Huddled in a room at the Columbian Exposition in 1893, a group of academics listened to the last of several presenters, Frederick Jackson Turner, read his paper, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” “The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward,” the young [...]
Since 1991, a new conception of Indian-white relations, known as the “middle ground,” has slowly emerged in Indian and western American historiography, challenging the old and New Western History and Indian history paradigms. The relations between Native Americans and white settlers—the middle ground—served as a gigantic trade zone in which culture became the economic goods [...]
In 1787, the U.S Congress unanimously passed the most republican law in Western history—the Northwest Ordinance, in which Americans argued that real sovereignty resides in the individual human person in association. On this day in 1787, the Congress of the United States unanimously passed what my colleague, friend, and mentor John Willson has called the [...]
Now, isn’t this just what a cowboy should look like? It is Sherm Ewing of Great Falls, Montana, a rancher most of his adult life in Alberta, Canada and Montana. He and Tom Scott, a Great Falls lawyer, arranged for me to speak to a bunch of good western conservatives on behalf of Hillsdale College [...]