American West as image and myth                                    American Progress,  John Gast, 1872

The frontier as place and as process emerges are powerful themes in American culture-- think, for example, of James Fennimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1822),  Mark Twain's Roughing It (1872),  Theodore Roosevelt's Memoirs of life as a cowboy (1888), Owen Wister's The Virginian (1903), and Frederick Remington's art.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Frederick Jackson Turner's delineation of the Frontier Thesis provided a definition of what made Americans "American." Turner argued that encounters with wilderness on the frontier--and its human analogies, Native Americans--transformed Europeans into Americans. Not surprisingly, this definition of "American exceptionalism" emerged in other forms, through Western films, cowboy culture, and even in the Space Race and in American foreign policy. (See Henry Nash Smith's The Virgin Land)

Required Readings:

Recommended Readings:

• Gary Gerstle, "Theodore Roosevelt and the Divided Character of American Nationalism" (1999).