I started reading this book when I downloaded it from the library back in August. I didn't get through it during the allotted two weeks and then there was a long waiting list to get it again. Luckily I found it in the Canisius College library and checked it out for six months as a former staff member.
I just recently finished it. I would read a chapter or so at a time and then read other things for awhile before going back to it. I really did enjoy this book but liked reading it is small doses. It really was a fascinating interpretation of the meaning of the frontier in American history and psyche. It was about the westward expansion of the nation and it's impact on American identity... good and bad. The author, Greg Grandin, is a Pulitzer Prize winning historian and his work shines throughout this book as he explore the concept of the frontier throughout U.S. history.
He explores and explains the current rise of reactionary populism, racist nationalism, anger and polarization that resulted in the rise of Trump and MAGA extremism focused on immigrants, people of color and the so called border wall.
I've read a lot of American history over the last decade or so that the maga folks would call woke and I find it refreshing to see America as we really are instead of through the lens of the racist oligarchs that have written and disseminated a distorted history of our republic. We see now that they would rather destroy our democracy than teach our people what our nation really has done to itself over the past couple of centuries.
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