The End of the Myth
by Greg Grandin
Summary
Greg Grandin traces the idea of the American frontier from the country's founding through the election of Donald Trump, arguing that the frontier functioned for most of American history as a kind of safety valve, a place where the country's internal contradictions, over land, race, labor and economic inequality, could be displaced outward onto territory that always seemed to lie just ahead of it. As long as there was more frontier to expand into, Grandin argues, Americans could avoid confronting those contradictions directly, treating expansion itself as a substitute for genuine reckoning with problems at home.
The book moves through familiar chapters of American expansion, westward settlement, the closing of the physical frontier around the end of the nineteenth century, and the country's subsequent search for substitutes, overseas empire, Cold War global engagement, an economic frontier of endless growth, that Grandin reads as attempts to keep the same psychological mechanism running once the actual continental frontier had run out of room. He argues that the political rhetoric around a border wall in the twenty first century marks the endpoint of that search: a frontier turned inward and defensive, walling off rather than expanding into, because there is no more myth of open land left to displace the country's problems onto.
Grandin writes as a historian synthesizing a wide sweep of American history into a single argument, and reading the book means following that thesis build across more than three centuries rather than encountering discrete narrative episodes. It suits a reader interested in the intellectual and political history behind contemporary immigration debates, and willing to follow a long historical argument to its contemporary conclusion.
Historical Context & Significance
The Pulitzer board named Greg Grandin's The End of the Myth, published in 2019 by Henry Holt and Company, as a co winner of the 2020 Prize for General Nonfiction, sharing the award that year with Anne Boyer's The Undying. The Guardian's Ben Ehrenreich called it a powerful and painful book, clear sighted, meticulous and damning, and the American Historical Review's Benjamin H. Johnson described it as arresting and original.
Grandin, a historian at Yale, had been a Pulitzer finalist in History a decade earlier for a different book, Fordlandia, which was also a National Book Award finalist, so The End of the Myth turned a near miss into a win in a different category. The book arrived amid intense political debate over border policy during the Trump administration, and it has since become a frequently cited historical framework for discussions of how American immigration politics connects to the country's older mythology of westward expansion.