The Significance of the Frontier in American History

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"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. It was first presented to a special meeting of the American Historical Association at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois in 1893, and published later that year first in Proceedings of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, then in the Annual Report of the American Historical Association. It has been subsequently reprinted and anthologized many times, and was incorporated into Turner's 1920 book, The Frontier in American History, as Chapter I.

Contents

The essay summarizes Turner's views on how the idea of the American frontier shaped the American character in terms of democracy and violence. He stresses how the availability of very large amounts of nearly free farmland built agriculture, pulled ambitious families to the western frontier and created an ethos of unlimited opportunity. The frontier helped shape individualism and opposition to governmental control. [1] He argued that the westward migration and the settlement of new frontiers were transformative processes that shaped the idea of American exceptionalism.

Turner speculated how the frontier drove American history and helped shape American culture as it existed in the 1890s. Turner reflects on the past to illustrate his point by noting human fascination with the frontier and how expansion to the American West changed American views on its culture. The essay had a major impact on historiography for decades. Citing the 1890 Census Bureau declaration about the ending of the frontier, Turner argued in the future different factors would shape the nation's character. Turner's emphasis on the centrality of the frontier was contested by various historians who cited the complexity of American history outside of the frontier and the variety of factors influencing the country, such as urbanization. In the 1980s a new approach emphasizing minorities replaced the frontier in some interpretations. [2]

Australian historian Brett Bowden has explored how the concept of "frontier" has been very widely used in both scholarly and popular literature to denote challenging new forces. [3] By contrast, medievalist Nora Berend asked: "What good is a concept not very clearly formulated a hundred years ago—Turner’s frontier was an elastic term that had no sharp definition—and severely criticized ever since?" [4]

Opposition to the Turner Thesis

In 1942, in "The Frontier and American Institutions: A Criticism of the Turner Thesis," Professor George Wilson Pierson debated the validity of the Turner thesis, stating that many factors influenced American culture besides the looming frontier. Although he respected Turner, Pierson strongly argues his point by looking beyond the frontier and acknowledging other factors in American development.

The Turner Thesis was also critiqued by Patricia Nelson Limerick in her 1987 book, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. Limerick asserts the notion of a "New Western History" in which the American West is treated as a place and not a process of finite expansion. Limerick pushes for a continuation of study within the historical and social atmosphere of the American West, which she believes did not end in 1890, but rather continues on to this very day.

Urban historian Richard C. Wade challenged the Frontier Thesis in his first asset, The Urban Frontier (1959), asserting that western cities such as Pittsburgh, Louisville, and Cincinnati, not the farmer pioneers, were the catalysts for western expansion.

Glenda Riley has argued that Turner's thesis ignored women. She argues that his context and upbringing led him to ignore the female portion of society, which directly led to the frontier becoming an exclusively male phenomenon. [5] The exclusion of women is one of the central debates around his work, particularly referred to by New Western Historians.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frontier</span> Political and geographical area near or beyond a boundary

A frontier is the political and geographical area near or beyond a boundary. A frontier can also be referred to as a "front". The term came from French in the 15th century, with the meaning "borderland"—the region of a country that fronts on another country. Unlike a border—a rigid and clear-cut form of state boundary—in the most general sense a frontier can be fuzzy or diffuse. For example, the frontier between the Eastern United States and the Old West in the 1800s was an area where European American settlements gradually thinned out and gave way to Native American settlements or uninhabited land. The frontier was not always a single continuous area, as California and various large cities were populated before the land that connected those to the East.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frederick Jackson Turner</span> American historian (1861–1932)

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 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 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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">American Historical Association</span> Society of historians and professors of history

The American Historical Association (AHA) is the oldest professional association of historians in the United States and the largest such organization in the world. Founded in 1884, AHA works to protect academic freedom, develop professional standards, and support scholarship and innovative teaching. It publishes The American Historical Review four times annually, which features scholarly history-related articles and book reviews.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr.</span> American historian (1888–1965)

Arthur Meier Schlesinger was an American historian who taught at Harvard University, pioneering social history and urban history. He was a Progressive Era intellectual who stressed material causes and downplayed ideology and values as motivations for historical actors. He was highly influential as a director of PhD dissertations at Harvard for three decades, especially in the fields of social, women's, and immigration history. His son, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (1917–2007), also taught at Harvard and was a noted historian.

The metropolitan-hinterland thesis theory of social and economic development, developed by the Canadian historian Harold Innis examines how economically advanced societies, through trade and colonialism, distort and impede economic development of less developed societies and regions.

Walter Prescott Webb was an American historian noted for his groundbreaking work on the American West. As president of the Texas State Historical Association, he launched the project that produced the Handbook of Texas. He is a member of the Hall of Great Westerners, which is a part of the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Herbert Eugene Bolton</span> American historian

Herbert Eugene Bolton was an American historian who pioneered the study of the Spanish-American borderlands and was a prominent authority on Spanish American history. He originated what became known as the Bolton Theory of the history of the Americas which holds that it is impossible to study the history of the United States in isolation from the histories of other American nations, and wrote or co-authored ninety-four works. A student of Frederick Jackson Turner, Bolton disagreed with his mentor's Frontier theory and argued that the history of the Americas is best understood by taking a holistic view and trying to understand the ways that the different colonial and precolonial contexts have interacted to produce the modern United States. The height of his career was spent at the University of California, Berkeley where he served as chair of the history department for twenty-two years and is widely credited with making the renowned Bancroft Library the preeminent research center it is today.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">J. Franklin Jameson</span> American historian

John Franklin Jameson was an American historian, author, and journal editor who played a major role in the professional activities of American historians in the early 20th century. He helped establish the American Historical Association.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frontier myth</span>

The frontier myth or myth of the West is one of the influential myths in American culture. The frontier is the concept of a place that exists at the edge of a civilization, particularly during a period of expansion. The American frontier occurred throughout the 17th to 20th centuries as European Americans colonized and expanded across North America. This period of time became romanticized and idealized in literature and art to form a myth. Richard Slotkin, a prominent scholar on the subject, defines the myth of the frontier as "America as a wide-open land of unlimited opportunity for the strong, ambitious, self-reliant individual to thrust his way to the top."

Frederic Logan Paxson was an American historian. He had also been President of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association. He had undergraduate and PhD degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, as well as a master's from Harvard University. He taught at Wisconsin as successor to Frederick Jackson Turner and the University of California-Berkeley from 1932 to 1947.

The "new western history" movement emerged among professional historians in the 1980s, a belated manifestation of the 1970s "new social history" movement. The new western historians recast the study of American frontier history by focusing on race, class, gender, and environment in the trans-Mississippi West. The movement is best known through the work of Patricia Nelson Limerick, Richard White, William Cronon, and Donald Worster. The philosophy and historiography of the new western historians is discussed thoroughly and supportively in Patricia Nelson Limerick, Clyde Milner II, and Charles E. Rankin, eds., Trails: Toward A New Western History. An overview of the New Western History is available in Clyde Milner, et al., The Oxford History of the American West. The movement has been thoroughly critiqued by historian Michael Allen.

Rugged individualism, derived from individualism, is a term that indicates that an individual is self-reliant and independent from outside, usually state or government assistance. While the term is often associated with the notion of laissez-faire and associated adherents, it was actually coined by United States president Herbert Hoover.

John Mack Faragher is an American historian.

Ray Allen Billington was an American historian who researched the history of the American frontier and the American West, becoming one of the leading defenders of Frederick Jackson Turner's "Frontier Thesis" from the 1950s to the 1970s, expanding the field of the history of the American West. He was a co-founder of the Western History Association in 1961.

According to The Norton Anthology of American Literature, the term Americanization was coined in the early 1900s and "referred to a concerted movement to turn immigrants into Americans, including classes, programs, and ceremonies focused on American speech, ideals, traditions, and customs, but it was also a broader term used in debates about national identity and a person’s general fitness for citizenship”.

Martin Ridge was an American historian and director of research at the Huntington Library. He is particularly known for the 1982 5th edition of "Westward expansion: a history of the American frontier" co-authored with Ray Allen Billington.

Stan Steiner (1925–1987) was an American historian and teacher who authored works generally focusing on American minority communities and their relationship to the broader U.S. society as well as the mythology of the American frontier. Born in the Coney Island area of New York, New York, he wrote a number of books touching upon various subjects from the 1960s to 1980s. He expressed particular interest in indigenous American peoples and their complex history into the 20th century. As an instructor, he lectured at a variety of U.S. institutions, including the University of New Mexico.

Jackson Turner Main (1917-2003) was a professor, historian and author who researched and wrote about the colonial American social order before, during and after the American Revolution. He was the grandson of Frederick Jackson Turner, author of the influential Frontier Thesis. Main worked most of his adult life as a professor and author of American Revolution history where it involved the social order during that period and wrote seven ground-breaking works in this area.

This is an English language bibliography of scholarly books and articles on the American frontier.

References

  1. ↑ Samuel Bazzi, Martin Fiszbein, and Mesay Gebresilasse. "Frontier culture: The roots and persistence of “rugged individualism” in the United States." Econometrica 88.6 (2020): 2329-2368, provides statistical support for individualism on the frontier.
  2. ↑ John Mack Faragher, "The frontier trail: rethinking Turner and reimagining the American West." (1993) American Historical Review 98#1 (1993), pp. 106-117. online [ dead link ]
  3. ↑ Brett Bowden "Frontiers—Old, New, and Final," The European Legacy (2020) 25:6, 671-686, DOI: 10.1080/10848770.2020.1760486
  4. ↑ Nora Berend, “Medievalists and the Notion of the Frontier.” Medieval History Journal 2#1 (1999): 55–72.
  5. ↑ Riley, Glenda. "Frederick Jackson Turner Overlooked the Ladies." Journal of the Early Republic 13.2 (1993): 216–30.

Further reading

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