Sublime

Frontiers can be envisioned as peaceful trade zones where valuables are exchanged for the mutual benefit of both sides, with economic need preventing overt hostilities, or as places where distrust is magnified by cultural misunderstandings, negative stereotypes, and the absence of bridging institutions.

Geographic frontiers are what we tend to think of when frontiers are invoked: the vast unspoiled vistas, the abundant and yet uncounted resources. All of the New World—North and South America, the Caribbean, and every island near the coasts—was a vast geographic frontier for the Beringians.

But the influence of the frontier doesn't end at the individual. The frontier also shapes the cultures of the tribes who inhabit it.

The most striking effect is forcing solidarity. Out on the fringe, short on resources and surrounded by wilderness and potential enemies, a tribe must either unite or perish. Most tribes — and certainly all the success

A frontier is really any boundary between where we feel comfortable and where we don’t. And there are an infinite number of frontiers available to each of us, because every aspect of our lives includes a comfort zone that we have taken as a given and that constricts the possibilities available to us.

A frontier situation generates a psychological orientation toward the frontier on the part of the people engaged in conquering it, endowing them with the "frontier spirit."

To realize their vision, the founders created a distinct political category for the frontier: territory. The revolution had been fought by a union of states, but those states’ borders became ill-defined and even overlapped as they reached westward. Rather than dividing the frontier among the states, the republic’s leaders brokered deals by which no

On Europe’s Inner Asian frontier, demographic expansion long seemed as hobbled as it was in mainland North America until the 1750s.

Tribal psychology

The frontier is one of the most interesting human niches. It draws a particular type of person, and once drawn, exerts a constant psychological and behavioral pressure (as niches tend to do).

Persistent frontiers need not be stable geographically—they can move, as the Romano-Celt/Anglo-Saxon material-culture frontier moved across Britain between 400 and 700 CE,