ThoughtLeaf (Richard Slotkin)

"It is by now commonplace that our adherence to the 'myth of the frontier' - the conception of America as a wide-open land of unlimited opportunity for the strong, ambitious, self-reliant individual to thrust his way to the top - has blinded us to the consequences of the industrial and urban revolutions and to the need for social reform and a new concept of individual and communal welfare. Nor is it by a far-fetched association that the murderous violence that has characterized recent political life has been linked by poets and news commentators alike to the 'frontier psychology' of our recent past and our long heritage. The first colonists saw in America an opportunity to regenerate their fortunes, their spirits, and the power of their church and nation; but the means to that regeneration ultimately became the means of violence, and the myth of regeneration through violence became the structuring metaphor of the American experience."

- Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (1973), p. 5