Word: frontier
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...does not freak out, sport beads or let his hair hang to his collar. Instead, Fink wears the badge of a deputy inspector in the New York City Police Department. As head cop in the bohemian quarter of Manhattan's Lower East Side, Fink mans a little-known frontier of the law: preventive enforcement. At a time when young nonconformists tend to see cops as oppressors, call them pigs to their faces and even fling excrement at them, Fink stands all but alone as a policeman who has learned how to handle the discontented young...
Frederick Jackson Turner sounded his single but remarkably lasting note-on the paramount significance of the frontier in American history-in 1893. Charles Beard created his most influential and controversial book, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, in 1913. He had completed his most popular history. The Rise of American Civilization, by 1927, the year when an unknown English professor named V. L. Parrington published his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Main Currents in American Thought. These men, writes Hofstadter, were the first "to make American history relevant to the political and intellectual issues of the moment...
Free Land and Hardship. As Turner grasped it, American democracy was neither a perfected political boon granted to the Founding Fathers by a Protestant Providence nor an inheritance from European political theorists, but something else again. It was a unique, home-grown institution shaped on the American frontier. Free land, Turner argued, made Americans free and generous. Frontier hardship made them self-reliant and individualistic. Frontier challenges made them willing to cooperate democratically with one another. The absence of the trappings of privilege made them egalitarian...
...vain that later critics pointed out Turner's contradictions, observing that the frontier had also made Americans ruthless and violent and that many of the facts on which Turner based his theory did not check out. (For example, frontier settlers, who Turner insisted always wanted to broaden the vote, in fact often lagged behind their urban neighbors.) Turner's creative concept had caught the imagination, not merely of historians and students who revered him but of the people as well. It still does-witness Barry Goldwater's appeal in 1964 to the nostalgic hope of returning...
When Dubček demurred that such a large Soviet garrison would leave little barracks space for the Czechoslovak army, Brezhnev replied: "We could use about 250,000 of your troops along the Chinese frontier." When Dubček tried to explain that his side had fulfilled the conditions of the first Moscow accord, Soviet President Nikolai Podgorny ordered him to shut up. The Russians told the Czechoslovaks not to hope that outrage among the free world's Communist parties would deter the Kremlin from cracking down harder on Czechoslovakia. In the words of one Russian, "For the next...