Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis contends that the frontier, and the territorial expansion that accompanied it, defined not only American history, but also American culture and the American character. Turner believed that the frontier had fostered innovation, democracy, pragmatism, a can-do spirit, and political moderation; and because of this, the frontier had made the Americans an exceptional people.
Greg Grandin, in The End of the Myth, begs to differ. He argues that the frontier, and the United States’ centuries-long expansion, has been a blessing for some and a curse for everyone else. The frontier engendered perpetual war, racial subjugation, environmental degradation, a misanthropic individualism, and notions of freedom so disconnected from basic communal concerns that social stability suffered.
The frontier also promoted the belief that there were no limits to America’s cultural expansion. America’s values, capitalist economic model, and form of governance had universal applicability. This misplaced idea led the United States into disastrous wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Continue Reading »
Although North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho signed the Paris Peace Accords in January, 1973, he and his colleagues on the North Vietnamese Politburo remained committed to toppling the Saigon regime. Evidence of Hanoi’s intentions toward South Vietnam were not hard to discern – they were easily visible across the South Vietnamese landscape. 
George Packer’s Our Man is occasionally insightful, at times gossipy, and nearly always disturbing.
When Lewis and Clark went up the Missouri in 1804, the river south of today’s Sioux City, Iowa, possessed a series of long, graceful bends and a relatively deep, narrow, main channel. But in the mid-nineteenth century, this meandering river began to morph into something altogether different. Changes in the weather, in conjunction with the fur trade and agricultural settlement, dramatically altered the appearance and behavior of the Missouri.
