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Introduction
"The first thing he noticed was that there were no trees, no trees at all, as faras you look in any direction. The land was down upon itself, a land of black loam, but nothing on it.. " (1).
While these sentiments might have been uttered by a nineteenth-century homesteader first surveying a sea of prairie grass on the American frontier, they were actually the thoughts and feelings of a man first encountering the Martian landscape-well, "actually" in the sense of being a scene imagined by science fiction writer Ray Bradbury in his seminal work, The Martian Chronicles, a collection of short stories and vignettes that center around the first several manned missions to Mars. The parallels of this work of fiction to the historical settlement of the United States' "frontiers," especially the trans-Mississippi West, make a high-interest, high-impact lesson for students in any American history class (2).
A curriculum gains relevance and makes the abstract concrete when it connects to student experiences (3). When Bradbury's Chronicles was first published in 1950, its chapter headings of dates from January 1999 to October 2026 probably seemed light-years away to its readers-a truly science-fictionalized account of the distant future they would never see. However, with the first of those dates already on our calendars and the last appearing in long-term contracts, students today read this work as more science fact than fiction. The stunning success of the 1997 Mars Pathfinder mission was shared by everyone, as we accessed its data on the Internet and through stories in the media. Americans were captivated by Sojourner's adventures on the Martian landscape. For students, the "frontier" is no longer a dusty relic of the past; rather, it is a real place in the present, while manned missions to Mars are quite possibly in their future (4).
The Martian Chronicles adds another dimension to frontier history with its parallels to the European settlement of the American continent and to the clash of native and non-native cultures. Students of American history who may be reluctant to engage in a discussion of these issues find in Bradbury's novel a highly engaging connection to the real frontier of the past by reading about a frontier of the future. The work also provides students...