Tag: the frontier

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I was downtown in Salt Lake City in 2002 to watch the Pioneer Day parade, also known as “Days Of ’47” — as in 1847, of course. I got to see the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ President Gordon B. Hinckley heading up the column. Although my piety leaves much to be desired, that was something else, indeed! (more…)

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Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

After the climactic gunfight between Frank and Harmonica, the latter and Cheyenne say goodbye to Jill. But just outside of the McBain property, Cheyenne falters. Harmonica stops and turns with concern. It turns out that Cheyenne was mortally wounded by Morton. Like Jesus, he has a bleeding wound in his side. This comes as some surprise. He must have been putting up a brave front with Jill. But the surprise comes off as a rather contrived plot twist; one of many. (more…)

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Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)

I have had a difficult relationship with Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). Parts of this film are so emotionally powerful as to be almost unendurable. Indeed, before I began work on this review, I had seen Once Upon a Time in the West only one time in full, on a rented VHS tape in the 1990s. I knew it was a great film, so I bought the VHS. But I could not bring myself to watch it again. (more…)

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Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)

See also: “Colonel McCormick,” “America First 1939-1941,” “Wind Down the Empire of Nothing,” & “America’s Endless Wars” (more…)

Theodore Roosevelt, a great pioneer of American conservationism.

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The Great Replacement is both a demographic and a cultural phenomenon. It consists, on the one hand, of encouraging low birth rates among Europeans and their colonial offshoots by promoting secularism and hedonism, guilt and shame for their ancestors and culture, and the virtues of childlessness. Simultaneously, its architects support open borders and increased immigration from the Third World, ostensibly for humanitarian motives or to compensate for population decline among the native-born population. Needless to say, these massive demographic changes will affect every facet of American life in the years ahead. (more…)

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The Searchers (1956) has been acclaimed not just as one of John Ford’s greatest films, and not just as one of the greatest Westerns, but as one of the greatest films of all time. This praise is all the more surprising given that The Searchers is a profoundly illiberal and even “racist” movie, which means that most fans esteem it grudgingly rather than unreservedly.  (more…)

Edgar Samuel Paxson, Battle of Little Bighorn, 1911.

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American history was always taught to me in a way that shamed and vilified white people. Despite all the efforts and propaganda to make me feel sorry for the Native Americans, I always resented them for their attacks on the European colonists and settlers. (more…)

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Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) wasn’t the first American writer. That was William Hill Brown (no relation), whose The Power of Sympathy (1789) was an epistolary novel imitating Richardson with moral purpose and a satisfying ending of virtue triumphant. Then there was Susanna Rowson. Her Charlotte Temple (1790), was America’s first bestseller, another fine moral tale of a young woman choosing virtue and so (again) triumphing. (more…)