![]() Native Americans’ land might be taken over by white settlers, speculators or agents using force. The frontier zone was amorphous and often bloody. While purchases and treaties officially moved America’s borders further west on maps, in reality, there were few actual boundaries. Native Americans were massacred and betrayed and repeatedly removed from their land by state sanction. ![]() In addition to slaveholders across the South, even abolitionists failed to imagine a coequal state after the Civil War. The New World was seen as “simultaneously pristine and despoiled: empty and at the same time filled with primitives begging for deliverance.” America’s “founding paradox,” as Grandin puts it, is “the promise of political freedom and the reality of racial subjugation.” There were contradictions from the start. ![]() He sets Turner aside to begin at America’s beginning, taking the reader through the proto-United States and the nation’s formation. ![]() In this book, he moves easily between historical events and tracing the political thought that accompanied and explicated them. Grandin is a professor of history at New York University best known for 2009’s “Fordlandia,” a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. ![]()
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