Word: frontier
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...first photograph in the catalog of "The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820-1920," the large and deeply interesting show now on view at Washington's National Museum of American Art, has to be one of the funniest ever seen in a museum. It is of Charles Schreyvogel, a turn-of-the- century Wild West illustrator, painting in the open air. His subject crouches alertly before him: a cowboy pointing a six-gun. They are on the flat roof of an apartment building in Hoboken, N.J. Such was the "authentic West" of Schreyvogel and other painters like...
What they left, instead, is a foundation myth in paint and stone. Its main character is God, the approving father, as manifested in the landscape that he had created and that white migrants were now taking for themselves. Its human actors are frontier scouts and settlers, cavalrymen and trappers, and the American Indians -- noble at first, then seen as degenerate enemies of progress as the century went on and their resistance grew, and finally (by the 1890s) turning into doomed phantoms. Its landscapes are prodigious. Its stage material includes the Conestoga wagon, the simple cabin, the tepee, the isolated fort...
Over time, though, returning home or at least relocating to one of the tent cities may begin to look more appealing to the Kurds than continuing to squat in their miserable mountain asylums along the border. Turkish forces patrolling their side of the frontier may speed up that reassessment. "When the weather gets better," says a U.N. worker, "the Turkish military will get the journalists out, then give the refugees a survival kit and push them out, at gunpoint if necessary." Other relief specialists add that within a month, the streams in the mountains will dry up, forcing the Kurds...
...century ago, Frederick Jackson Turner used the 1890 headcount as a springboard for his provocative "frontier thesis," which argued that America's distinctive culture was the result of its pioneering history. The 1980 Census chronicled the "rural renaissance" of the 1970s, when city dwellers headed for the countryside by the tens of thousands. During the following decade, America did exactly the opposite. Preliminary figures from the 1990 Census -- the final tallies won't be available until after July 15 -- depict a nation that has been growing more rapidly and in more complex patterns than ever before. And with the large...
Another reason exists for the Kurds' sufferings: the Turks adamantly refuse to let many of them cross the frontier. The Turks fear that the refugees will join Kurdish Turks in forming a political bloc demanding more autonomy than Ankara is willing to grant...