![]() ![]() The field of American Studies was born, in part, from Henry Nash Smith's 1950 study, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth, and may well have reached its apotheosis with Richard Slotkin's magisterial trilogy, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier (1973), The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (1985), and Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (1992). Nor is he the first to affirm Canadian poet Anne Carson's contention that "to live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing" (8). Greg Grandin is not the first historian to offer an intellectual history of the frontier myth, to detail the genocide accompanying territorial expansion, or to explore the pathological symbiosis of capitalism and the frontier's inherent promise of boundlessness. ![]()
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