Americans Recaptured: Progressive Era Memory of Frontier Captivity by Molly K. Varley

Abstract

Students of the early American frontier often find themselves indebted to late 19th-and early 20th-century historians for compiling and publishing a vast array of valuable primary source material. However, they may also wonder why such a volume of relevant information was reissued in the decades just prior to World War I. Historian Molly K. Varley explores this interesting question in
Americans Recaptured: Progressive Era Memory ofFrontier Captivity. As she reveals, the answer concerned a crisis of identity brought on by the recent loss of two critical elements of the American experience: the frontier and its allegedly "vanishing" Native inhabitants.