Stanford Libraries' official online search tool for books, media, journals, databases, government documents and more. A thought provoking read that starts stronger than it ends. Free Books! So, a lot of the—so they were able to execute and commit quite a degree of unsupervised, unregulated abuse on migrants. This history begins with the early western border of the 18th century, wherein the country’s Founding Fathers (p. 23-30) played a crucial role in solidifying American expansionism as a definitive part of America’s essence. His latest book is titled The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. A Professor of History at New York University, Grandin has published a number of other award-winning books, including Empire's Workshop, The Last Colonial Massacre, and The Blood of Guatemala. It is a fixed physical construct with forts, rivers, trails and transportation routes and maps to identify them; but it was also a “blurry, indistinct place where white settlers fled to escape routinization,” a place that goes on forever. And why this story is interesting is it encapsulates what I call the nationalization of border brutalism, that kind of racism that had been concentrated at the border. 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The ghosts of slavery, the Confederacy, the Mexican-American war, Vietnam, etc. Well, back when Trump was on the rise and building momentum, there were two kind of oppositional ways of thinking about him, mutually exclusive. Jackson saw The Founders as cowards who pussyfooted around rather than rush into Native Lands and take everything with the unrestrained frenzy of today’s Black Friday shoppers – Jackson saw Jefferson in particular as failure of the will – he had the right wrong ideas but didn’t have stomach to carry them out. A difficult read, for all the right reasons. Start by marking “The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America” as Want to Read: Error rating book. The frontier reached a physical limit in North America and by necessity expanded overseas creating an “American history…fast turning into an endless public parade of war and more war….Overseas war had the effect of unifying the country, this time not some sections against others but the whole nation.” The military became “the primary means of social mobility, allowing both whites and…blacks shelter from the capitalist market.”. And so, one of the themes of the book is trying to look at the way the wall has trumped the frontier as the national symbol, and what that means. Even before the agreement was enacted there were already 1925 work plants in Mexico taking advantage of the low wage labour and the lack of labour and environmental regulations. Another important associated idea is that of a safety valve. In doing so, some of these authors have “looked to history for a usable past”—as Slotkin once described Theodore Roosevelt’s opportunistic approach to American history—in their efforts to advance a working theory on the present moment. So it’s a very graphic illustration of that process. It is a fixed physical construct with forts, rivers, trails and transportation routes and maps to identify them; but it was also a “blurry, indistinct place where white settlers fled to escape routinization,” a place that goes on forever. GREG GRANDIN: Yes, and that’s from other historians’ work. Another important associated idea is that of a safety valve. Much of the history Grandin incorporates into this new book is utterly captivating in his hands, and often revelatory. NAFTA affected the poor farmers as subsidized U.S. corn, dairy, and pork killed their subsistence living. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. This is a fascinating but deeply troubling book about America, and the myth it created about itself. In sweeping through the last 200 years of American history, he seems to cherry-pick events and quotations that support his point of view. Around 2000, there’s once again a resurgence in paramilitarism, militia on the border. Wow. These designs, Grandin argues, signify the death of the frontier myth and all the possibilities it once suggested. On the other hand, there’s a bipartisan militarization of the border that Clinton presides over, which you have covered often. In terms of the war on terror, what you see is that domestic paramilitarism grows in tandem as the wars are still going on, but as they are discredited. It’s called The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. His new book, out this week, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account. And actually, it has its roots in the fact that, back in the 1920s, when immigration laws were restricted for different parts of the world, that Mexico was still allowed to have folks come into the country without restrictions, and the right wing then saw the need to create a Border Patrol. “Where the frontier symbolized perennial rebirth, a culture in springtime, those eight prototypes in Otay Mesa loom like tombstones. American expansion became the answer to every major question whether it be economic, political, or social.