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Program 16: The West
Donald L. Miller with Virginia Scharff and Louis P. Masur
Introduction
Miller: The American frontier in the late 19th century. Was it part of
Jefferson's Empire of Liberty, or something else?
Scharff: In the period that you're talking about, what counts as the
United States has to be domesticated, okay? So there's this big old hunk of the
country that still is not yet a part of this industrial democracy that you're
talking about. The whole process of claiming and bounding and peopling and
incorporating this large terrain, that's already obviously inhabited, is
something that creates modern America. What happens out there on the ground
shapes the American character in some fundamental ways. It reflects larger
American processes.
Miller: More than cowboys and cattle, more than homesteading, the Gold
Rush, and the tragedy of Native Americans. Today on A Biography of America,
"The West".
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