The Great Frontier
The Great Frontier by Walter Prescott Webb, 2003 paperback edition, University of Nevada Press, MS 166, Reno, NV 89557-0076, 464p., 6 x 9, $21.95, soft 0-87417-519-4.
Western history would not be the same with Walter Prescott Webb’s The Great Frontier, and neither would be the debate of issues surrounding the history of the region. While Webb’s conclusion are still debated, this book established the importance of the history and future of the West in the broader picture of democratic civilization. Webb “interprets the settlement of the American West in the global context of the expansion of European civilization between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries” thus establishing the hypothesis that this movement gave birth to individualism, capitalism, and political democracy. In a new foreword by Western historian William D. Rowley, the importance of the work is once again offered, demonstrating that, “without quest and discovery, the spark of New World democracy might be stifled by Old World bureaucracy and, far worse, by rise of totalitarianism, which was the challenge of Webb’s generation as well as those to come” (xiii). Originally published by BSW April 2005, Issue 484