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The frontier has long been an important part of mythic American ideology as a space with untapped resources offering the potential for social mobility. This thesis looks at writing representing the three types of frontiers identified by Lucy Lockwood Hazard to demonstrate how this boundary between the “civilized” and “savage” actually reveals the instability and inaccessibility of the American Dream. Francis Parkman’s The Oregon Trail is one of the quintessential narratives about the geographical frontier; while deeply racist and sexist, it manifests doubts about the rhetoric of inhumanity attributed to indigenous populations. The industrial frontier’s creation of exploitative factory structures that were then translated into domestic spaces is illustrated by William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. The canonical novel speaks to the inability of the poor to achieve social mobility and the reemergence of social hubs as the space of opportunity. Finally, Jade Chang’s 2016 debut novel, The Wangs vs. the World, works to completely reframe the frontier genre by positing characters of color as protagonists, resisting their typical location on the “savage” side of the frontier binary. Chang uses the concept of the spiritual frontier to foreground the difficulties minorities face in order to be accepted into white society. The instabilities manifested by each of these frontiers ultimately point to the ways in which the American Dream has historically been an escapist impossibility and inflicted violence on women, lower classes, and people of color.

It is the aim of this dissertation to discuss the creation of historiographic space in the works of Francis Parkman. More specifically, this dissertation intends to analyze Parkman’s The Oregon Trail and Montcalm and Wolfe as literary texts that examine geographies of cultural interaction and transnational empire building. Parkman’s historical narratives, this dissertation suggests, not only describe historically significant sites, such as the Oregon Trail and the Northern Frontier, but further create literary heterotopias. These textual counter geographies, as for instance his conceptualizations of the trading posts of the far West and the wilderness fortifications of the far North, allow Parkman to effectively interrogate American history. By investigating the fruitful juncture between history, geography, and literature this project aims to establish the importance of historical geographies for Francis Parkman’s methodology and define its function for the creation of a national consciousness. In addition to Parkman’s use of space, this dissertation further analyzes the historian’s depiction of historical characters and his subsequent attempts to define American identity. Thereby, my analysis specifically highlights the relationship between Parkman’s literary characters and their environment. In an attempt to trace the impact Parkman’s historical narratives exert on postmodern authors of American literature, the concluding chapters interrogate the re-negotiation of Parkman’s historiographic spaces in Thomas King’s Truth and Bright Water and William T. Vollmann’s Fathers and Crows.