Like the new social historians, new western historians made important contributions. By focusing on race, class, gender, environment, they added to the work of older Borderlands scholars of Hispanic studies, furthered the understanding of Native Americans in the United States and frontier women, and worked the fertile ground of twentieth-century western history.
Frontier history did not show the impact of the new social history until over a decade after most other historical fields. The reason for the lag is that frontier history, from its inception in Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 "Frontier Thesis" paper, had always been home to a strong school of non-Marxist economic determinists (“Progressives”). These “old” western historians had addressed multiethnic and environmental issues on the Colonial, trans-Appalachian, and trans-Mississippi frontiers. Although they left much work undone, these Progressives planted the fields the new western historians later harvested.
References and further reading
Allen , Michael. , "The ‘New’ Western History Stillborn," The Historian 57 (Fall 1994), 201-208 and "Cowboyphobia, or The Emperors Wear No Duds," Journal of the West 36 (October 1997), 3-6.
Limerick, Patricia Nelson. Clyde Milner II, and Charles E. Rankin, eds., Trails: Toward A New Western History (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991). ISBN978-0-7006-0501-9
Massip, Nathalie. "When Western History Tried to Reinvent Itself: Revisionism, Controversy, and the Reception of the New Western History." Western Historical Quarterly (Spring 2021) 52#1 pp 59-85.
White, Richard It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991). ISBN0-8061-2366-4
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A frontier is a political and geographical term referring to areas near or beyond a boundary.
Frederick Jackson Turner 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 emphasis on the Midwestern United States.
The American frontier, also known as the Old West, and popularly known as the Wild West, encompasses the geography, history, folklore, and culture associated with the forward wave of American expansion in mainland North America that began with European colonial settlements in the early 17th century and ended with the admission of the last few contiguous western territories as states in 1912. This era of massive migration and settlement was particularly encouraged by President Thomas Jefferson following the Louisiana Purchase, giving rise to the expansionist attitude known as "manifest destiny" and historians' "Frontier Thesis". The legends, historical events and folklore of the American frontier, known as the frontier myth, have embedded themselves into United States culture so much so that the Old West, and the Western genre of media specifically, has become one of the defining features of American national identity.
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The Frontier Thesis, also known as Turner's Thesis or American frontierism, is the argument 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 further for U.S. colonization, and the impact this had on pioneer culture and character. Turner's text takes the ideas behind Manifest Destiny and uses them to explain how American culture came to be. The features of this unique American culture included democracy, egalitarianism, uninterest in bourgeois or high culture, and an ever-present potential for violence. "American democracy was born of no theorist's dream; it was not carried in the Susan 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," wrote Turner.
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