The frontier, Turner declared, was “a magic fountain of youth in which America continually bathed and was rejuvenated.” Grandin deepens and enriches that picture. It was a pretty picture and a profoundly optimistic one. In 1893, he read a paper on “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” to a sleepy audience. The first person to articulate the frontier thesis was a University of Wisconsin historian who was little regarded at the time, Frederick Jackson Turner. How is it, Grandin wants to know, that the symbol of America was once a boundless, beckoning frontier and today is a dark and forbidding wall? But “The End of the Myth” has a shadow theme. Just who was welcome in that west-facing “haven,” Greg Grandin explains, was never as simple as Americans liked to proclaim. It is the mission of this fine, elegantly written history to explore the ever-shifting role of the frontier in the American story.

“At the very worst,” Roosevelt declared, “there was always the possibility of climbing into a covered wagon and moving west where the untilled prairies afforded a haven for men to whom the East did not provide a place.”

In a speech in 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt reminded a San Francisco audience of what had always distinguished the United States from other nations since its earliest days. THE END OF THE MYTH From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America By Greg Grandin

End of the myth greg grandin