ABSTRACT

In 1896, a major shift in the nation's cultural consciousness was occurring, as famously noted by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in an essay announcing "the closing of the American frontier." For the first time in the country's history, there were no longer any unknown territories to explore, said Turner, just the mundane task of colonizing the remaining spaces. For an entrepreneurial nation weaned on the idea of a vast, endless frontier, this was a startling realization: the existence of limits.