The American Frontier from the Puritans to the Planet Mars

Undergraduate / Graduate

This course explores the idea of the frontier in American history and culture from the Puritans' "howling wilderness" to the "final frontier" of the Space Age. Settlers imagined the frontier in a variety of ways: a dangerous wasteland designed to test their faith, a zone of violence against Indigenous peoples, a process of technological progress and expanding democracy, an opportunity to establish racial supremacy and revitalize colonized peoples, and an infinite space for the spread of humanity among the stars. In each case, the ways that people imagined the future were central to how they understood themselves. We will emphasize the ways that these ideas of the frontier shaped encounters between settlers and Indigenous peoples, the ways that settlers imagined themselves becoming "indigenous" in places to which they were alien, and the enduring effect of these ideas on American culture.