Word: frontiers
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...hundred and three years ago, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner made his famous elegiac announcement that America no longer had a frontier. Turner was interested in the frontier less as a place than as a sociological phenomenon. "The West was another name for opportunity," he wrote; to his mind it had been the means by which the nation delivered on its promise of a chance of advancement for all citizens. It was the possible loss of this, not of open range, that worried...
What is not so well known about Turner is what he thought the replacement for the frontier would be: state universities. They could take on the mystical duties for democracy that free land had once performed--with, of course, an academic twist. "The test tube and the microscope are needed, rather than the ax and rifle, in this new ideal of conquest," he wrote...
...some circles the techno-bashing Unabomber has become a cultural hero. Nowhere is that irony more apparent than on the technological frontier of the Internet. There, copies of the manifesto are as abundant as flame wars. One site offers a Unabomber theme song, another invites people to attend an upcoming online birthday party for Kaczynski, and a third gives away free "Official Unabomber" screen savers that include "fashion tips" and other surprises. "It's dynamite," promises Corey Deitz, the Cleveland FM-radio jock who helped create the computer program...
Twenty-five airlines have started up in the past seven years, and eight more are awaiting clearance from the Department of Transportation. They sport such names as Frontier, ValuJet, Air 21, Vanguard, Nations Air, KIWI and Western Pacific, and they promise that the competition is going to be different this time. They have staked their survival on two basic strategies. First, fly into a place, like Fresno, California, that the major carriers have largely abandoned. Second, don't pick the big guys' pockets; use low-fare, no-frills flights to expand the market. The idea isn't to steal market...
UNTIL ABOUT 1880, THE ACCEPTed epic subject of American painting was the Western frontier. By 1900 this had slid into nostalgia; it was no longer in synch with social reality. Most Americans lived in cities, and the myth of the West was just that: a myth, however durable. The real frontier was urban--a place of hitherto unimagined overcrowding, of cultural collision enforced by huge-scale immigration, of rapid change, where class ground against class like the imperfect rollers of a giant machine. Its epitome was New York City--Bagdad-on-the-Subway, as the writer O. Henry called...