… All could benefit all could rise and share in the earth’s riches.

In Grandin’s words, “The frontier was, ultimately, a mirage, an ideological relic of a now-exhausted universalism. Grandin suggests Trump has co-opted the Frontier but transmogrified it into the Wall. And he finally sets us down, chastened, to hear this evening’s breaking news, featuring Donald Trump. Like any good historian-poet, Grandin creates spiritual through-lines that pull his readers inexorably along the path of America’s westward expansion, making us take responsibility for bloody events we may never have learned about but certainly should have. Because it was published in 2019, it is pre-pandemic in scope - but it feels just as sad and timely as this morning’s death counts, both those from COVID-19 and those from racial injustice. In “The End of the Myth,” for which he was awarded this year’s Pulitzer for nonfiction, he focuses on sociolinguistic analysis of our unruly national myths, those suggested by words such as “frontier,” “border,” “freedom” and “wall.” The book is a subtle but highly readable analysis of these metaphors in American thought and actions from Colonial days to this moment. Grandin - a Yale historian whose previous books, including his Pulitzer Prize finalist “Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City” (2009), have mostly featured Latin America - fortunately excels in both history and English. One myth, of freedom and opportunity, is replaced by another, grim, notion: that of closure, and of whiteness that must be protected. While Grandin spends most of his book examining the debates about and extensions of Turner’s notion, he offers a new thesis: that the frontier myth is now, in any case, dead, its prominence having been usurped by the mighty (and also misguided) myth of the Border Wall.

Native Americans) ever westward, over the Appalachians, past the Mississippi, over the Rockies and, on, eventually, to the Pacific. In “The End of the Myth,” Grandin observes that it instead allowed white Americans to push problems and problematic people (e.g. Turner suggested that our open frontier served as a benign safety valve.

Greg grandin the end of myth