Product Overview
In The Fatal Environment, Richard Slotkin demonstrates how the myth of frontier expansion and subjugation of the Indians helped to justify the course of Americas rise to wealth and power. Using Custers Last Stand as a metaphor for what Americans feared might happen if the frontier should be closed and the savage element be permitted to dominate the civilized, Slotkin shows the emergence by 1890 of a myth redefined to help Americans respond to the confusion and strife of industrialization and imperial expansion.