Word: frontierisms
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...does not freak out, sport beads or let his hair hang to his collar. Instead, Fink wears the badge of a deputy inspector in the New York City Police Department. As head cop in the bohemian quarter of Manhattan's Lower East Side, Fink mans a little-known frontier of the law: preventive enforcement. At a time when young nonconformists tend to see cops as oppressors, call them pigs to their faces and even fling excrement at them, Fink stands all but alone as a policeman who has learned how to handle the discontented young...
Downtown Dallas on Sunday morning has the look of frontier tranquillity. The streets are clean and nearly free of traffic-except on the midtown corners that surround the First Baptist Church. Here, beginning shortly before 8 a.m., cars crowd in to disgorge loads of early worshipers. A few of the young women wear miniskirts, bouffant hairdos and unlikely eyelashes. Their female elders, considerably less chic, carry the aura of talcum and printed voile that spells the Sabbath all over the South...
...sure ear for its speech and a shrewd eye for its manners, Richter brought early America to life. The cowboys, Indians and farmers of his novels are more than fictional characters; they are, as one critic noted, explorers who give the "truest picture of the everyday realities of frontier life...
Free Land and Hardship. As Turner grasped it, American democracy was neither a perfected political boon granted to the Founding Fathers by a Protestant Providence nor an inheritance from European political theorists, but something else again. It was a unique, home-grown institution shaped on the American frontier. Free land, Turner argued, made Americans free and generous. Frontier hardship made them self-reliant and individualistic. Frontier challenges made them willing to cooperate democratically with one another. The absence of the trappings of privilege made them egalitarian...
...vain that later critics pointed out Turner's contradictions, observing that the frontier had also made Americans ruthless and violent and that many of the facts on which Turner based his theory did not check out. (For example, frontier settlers, who Turner insisted always wanted to broaden the vote, in fact often lagged behind their urban neighbors.) Turner's creative concept had caught the imagination, not merely of historians and students who revered him but of the people as well. It still does-witness Barry Goldwater's appeal in 1964 to the nostalgic hope of returning...