At the 1893 World’s Fair celebrating industrial change, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner reflected on whether American individualism, which had been fostered by the frontier then just closing, would be undermined by the emerging urban, industrial society.9 Recent research has confirmed that frontier life was indeed associated with a culture of bootstrap self-reliance and hostility to economic redistribution, an imprint still visible a century later.10 In this way, the frontier had encouraged American individualism generally, just as Turner had speculated, and its closing might portend a
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