (1926) and Susan Sontag’s In America (1999). Allmendinger starts in a familiar place, with Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 frontier thesis, rereading it as a parade of westward-moving actors changing costume as they encounter different landscapes. It’s a nice conceit and can work well—for example, when he parses the movement work of Isadora Duncan, the California-born “creator of modern American...

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.

Reviewed by: What Is a Western? Region, Genre, Imagination by Josh Garrett-Davis Christopher Hickman What Is a Western? Region, Genre, Imagination. By Josh Garrett-Davis. Foreword by Patricia Nelson Limerick. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019. ix + 161 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $24.95 paper. Josh Garrett-Davis’s What Is a Western? coincides with revisions and the planned reopening of the Autry Museum of the American West’s principal gallery. The book has twenty-one chapters, some of which have undergone re-tooling after appearing elsewhere. Garrett-Davis’s provocations often highlight, if not feature, artifacts and items from the Autry’s collections. From borderlands music to a variety of international invocations of the “Western” genre, the inclusivity of the book fits its ambitions. All told, Garrett-Davis, who is an associate curator at the Autry, skillfully surveys a vast canvas of ideas, sources, and cultural products. His book provides the heady cultural consumer with thoughtful judgments about the “Western” as a capacious, peculiar, mythological, and dialogical cultural form. The book’s interrogatory title matters. The musings, illustrations, and examples within the book’s binding touch upon a variety of hefty questions. What gives—or at earlier points across the twentieth century gave—the “Western” its durability? This book reckons with a core problematic. Could we put the genre to such reexamination and deconstruction that we are left with pieces, if not another composite of the genre, that then undermine what Garrett-Davis calls the “specific genius of the Western”? A long-running film series “What Is a Western?” at the Autry both inspires and coheres the text. The chapters with particular focus on a film, such as those about Oklahoma! (1955), The Frisco Kid (1979), or Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985), are enthusiastically arranged and argued. We might ask whether filmic culture has, in fact, had an outsized influence in giving meaning to the genre. Did the “Western” convey a comfort that made it an essential part of post–Second World War American culture and society? After all, the filmic entries of the 1950s and 1960s, many presented in Fox’s Cinemas-cope, provided a visual topography that told contemporary Americans that vastness and [End Page 366] power would go hand in hand. This tandem existed as those in the present sought out and provided explanations, if not release, from the burdens of those explanations, in filmic art. The frontier then had not closed, subtly subverting what Frederick Jackson Turner had made the fons et origio of his “frontier thesis” at the end of the nineteenth century. Instead, as the inimitable William Appleman Williams told us four decades ago, Americans had become accustomed to accepting the benefits, but not to account for the costs and consequences, of what Williams phrased “empire as a way of life.” Imperialism had always been there, too, at least in some generalizable American ambition. The “Western” has been its own “way of life.” As a cultural form, it featured shifting frontiers; it conveyed contortions and contests reminding Americans, if not non-American audiences, that cinema screens had a regnant didactic purpose that paralleled the country’s intended reach and power. Yet that power had its paradoxes. Monument Valley had dialogical gusto for director John Ford. It was there for movie-goers, as part of that filmic reception. Perhaps that location would persist beyond the contemporary turmoil that audiences would have known at the time of Stagecoach (1939) or later on with the existentialism of The Searchers (1956). Be that as it may, mid-twentieth-century “Western” films also continued to echo something aside from variations on the Turnerian thesis about space, movement, and democracy. Instead, such cultural items yielded to viewers an ideational, if not moral, continuity that perpetuated the racial and ethnic nationalism of Theodore Roosevelt’s Winning the West (1889). What Is a Western? will be particularly useful for educators who teach courses on film, popular culture, and the American West, however broadly or paradoxically they define it. [End Page 367] Christopher Hickman Department of History Tarleton State University Copyright © 2023 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Vertical Mountain Ranges exist in the Americas, North Central Asia, African Highlands and Japan, Philippines and Australia and Horizontal Mountain Ranges exist Elsewhere is a new geographical thesis like the “Frontier Thesis” of Frederick Jackson Turner delivered at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. Slanted mountain ranges occur in the European continent in places like the Caucuses mountains too. Carpathian mountain ranges, Apennines, Pyrenees, Dinaric Alps can be seen as slanted mountain ranges too [1]. The Pennines of the United Kingdom can be seen as a vertical direction mountain range.

Since February 24, 2022, we have been witnessing the next stage of what began in the 2014 Russo-Ukrainian War: a full-scale military invasion of Ukraine. For the first time in the history of the European Union, the intensive armed conflict is now approaching the border of the EU and Schengen Zone. The consequences of war: the refugee crisis, humanitarian aid, and economic problems have affected EU countries both immediately and directly. While keeping in mind the human tragedy and the tragedy of Ukraine, we would like to address a few important questions from the perspective of regional and border scholars. From this perspective, the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine is another stage of the new political order in Europe, preceded by the war in Ukraine that started in 2014, the 2015 migration crisis, 2021 Belarus-EU border crisis, which altogether – from the perspective of the border studies – could be described as re-bordering and securitization of borderlands. In this joint editorial, we address four main questions. Firstly, how we can interpret the Russian invasion in the wider, historical context, taking the frontier thesis as an explanatory category developed by Turner (1994). Secondly, the Ukrainian refugee crisis, in the context of the previous Belarusian-EU border crisis, is a multi-layered issue, where religion, gender, geopolitics, and rationales meet. Thirdly, apart from the military and political actions, war and refugee flux could be seen from the perspective of a grassroots movement of aid. Fourthly, the war in Ukraine brings uncertainty and questions about democracy and peace in Western Europe.

In the Summer of 2020, as the latest coronavirus quickened its evolutionary journeys through the human mobilities of planetary urban systems, the research journal of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development published an article by the world's most famous urban economist. Edward Glaeser's article, “The Closing of America's Urban Frontier,” celebrates the influential interpretation of U.S. history offered by Frederick Jackson Turner in a lecture delivered in Chicago in 1893, as part of Glaeser's advocacy of neoliberal, supply-side deregulated city-building as social policy. Yet Glaeser carefully evades the fundamental ethnoracial inequalities at the heart of Turner's frontier thesis, which were inseparable from the Social Darwinist hijacking of evolutionary thought that corrupted economics and other social sciences beginning in the late 19th century. In this paper, the Glaeser-Turner genealogy is used to interpret today's evolving materialities and discourses of race, class, identity, and urbanism. A mixed-methods blend of quantitative modeling and simple, descriptive online media analysis in the spirit of Robert Park's “Natural History of the Newspaper” is used to map the contours of competition, succession, and representation in a planetary urbanism that is now diagnosed as a new phase of “cognitive-cultural” capitalism. Cognitive-capitalist urbanism evolves along multiple semiotic frontiers of cosmopolitan diversity and multidimensional, intersectional hybridity – while valorizing performative competitive hierarchies that legitimate the reproduction of the structured inequalities of capital accumulation. Combinatoric expansion of the spatio-temporal reference points of identity and ancestry present daunting challenges to all who pursue equity or equality – requiring careful strategic confrontation of the meanings of neoliberal planetary human evolution.

Review: <i>The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America</i>, by Greg Grandin

The subject of this research is the written historical sources that contain the term &amp;ldquo;Shaitan&amp;rdquo; and indicate the non-Orthodox nature of its origin in the history and culture of Finno-Ugric population of Ural and Siberia. Methodological framework is comprised of the Frontier Thesis by F. Turner. Historically, the traditional culture of Finno-Ugric peoples of Ural and Siberia was influenced by Muslim and Christian missionaries. Although in the XVII century, retained the influence of the Muslim &amp;ndash; descendants of the Kazan and Siberian Khanates, it was also the influence of the Russian Orthodox Church. Such combination substantiated twofold processes in the history of Finno-Ugric peoples. The research employs the comparative-historical method that reveals the degree of Christian and Muslim influence upon the formation of the image of &amp;ldquo;Shaitan&amp;rdquo; and its use in the culture of Finno-Ugric peoples. The ehnographic materials collected and published prior to 1917 authored by N. Witsen, G. I. Novitsky, K. F. Karjalainen, and I. N. Smirnov served as the source base for this work. The use of the term &amp;ldquo;Shaitan&amp;rdquo; in Finno-Ugric cultures of Ural and Siberia has not been previously associated with the Muslim influence; this approach is implemented for the first time. The authors are also first to publish the field materials, which mention Num-Torum as the &amp;ldquo;former Muslim god&amp;rdquo;. The conclusion is made that relatively to the XVII century, there was no single (Christian) method of infiltration of the term &amp;ldquo;Shaitan&amp;rdquo; into local cultures, as for a long time, Finno-Ugric peoples of Ural and Western Siberia were under the influence of Muslims. The signs of such influence were replaced by Christianity throughout centuries, and the Islamic norms in the culture of Finno-Ugric peoples gradually faded away.

This article analyzes Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West (1985)—the first product of Cormac McCarthy’s borderlands immersion—by deploying the concept of “toxic masculinity,” an exaggerated masculinity related mythically to the role of the cowboy/warrior/pioneer, which creates recklessness and eventually perpetuates violence. In other words, it explores how perfunctorily embracing, or endeavoring to fulfill, hegemonic masculine ideals bring about self-destructive behaviors in McCarthy’s monolithically male characters on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s. Even though the term “toxic masculinity” was seldomly used in the 1980s when McCarthy wrote this novel, he clearly anticipates and historicizes the evolution of American masculinity as embodied by the cowboy/warrior/pioneer into a form of toxic masculinity. By doing so, he presages the gradual cultural recognition that such masculinity is not the generic standard against which all versions of gendered identity should be measured but is in fact toxic, pathological, political, and problematic. By exposing toxic cowboy mythology and deploying it to construct alternative masculinities, McCarthy questions the Frontier Thesis and Manifest Destiny while disrupting the toxic assumptions about manhood and masculine identities they were intended to uphold. The new vision McCarthy presents in Blood Meridian challenges the development of American national identity based on the vicious conquest of impoverished, discriminated, oppressed, and racialized Others and exploited, feminized nature.

American criminal laws and criminal justice systems are harsher, more punitive, more afflicted by racial disparities and injustices, more indifferent to suffering, and less respectful of human dignity than those of other Western countries. The explanations usually offered—rising crime rates in the 1970s and 1980s, public anger and anxiety, crime control politics, neoliberal economic and social policies—are fundamentally incomplete. The deeper explanations are four features of American history that shaped values, attitudes, and beliefs and produced a political culture in which suffering is fatalistically accepted and policy makers are largely indifferent to individual injustices. They are the history of American race relations, the evolution of Protestant fundamentalism, local election of judges and prosecutors, and the continuing influence of political and social values that emerged during three centuries of western expansion. The last, encapsulated in Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis,” is interwoven with the other three. Together, they explain long-term characteristics of American criminal justice and the extraordinary severity of penal policies and practices since the 1970s.

This article puts Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis”—an interpretation of American history that held sway among historians and the general public from the late 1890s to the 1930s—in conversation with James F. White’s depiction of an American liturgical “frontier tradition”—an interpretation of evangelical worship that became popular in the 1990s and continues to hold sway in the twenty-first century. It analyzes both through the lens of contemporary critiques and proposes new lines of inquiry that will contribute to a more robust understanding of American evangelical worship.

Abstract Over the past two decades, historians studying the American West have embraced the label “borderlands” as a means of distinguishing their work from the triumphalism associated with Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis. Historians of early America have made a similar transition, although the term “frontier” is still very much in use among those working in the mid-Atlantic region. The articles in this special issue of Pennsylvania History illustrate how the themes of borderlands history have found their way into studies of eighteenth-century Pennsylvania, even if the term itself has not gained wide currency there.