The End of American Exceptionalism: Frontier Anxiety from the Old West to the New DealThe American frontier was officially closed, according to the U. S. Census Bureau, in 1890. Yet more homesteads were settled in the first few decades of the twentieth century than in the entire nineteenth century. "Frontier anxiety," then, really was caused not by the closing of the frontier, but by the perception that the frontier was closing, argues David Wrobel. As early as the 1870s and through the 1930s, many Americans believed an important era