The story of the American West plays a starring role in our national mythology.

In 1893. Frederick Jackson Turner delivered his epoch-making address claiming that the contemporary crisis in America was caused by the closing of “the frontier” just a few years earlier. Decades later, JFK used “the New Frontier” as a potent symbol in his 1960 presidential speech to inspire hope in America — manifesting itself in the new frontier of space with the inception of the Apollo mission or the frontier of Vietnam, where America engaged in a “long twilight struggle” against the countries that supposedly embodied the political ideology of Communism.

From Hollywood Westerns to the language we use to describe our enemies in war, the citizens and political leaders of the United States continue to use the myth of the American Frontier to form identities/ideologies.

Homeland I is the first chapter of an ongoing investigation on how these stories (myths) associated with the frontier not only directly influence the people and places of the American West, but how mythology & memory impacts the way Americans shape our future.