Show Notes
If America is the last, best hope of earth, one reason is the frontier. The frontier has been imagined as the place—or perhaps the process—through which the American character is forged—rugged individualism, the possibility of acquiring land and wealth, where happiness is pursued. For the historian Frederick Jackson Turner in the 1890s, the frontier was what made Americans different. Democracy was not born of a theorists dream, Turner said, nor was freedom something transplanted by Puritans from England, it was forged every time Americans found new frontiers. The frontier gave Americans a restless, nervous energy, a sense of purpose and direction. The frontier was, perhaps above all, a way that Americans, uniquely, could escape the bounds of history, the constraints of resources, of space of land that hampered less favoured nations – it was therefore a way of talking about the future and the endless barrelling forward of their raucous, capitalist, populist society. But where did the myth of the frontier come from? How does it relate to the reality of western expansion, if it does at all? And what of today? How does the optimistic myth of a frontier as a place of possibility fare in a world of ICE agents and border walls. Rather than the endless expansion promised by the myth of the frontier, is America closing in? Adam Smith is joined by two great historians: Patrician Nelson Limerick, professor of history at the University of Colorado, Boulder, one of the founders of the “New Western History” and author of Legacy of Conquest: the unbroken past of the American West. And Greg Grandin, Professor of History at Yale, and the author of The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 2020. The Last Best Hope? is a podcast of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford. For details of our programming go to rai.ox.ac.uk Producer: Emily Williams. Presenter: Adam Smith Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
More from The Last Best Hope?
Since the Civil War the president's party has lost ground in Congress in every single midterm election bar four. What's going on? Are voters punishing the administration they put into office just two short years earlier? Is it an attempt to balance power in Washington? Or is it just that the president's party's supporters don't turn out? To explore this issue, Adam is joined by Ursula Hackett, the Churchill Associate Professor of US Politics at the RAI. Adam and Ursula discuss some of the most dramatic midterm elections of the past -- from the 1874 repudiation of President Grant to Obama's 2010 "shellacking" to try to work out what explains a remarkably consistent phenomenon-- the President's party losing.
What is an American political party? Unlike in parliamentary systems, they're not private organisations but quasi-public bodies, with no membership dues and with their candidate selection regulated by public law. And how do we explain the paradox that in an era of intense 'partisan' division, the parties themselves -- as organisations -- are by some measures weaker than ever before? Adam is joined by Sam Rosenfeld Associate Professor of Political Science at Colgate University, the author of The Polarizers: Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era, and, with Daniel Schlozman, The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics.
As the United States gears up to mid-term elections, which may once again shift the political trajectory of the country, the Last Best Hope? returns for a brand-new season on the 8th of October.
In the bicentennial summer of 1976, the United States staged what was, by some measures, the largest single celebration in the country’s history. Tall ships in New York harbor. Fireworks over the Mall. Specially-minted bicentennial quarters. A made-for-TV reconciliation after Vietnam and Watergate, after the assassinations and the riots and the burnings of the long sixties. The country told itself, for a few weeks at least, that it was still the country it remembered being.
Is there anything more distinctively American than its sports culture? In a previous episode of this podcast, we discussed the tragic decline and partial revival of American cricket. As the 2026 World Cup kicks off in the US Adam asks why a sport that took over the world has been so marginal for so long in America – and wonders if that’s finally changing. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, a form of football that had begun in English public schools became a global phenomenon, played almost everywhere except in the United States. There, a strange alternative form of football was played instead, one in which men in helmets stand around for long periods, interrupted by occasional violent bursts of energy. This is a story about culture, gender politics, race, class and migration – and, as with the story of cricket’s demise -- about nationhood. Guests on this episode: Frank Guridy, Dr. Kenneth and Kareitha Forde Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies and Professor of History at Columbia. His most recent book is The Stadium: An American History of Politics, Protest, and Play (Basic Books, 2024) which tells the story of the American stadium as an institution that has played a central role in American civic and political life and in the struggles for social justice over the last 150 years. And by Uta Balbier, Professor of US History at Oxford, a transnational historian of the modern United States with a particular interest in sport history.