A Century after the "Closing" of the American Frontier

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Given the prominence of the social, economic, and political issues currently being debated by the so-called Western historians, a re-immersion into questions concerning the meaning of the frontier might, at first glance, appear to be quaint academic wool-gathering. Yet, as David M. Wrobel suggests, his study is western history than intellectual history . . . more than peripheral to the current debate (p. vii). The focus is not on whether and when the frontier whether or not there were any sharp breaks in western American development. Rather, the focus is on the anxieties which preoccupied those who perceived that the frontier was closing or had already closed. Wrobel claims that between the late nineteenth century and the end of the New Deal, numerous Americans perceived that the frontier had closed, and acted on their perceptions (p. viii). Historians, according to Wrobel, largely ignored this realization. In a lean text of less than 150 pages, broken into ten chapters, Wrobel essenti

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