The significance of the frontier in American history Frederick Jackson Turner

"The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development." With these words, Frederick Jackson Turner laid the foundation for modern historical study of the American West and presented a "frontier thesis" that continues to influence historical thinking even today. Turner's contribution to American history was to argue that the frontier past best explained the distinctive history of the United States. He most cogently articulated this idea in "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," which he first delivered to a gathering of historians in 1893 at Chicago, then the site of the World's Columbian Exposition, an enormous fair to mark the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus' voyage. Although almost totally ignored at the time, Turner's lecture eventually gained such wide distribution and influence that a contemporary scholar has called it "the single most influential piece of writing in the history of American history." For Turner, the deeper significance of the frontier lay in the effects of this social recapitulation on the American character. "The frontier," he claimed, "is the line of most rapid Americanization." The presence and predominance of numerous cultural traits -"that coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and acquisitiveness; that practical inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things... that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism" -- could all be attributed to the influence of the frontier. Some have long disputed the very idea of a frontier of "free land." Turner's formulation ignored the presence of the numerous Indian peoples whose subjugation was required by the nation's westward march, and assumed that the bulk of newly acquired lands were actually democratically distributed to yeomen pioneers. The numerous Indian wars provoked by American expansion belie Turner's argument that the American "free land" frontier was a sharp contrast with European nations' borders with other states. Turner's ideas impacted many areas of historiography. In the history of religion, for example Boles (1993) notes that William Warren Sweet at the University of Chicago Divinity School, argued that churches adapted to the characteristics of the frontier, creating new denominations such as the Mormons, the Church of Christ, the Disciples of Christ, and the Cumberland Presbyterians. The frontier, they argued, shaped uniquely American institutions such as revivals, camp meetings, and itinerant preaching. This view dominated religious historiography for decades. Moos (2002) shows that 1910s to 1940s black filmmaker and novelist Oscar Micheaux incorporated Turner's frontier thesis into his work. Micheaux promoted the West as a place where blacks could transcend race and earn economic success through hard work and perseverance. Slatta (2001) argues that the widespread popularization of Turner's frontier thesis impacted popular histories, motion pictures, and novels. They characterize the West in terms of individualism, frontier violence, and rough justice. Disneyland's Frontierland of the late 20th century reflected the myth of rugged individualism that celebrated what was perceived to be the American heritage. The public has ignored academic historians' anti-Turnerian models, largely because they conflict with and often destroy the icons of Western heritage. However, the work of historians during the 1980s-1990s, some of whom sought to bury Turner's conception of the frontier and others who have sought to spare the concept

while presenting a more balanced and nuanced view, have done much to place Western myths in context and rescue Western history from them. Frederick Jackson Turner explained how the Frontier purified Democracy as settlers crafted governmental institutions to meet their needs. From the West came suffrage for women, coeducational colleges, direct election of senators, and Social Welfare, as the vastness of the West taught citizens to act collectively when solving problems beyond the capabilities of individual settlers. Rugged individualism remained the ideal, while in practice, government became the agent of change. These purifying affects emerged as prime motivations for Americans to expand Anglo-American civilization beyond the shores of North America after the Frontier closed. Shortly after Turner's address to the American Historical Association in 1893, the Frontier Thesis justified the intellectual argument for American colonization of the Pacific and Caribbean Basins prior to the Spanish American War in 1898. The Frontier Thesis and Turner's following essays influenced U.S. presidents and foreign policy from that time forward including the current "informal empire" that spans the globe. Turner's essays will be a historical Rosetta Stone for young historians deciphering the twists and turns of American foreign policy throughout the twentieth century and beyond.