Word: frontierment
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...introduction to Pioneer Women, by Joanna Stratton '76, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. recalls the iron-gray Auntie Em of The Wizard of Oz, the sexless and colorless lady of the Kansas plains who has come to represent the withered frontier woman in the minds of childhood readers. The transformation of Dorothy's maternal surrogate, one of the more familiar passages of the beloved novel, goes like this...
...Stratton's recent discovery of hundreds of memoirs from the women who settled the western wilderness against great odds in the mid-19th century has unveiled a female frontier population which seemed to strengthen and thrive and gain color from the prairie sun and wind. These women, who trailed west after their husbands, unwillingly at first, soon burst out in lively appreciation of and identification with the frontier landscape. Carrie Stearns Smith, one pioneer woman, recollects the liberating power of the prairie as it accosted her constricted New England sensibility...
Stratton stumbled upon this gold mine of frontier history--a unique and impressive collection--five years ago in her grandmother's attic. Visiting her ancestor's Topeka. Kansas, home during a semester break from Harvard. Stratton uncovered the manuscripts while poking in a musty filing cabinet lodged under the eaves. Its contents revealed reams of personal testimonies from 800 Kansas women: women in combat with rattlers, prairie blazes and cayotes: women in solitary labor in the cornfields and in the home giving birth with only the cows as witnesses: and, by the 1870s, women embroiled in local politics, temperance...
Firearms have achieved in the U.S. a strange sort of inevitability-the nation's gun-ridden frontier heritage getting smokily mingled now with a terror of accelerating criminal violence and a sense that as the social contract tatters, the good guys must have their guns to defend themselves against the rising tribes of bad guys. It is very hard to persuade the good guys that all those guns in their hands wind up doing more lethal harm to their own kind than to the animals they fear; that good guys sometimes get drunk and shoot other good guys...
...been almost 90 years since the historian Frederick Jackson Turner propounded his famous thesis about the end of the American frontier. But the worst part of the frontier never did vanish. Its violence, once tolerable in the vast spaces, has simply backed up into modern America, where it goes on blazing away...