Mission

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A Conference Co-Sponsored by the Hall Center, the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture and the Glasscock Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M
Saturday, September 29, 2007 at the Dallas Institute Conference Center, Dallas, Texas

The West has always loomed large in America's sense of itself. Very early, the American imagination conceived of the West as both the limit of civilized existence--the border that forbids and attracts--and uncharted space--the frontier that promises danger and reward. The Spanish word frontera captures both these aspects of the West--limit and limitlessness, border and frontier.

Until recently Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 thesis has held sway: that daring to cross borders and claim the frontier made Americans out of Europeans. Traditional images of the American West--the empty land, the self-reliant individual, civilization versus savagery, redemption through violence--have been imbedded in our collective imagination for decades.

Today, these images are being challenged if not replaced. When we look Westward now, we see a dramatic shift: for growing numbers of Americans, the border has become a line that divides and protects, while the frontier of earlier times is now regarded as distinct regions to be not dominated and used up but accepted on their own terms and husbanded accordingly.

The program was as follows:

Paul Christensen, Texas A&M University, “The 'Wild West': The Life and Death of a Myth”

Donald Worster, University of Kansas, “Ordinary People, Extraordinary Land: Changing Myths of the American West”

Jeffrey Gusky, photographer, “Borderlands: A Photographic Odyssey”

Luis Alberto Urrea, University of Illinois-Chicago, “The Future of American Borders”

Benjamin Johnson, Southern Methodist University, and Luis Alberto Urrea, “The Border: An Emerging Epic?”

Paul Christensen, Luis Alberto Urrea and Donald Worster, Closing Panel: “Old West & New West”

The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture exists to care for the actual things of the urban world. In some instances, these things are visible - the city, education, architecture, medicine, art, technology, money. Equally important are the invisible forms within which life takes place and has meaning - friendship, the soul, taste, imagination, community, intellectual life, ritual, leadership. Through its courses of study, public seminars, publications, conferences, and civic involvement, The Dallas Institute brings thought, imagination, language, and sensibility to bear on the convergence between the visible shaping of the world and the permanent values necessary for the crafting of culture.