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 suffers.
The frontier also promoted the belief that there were no limits to America’s cultural expansion. In other words, 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 »
Every snowstorm and every rain event that occurs in the Missouri Basin between now and next spring will increase the odds that the Missouri River will flood in 2020.
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.
At the time of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, the Missouri River south of today’s Sioux City, Iowa, possessed a series of long, graceful bends and a relatively deep, narrow, main channel. But by the mid-nineteenth century, that meandering river began to disappear, replaced by an altogether different kind of river.
