Understanding the Wild West Myth : American Exceptionalism through Violence and Indian Wars
Historians of the American West despise the term “Wild West.” It has a lot of connotations that are inherently false and more-so vile, yet so much of popular culture is based around these misconceptions. From manifest destiny to disappearing Indigenous people, there are many components to the frontier myth. It is the most common myth in American history and in fact drove much of that history. Heck, it’s basically what defines the so-called “American character,” you know the thing that a myth is about. We tell ourselves stories to inform our identity. Perhaps the person who pushed the myth the best was Frederick Jackson Turner. He argued, “American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.” Turner became a household name after he presented his thesis at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. Every invocation of what makes America exceptionally great since then has had Turner’s frontier thesis behind it, even if his name has faded from memory.
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Here is my dissertation:
Joseph Hall-Patton, "Great Excitement: Violent Incorporations of the American Southwest," dissertation, University of New Mexico, 2023. https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/his...
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