Frederick Jackson Turner famously declared the United States frontier closed in 1893, but of course he was wrong: you can’t close an idea. As many historians, literary scholars, and cultural critics since Turner have suggested, the frontier is not a place in time but a grand mythology, a story of national formation in which violent conflict gives way to white patriarchal authority and the domestication of “wild” spaces and people. Rehearsed in every form of art and popular culture, frontier mythology is also a broken promise, since the moral order, homogeneous social accord, and economic prosperity it ascribes to white settlement never arrived. As such, it prompts Americans’ continuous engagement; we return to it again and again, either to reinvest in its premises or, more productively, to reevaluate and challenge them. Though they differ in the depths of their investigations, the books under review join the ongoing project of tracking...

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