“Logic and history say that the frontier was, in fact, a place where violence served the causes of racial subordination, but a more powerful emotional understanding says that the frontier is where people of courage have gone to take a stand for the right and the good,” writes historian Patricia Nelson Limerick in Harper’s (October), quoted from her contribution to a book published in conjunction with the Newberry Library’s exhibit on the frontier. “As a mental artifact, the frontier has demonstrated an astonishing stickiness and persistence. It is virtually the flypaper of our mental world; it attaches itself to everything–healthful diets, space shuttles, civil-rights campaigns, heart transplants, industrial-product development, musical innovations. Packed full of nonsense and goofiness, jammed with nationalistic self-congratulation, the image of the frontier is nonetheless universally recognized and laden with positive associations.”
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Here we have a photocopy without an original. The Rockford-based Testor Corporation, which manufactures hobby materials, says it has created “a scale model–called the Area S4 UFO–of an alien spacecraft allegedly hidden within the heavily guarded Nellis Air Force Range at Groom Lake in central Nevada.” But company PR director John Dewey says Testor “can neither confirm nor deny the existence of UFOs.”
“We shouldn’t write the [Chicago] river off,” insists Robert Lonsdorf in the North Branch Prairie Project’s Sixteenth Year Report 1990-1993, noting several recent initiatives to start restoring parts of the river and its banks and wetlands. Besides, “last summer, up on the West Fork, in a ditch where it didn’t belong, a state-threatened fish, the Iowa darter, was found. Its Latin name is Etheostoma exile, like an exile that had found its way home.”
Enough pressure for you? According to the director of career and placement services at the University of Chicago, “The best time to begin thinking about getting a job after college is during your freshman year.”
