“The Significance of the Frontier in American History” http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/gilded/empire/text1/turner.pdf
In 1890 the U.S. Census Bureau announced that the contiguous frontier line separating wilderness from civilization in the United States no longer existed. Three years later, Frederick Jackson Turner, a young professor at the University of Wisconsin, delivered a scholarly paper, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” before the American Historical Association in Chicago during the World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago World’s Fair). In it Turner argued that “the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development.” The frontier line “between savagery and civilization” had moved west from the earliest English settlements in Massachusetts and Virginia across the Appalachians to the Mississippi and finally across the plains to California and Oregon. Settlers had been forced by necessity to build a rough-hewn civilization on the frontier, and the resourcefulness and strength of character that required had given America its individualistic and democratic spirit, and distinguished North America from the monarchies of Europe.
Turner’s paper was widely distributed and enormously influential, and it remains perhaps the single most important piece of American historical writing. Scholars since have criticized Turner’s facts and interpretation, but at the time, his words raised concerns about the future of American government and society. Would the American character degrade without the stimulus of the frontier, especially at a time of rapid industrialization? Should the United States seek a new frontier and compete with the European nations now scrambling to gain or maintain colonial empires?
In a recent bulletin of the Superintendent of the Census for 1890 appear these significant words: “Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it cannot, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports.” This brief official statement marks the closing of a great historic movement. Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.
Behind institutions, behind constitutional forms and modifications, lie the vital forces that call these organs into life and shape them to meet changing conditions. The peculiarity of American institutions is the fact that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people—to the changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and in developing at each area of this progress out of the primitive economic and political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life. Said Calhoun in 1817, “We are great, and rapidly—I was about to say fearfully—growing!” [1] So saying, he touched the distinguishing feature of American life. All peoples show development; the germ theory of politics has been sufficiently emphasized. [2] In the case of most nations, however, the development has occurred in a limited area; and if the nation has expanded, it has met other growing peoples whom it has conquered. But in the case of the United States we have a different phenomenon. Limiting our attention to the Atlantic Coast, we have the familiar phenomenon of the evolution of institutions in a limited area, such as the rise of representative government[,] into complex organs; the progress from primitive industrial society, without division of labor, up to manufacturing civilization. But we have in addition to this a recurrence of the process of evolution in each western area reached in the process of expansion. Thus American development has exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area. American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character. The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic Coast, it is the Great West. Even the slavery struggle, which is made so exclusive an object of attention by writers like Professor von Holst, occupies [3] its important place in American history because of its relation to westward expansion.
In this advance, the frontier is the outer edge of the wave—the meeting point between savagery and civilization. Much has been written about the frontier from the point of view of border warfare and the chase, but as a field for the serious study of the economist and the historian it has been neglected.
The American frontier is sharply distinguished from the European frontier—a fortified boundary line running through dense populations. The most significant thing about the American frontier is that it lies at the hither edge of free land. In the census reports it is treated as the margin of that settlement which has a density of two or more to the square mile. The term is an elastic one, and for our purposes does not need sharp definition. We shall consider the whole frontier belt including the Indian country and the outer margin of the “settled area” of the census reports. This paper will make no attempt to treat the subject exhaustively; its aim is simply to call attention to the frontier as a fertile field for investigation, and to suggest some of the problems which arise in connection with it. . . .
It was this nationalizing tendency of the West that transformed the democracy of Jefferson into the national republicanism of Monroe and the democracy of Andrew Jackson. The West of the War of 1812, the West of Clay, and Benton and Harrison, and Andrew Jackson, [4] shut off by the Middle States and the mountains from the coast sections, had a solidarity of its own with national tendencies. On the tide of the Father of Waters, [5] North and South met and mingled into a nation. Interstate migration went steadily on—a process of cross-fertilization of ideas and institutions. The fierce struggle of the sections over slavery on the western frontier does not diminish the truth of this statement; it proves the truth of it. Slavery was a sectional trait that would not down, but in the West it could not remain sectional. It was the greatest of frontiersmen who declared: “I believe this Government can not endure permanently half slave and half free. It will become all of one thing or all of the other.” [6] Nothing works for nationalism like intercourse within the nation. Mobility of population is death to localism, and the western frontier worked irresistibly in unsettling population. The effect reached back from the frontier and affected profoundly the Atlantic Coast and even the Old World.
But the most important effect of the frontier has been in the promotion of democracy here and in Europe. As has been indicated, the frontier is productive of individualism. Complex society is precipitated by the wilderness into a kind of primitive organization based on the family. The tendency is antisocial. It produces antipathy to control, and particularly to any direct control. The tax gatherer is viewed as a representative of oppression. Prof. Osgood, in an able article, [7] has pointed out that the frontier conditions prevalent in the colonies are important factors in the explanation of the American Revolution, where individual liberty was sometimes confused with absence of all effective government. The same conditions aid in explaining the difficulty of instituting a strong government in the period of the confederacy. The frontier individualism has from the beginning promoted democracy. The frontier states that came into the Union in the first quarter of a century of its existence came in with democratic suffrage provisions, [8] and had reactive effects of the highest importance upon the older states whose peoples were being attracted there. An extension of the franchise became essential. It was western New York that forced an extension of suffrage in the constitutional convention of that state in 1821; and it was western Virginia that compelled the tide-water region to put a more liberal suffrage provision in the constitution framed in 1830, and to give to the frontier region a more nearly proportionate representation with the tide-water aristocracy. The rise of democracy as an effective force in the nation came in with western preponderance under Jackson and William Henry Harrison, and it meant the triumph of the frontier—with all of its good and with all of its evil elements. An interesting illustration of the tone of frontier democracy in 1830 comes from the same debates in the Virginia convention already referred to. [9] . . .
So long as free land exists, the opportunity for a competency exists, and economic power secures political power. But the democracy born of free land, strong in selfishness and individualism, intolerant of administrative experience and education, and pressing individual liberty beyond its proper bounds, has its dangers as well as its benefits. Individualism in America has allowed a laxity in regard to governmental affairs which has rendered possible the spoils system and all the manifest evils that follow from the lack of a highly developed civic spirit. [10] In this connection may be noted also the influence of frontier conditions in permitting lax business honor, inflated paper currency and wild-cat banking. The colonial and revolutionary frontier was the region whence emanated many of the worst forms of an evil currency. The West in the War of 1812 repeated the phenomenon on the frontier of that day, while the speculation and wild-cat banking of the period of the crisis of 1837 occurred on the new frontier belt of the next tier of states. Thus each one of the periods of lax financial integrity coincides with periods when a new set of frontier communities had arisen, and coincides in area with these successive frontiers for the most part. The recent Populist agitation is a case in point. [11] Many a state that now declines any connection with the tenets of the Populists, itself adhered to such ideas in an earlier stage of the development of the state. A primitive society can hardly be expected to show the intelligent appreciation of the complexity of business interests in a developed society. The continual recurrence of these areas of paper-money agitation is another evidence that the frontier can be isolated and studied as a factor in American history of the highest importance.
The East has always feared the result of an unregulated advance of the frontier, and has tried to check and guide it. The English authorities would have checked settlement at the headwaters of the Atlantic tributaries. . . .
From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of profound importance. The works of travelers along each frontier from colonial days onward describe certain common traits, and these traits have, while softening down, still persisted as survivals in the place of their origin, even when a higher social organization succeeded. The result is that to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom—these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier. Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them. He would be a rash prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life has now entirely ceased. Movement has been its dominant fact, and, unless this training has no effect upon a people, the American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise. But never again will such gifts of free land offer themselves. For a moment, at the frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant. There is no tabula rasa. [12] The stubborn American environment is there with its imperious summons to accept its conditions; the inherited ways of doing things are also there; and yet, in spite of environment, and in spite of custom, each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifference to its lessons, have accompanied the frontier. What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the nations of Europe more remotely. And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.
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The Frontier Thesis or Turner Thesis , is the argument advanced by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893 that American democracy was formed by the American frontier. He stressed the process—the moving frontier line—and the impact it had on pioneers going through the process. He also stressed results, especially that American democracy was the primary result, along with egalitarianism , a lack of interest in high culture , and violence. "American democracy was born of no theorist's dream; it was not carried in the Sarah Constant to Virginia, nor in the Mayflower to Plymouth. It came out of the American forest, and it gained new strength each time it touched a new frontier," said Turner. In the thesis, the American frontier established liberty by releasing Americans from European mindsets and eroding old, dysfunctional customs. The frontier had no need for standing armies, established churches, aristocrats or nobles, nor for landed gentry who controlled most of the land and charged heavy rents. Frontier land was free for the taking. Turner first announced his thesis in a paper entitled " The Significance of the Frontier in American History ", delivered to the American Historical Association in 1893 in Chicago. He won wide acclaim among historians and intellectuals. Turner elaborated on the theme in his advanced history lectures and in a series of essays published over the next 25 years, published along with his initial paper as The Frontier in American History.
Turner's emphasis on the importance of the frontier in shaping American character influenced the interpretation found in thousands of scholarly histories. By the time Turner died in 1932, 60% of the leading history departments in the U.S. were teaching courses in frontier history along Turnerian lines.
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Frontier Thesis
"The emergence of western history as an important field of scholarship can best be traced to the famous paper Frederick Jackson Turner delivered at a meeting of the American Historical Association in 1893. It was entitled "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." The "Turner thesis" or "frontier thesis," as his argument quickly became known, shaped both popular and scholarly views of the West (and of much else) for two generations. Turner stated his thesis simply. The settlement of the West by white people - "the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward" - was the central story of American history. The process of westward expansion had transformed a desolate and savage land into modem civilization. It had also continually renewed American ideas of democracy and individualism and had, therefore, shaped not just the West but the nation as a whole. "What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bonds of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States." The Turner thesis shaped the writing of American history for a generation, and it shaped the writing of western American history for even longer. " (quoted from "Where Historians Disagree: The 'Frontier' and the West" in Alan Brinkley, American History: A Survey, Chapter 16)
http://www.ndsu.nodak.edu/instruct/isern/103/turner.htm
Turner's thesis can be considered:
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In the summer of 1893, at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, Frederick Jackson Turner a minor academic in the new discipline of social science, presented his now-famous paper on the closing of the American frontier. What came to be known as the Turner Thesis (1893) forever changed thinking about the influence and importance of the frontier and how dramatic changes of the frontier profoundly impact future economic and social issues. His thesis was deemed so significant that it is still taught at colleges and universities today.
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Causey, J. (2019, November 20). Every company is a space company, some just don’t know it yet! (Op-Ed) . Space.com. Retrieved from https://www.space.com/every-company-is-a-space-company-spacecom-op-ed.html
Lindsey, B. (2011, April 1). Frontier economics: Why entrepreneurial capitalism is needed now more than ever . Papers.ssrn.com. Retrieved from https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1809996
Peck, J. M.. (1837). A new guide for emigrants to the west, containing sketches of Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, with the territory of Wisconsin, and the adjacent parts. 2nd ed. Boston, MA.
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Sandburg, C. (2013). Chicago poems. Hardpress Publishing. (Original work published 1916).
Turner, F. J. (1893). Wisconsin historical society the significance of the frontier in American history . Retrieved from http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/gilded/empire/text1/turner.pdf
Turner, F. J. (2013). The frontier in American history . Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. (Original work published 1893).
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Gregg, J. (2021). The Importance of Frontiers. In: The Cosmos Economy. Copernicus, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62569-6_4
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Article by D.R. Owram
Published Online February 7, 2006
Last Edited December 16, 2013
The Frontier thesis was formulated 1893, when American historian Frederick Jackson Turner theorized that the availability of unsettled land throughout much of American history was the most important factor determining national development. Frontier experiences and new opportunities forced old traditions to change, institutions to adapt and society to become more democratic as class distinctions collapsed. The result was a unique American society, distinct from the European societies from which it originated. In Canada the frontier thesis was popular between the world wars with historians such as A.R.M. LOWER and Frank UNDERHILL and sociologist S.D. CLARK , partly because of a new sense of Canada's North American character.
Since WWII the frontier thesis has declined in popularity because of recognition of important social and cultural distinctions between Canada and the US. In its place a "metropolitan school" has developed, emphasizing Canada's much closer historical ties with Europe. Moreover, centres such as Montréal, Toronto and Ottawa had a profound influence on the settlement of the Canadian frontier. Whichever argument is emphasized, however, any realistic conclusion cannot deny that both the frontier and the ties to established centres were formative in Canada's development.
See also METROPOLITAN-HINTERLAND THESIS .
Laurentian thesis, metropolitan-hinterland thesis.
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The Frontier Thesis, also known as Turner's Thesis or American frontierism, is the argument advanced by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893 that the settlement and colonization of the rugged American frontier was decisive in forming the culture of American democracy and distinguishing it from European nations. He stressed the process of "winning a wilderness" to extend the frontier line ...
Frederick Jackson Turner "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" is a seminal essay by the American historian Frederick Jackson Turner which advanced the Frontier thesis of American history.Turner's thesis had a significant impact on how people in the late 19th and early 20th centuries understood American identity, character, and national growth.
The "frontier thesis" essentially is that the United States is unique because it has always had a frontier with "free land" available. For this reason, people have always been able to move ...
derick Jackson Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History. 1893This brief official statement marks the closing of a great historic movement. Up to our own day American h. story has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous rece.
The Frontier Thesis was still wildly popular, and the differences he now identified within and between the regions were, he was told, withering away in the face of the unifying forces of the ...
The colonial and revolutionary frontier was the region whence emanated many of the worst forms of an evil currency. 47 The West in the war of 1812 repeated the phenomenon on the frontier of that day, while the speculation and wild-cat banking of the period of the crisis of 1837 occurred on the new frontier belt of the next tier of States. Thus ...
From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of profound importance. The works of travelers along each frontier from colonial days onward describe certain common traits, and these traits have, while softening down, still persisted as survivals in the place of their origin, even when a higher social organization succeeded ...
American frontier. history of United States. Frederick Jackson Turner (born November 14, 1861, Portage, Wisconsin, U.S.—died March 14, 1932, San Marino, California) was an American historian best known for the " frontier thesis.". The single most influential interpretation of the American past, it proposed that the distinctiveness of the ...
Our early history is the study of European germs developing in an American environment. Too exclusive attention has been paid by institutional students to the Germanic origins, too little to the American factors. The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist.
It is the frontier thesis. that has embodied the predominant American view of the American. past. Turner wrote his memorable essay, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," during that period of growing. tension between the Eastern and Western United States which. culminated in the Bryan campaign of 1 896.
This frontier thesis was able to transmit a series of symbols that became imbedded in the nation's self‐perception and self‐understanding: Virgin land, wilderness, land and democracy, Manifest Destiny, chosen race. ... The importance of Turner's frontier thesis and the reasons for its popular acceptance beyond scholarly circles have been a ...
Vocabulary Text; Census: an official count of the U.S. population that occurs every ten years, mandated by the Constitution to inform taxation and representation in Congress: In a recent bulletin of the Superintendent of the Census for 1890 appear these significant words: "Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken ...
The frontier individualism has from the beginning promoted democracy. The frontier states that came into the Union in the first quarter of a century of its existence came in with democratic suffrage provisions, [8] and had reactive effects of the highest importance upon the older states whose peoples were being attracted there. An extension of ...
The Frontier Thesis or Turner Thesis, is the argument advanced by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893 that American democracy was formed by the American frontier. ... Turner's emphasis on the importance of the frontier in shaping American character influenced the interpretation found in thousands of scholarly histories. By the time ...
Frontier Thesis "The emergence of western history as an important field of scholarship can best be traced to the famous paper Frederick Jackson Turner delivered at a meeting of the American Historical Association in 1893. It was entitled "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." The "Turner thesis" or "frontier thesis," as his ...
The most important effect of. the frontier, argued Turner, was in. promoting democracy. The fron tier produced a fierce individual. ism which opposed outside controls. and promoted a pure form of dem ocratic action. The West, according to Turner, had done more to devel op self-government and to increase.
The Turner Thesis is important for the imminent space economy because it acknowledges the importance of the undeveloped wilderness in civilized society as an incubator for hatching civilization's next incarnations. Turner's observations about closing Western civilization's last frontier are prescient because the space economy will ...
What was the importance of 1890 in Turner's thesis? ... Turner's frontier thesis describes "the farmer's advance," waves of settlement in the westward migration. Turner says the pioneer is ...
His thesis "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" mournfully proclaimed that the once vast American western frontier was closed. "American energy," Turner maintained, "will ...
Frontier Thesis. The Frontier thesis was formulated 1893, when American historian Frederick Jackson Turner theorized that the availability of unsettled land throughout much of American history was the most important factor determining national development. Frontier experiences and new opportunities forced old traditions to change, institutions ...
Frederick Jackson Turner (November 14, 1861 - March 14, 1932) was an American historian during the early 20th century, based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison until 1910, and then Harvard University.He was known primarily for his frontier thesis.He trained many PhDs who went on to become well-known historians. He promoted interdisciplinary and quantitative methods, often with an ...
A meaning for Turner's frontier, democracy in the Old Northwest, by S. Elkins and E. McKitrick.--Frontier democracy; social aspects, by R.A. Billington.--Suggestions for additional reading (p. 185-188)
Share Cite. Turner's "Frontier Thesis" stated that westward expansion was important to the American psyche in that conquering these uninhabited lands made United States's citizens more self ...