Review of Habits of Empire: A History of American Expansion By Walter Nugent

Authors

Jeffrey Ostler, University of Oregon

Date of this Version

2010

Document Type

Article

Citation

Great Plains Quarterly 30:1 (Winter 2010)

Comments

Copyright 2013 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Abstract

Two decades ago, "new western historians," led by Patricia Nelson Limerick in Legacy of Conquest, attempted to banish any mention of Frederick Jackson Turner and his frontier thesis. Although the Turner thesis was ethnocentric and its grounding of democracy in a frontier experience flawed in various ways, a nagging question remained: did the fact that America had a frontier matter at all?

In Habits of Empire, Walter Nugent, past president of the Western History Association, thinks the frontier mattered a great deal. This is not because it created democracy, but because it "taught Americans a twisted ideology: that they should expand the area of civilization and shrink the area of savagery." "The significance of the frontier in American history," Nugent suggests, "may well be that it instilled in Americans bad habits of building empires."