The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890

by Richard Slotkin

Overview

In The Fatal Environment, Richard Slotkin demonstrates how the myth of frontier expansion and subjugation of the Indians helped to justify the course of America’s rise to wealth and power. Using Custer’s Last Stand as a metaphor for what Americans feared might happen if the frontier should be closed and the "savage" element be permitted to dominate the "civilized," Slotkin shows the emergence by 1890 of a myth redefined to help Americans respond to the confusion and strife of industrialization and imperial expansion.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780806130309
Publisher:	University of Oklahoma Press
Publication date:	04/15/1998
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	656
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.48(d)

About the Author

Richard Slotkin is Olin Professor of English and Director of American Studies at Wesleyan University. He is the author of Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 and Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of Frontier in Twentieth-Century America, published by the University of Oklahoma Press.

Editorial Reviews

"Without question, this is the most ambitious and provocative work in the field of American Studies to appear in recent years." –George M. Fredrickson, New York Review of Books

From the Publisher

<:st> Reprint of the Athenaeum original of 1985 (which is cited in ). Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

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