Re: Citizen becomes Cipher
Welcome aboard, coberst (can I call you Conner?). That's an impressive first post. I'll be interested to see what ideas you bring to the table.
While I recognize the ideal that you're pointing to in the quoted text, and agree that it was an ideal widely espoused on the American frontier, I think it's dangerous to assume that people lived up to it with any regularity. Francis Jennings, for example, has compellingly argued that European frontiersmen in the New World would have been thoroughly incapable of establishing a foothold on the continent had they not found ready collaborators in the indigenous societies. Richard Hofstadter also discusses the yeoman ideal at length, and from reading his books and other sources, I've come to think it highly unlikely that many people, if any at all, truly managed to be self-sufficient during the frontier expansion.
Which is not, of course, to say that we aren't even further removed from the ideal than they were. But it also seems that some pockets of flexibility have opened up here and there. Some scholars have suggested that the ease and readiness with which the younger adult generations transition from one job to the next, not only within a given field but across fields, constitutes a sort of economic freedom that hasn't been evidence in the United States since the 19th century.
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