frederick jackson turner thesis and its flaws

Why was the Turner Thesis abandoned by historians

Fredrick Jackson Turner’s thesis of the American frontier defined the study of the American West during the 20th century. In 1893, Turner argued that “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.” ( The Frontier in American History , Turner, p. 1.) Jackson believed that westward expansion allowed America to move away from the influence of Europe and gain “independence on American lines.” (Turner, p. 4.) The conquest of the frontier forced Americans to become smart, resourceful, and democratic. By focusing his analysis on people in the periphery, Turner de-emphasized the importance of everyone else. Additionally, many people who lived on the “frontier” were not part of his thesis because they did not fit his model of the democratizing American. The closing of the frontier in 1890 by the Superintendent of the census prompted Turner’s thesis.

Despite its faults, his thesis proved powerful because it succinctly summed up the concerns of Turner and his contemporaries. More importantly, it created an appealing grand narrative for American history. Many Americans were concerned that American freedom would be diminished by the end of colonization of the West. Not only did his thesis give voice to these Americans’ concerns, but it also represented how Americans wanted to see themselves. Unfortunately, the history of the American West became the history of westward expansion and the history of the region of the American West was disregarded. The grand tapestry of western history was essentially ignored. During the mid-twentieth century, most people lost interest in the history of the American West.

Reassessment of Western History

In the last half of the twentieth century, a new wave of western historians rebelled against the Turner thesis and defined themselves by their opposition to it. Historians began to approach the field from different perspectives and investigated the lives of Women, miners, Chicanos, Indians, Asians, and African Americans. Additionally, historians studied regions that would not have been relevant to Turner. In 1987, Patricia Limerick tried to redefine the study of the American West for a new generation of western scholars. In Legacy of Conquest, she attempted to synthesize the scholarship on the West to that point and provide a new approach for re-examining the West. First, she asked historians to think of the America West as a place and not as a movement. Second, she emphasized that the history of the American West was defined by conquest; “[c]onquest forms the historical bedrock of the whole nation, and the American West is a preeminent case study in conquest and its consequences.” (Limerick, p. 22.)

Finally, she asked historians to eliminate the stereotypes from Western history and try to understand the complex relations between the people of the West. Even before Limerick’s manifesto, scholars were re-evaluating the west and its people, and its pace has only quickened. Whether or not scholars agree with Limerick, they have explored new depths of Western American history. While these new works are not easy to categorize, they do fit into some loose categories: gender ( Relations of Rescue by Peggy Pascoe), ethnicity ( The Roots of Dependency by Richard White, and Lewis and Clark Among the Indians by James P. Rhonda), immigration (Impossible Subjects by Ming Ngai), and environmental (Nature’s Metropolis by William Cronon, Rivers of Empire by Donald Worster) history. These are just a few of the topics that have been examined by American West scholars. This paper will examine how these new histories of the American West resemble or diverge from Limerick’s outline.

Defining America or a Threat to America's Moral Standing

Unlike Limerick, Pascoe did not find it necessary to define the west or the frontier. She did not have to because the Protestant missionaries in her story defined it for her. While Turner may have believed that the West was no longer the frontier in 1890, the missionaries certainly would have disagreed. In fact, the rescue missions were placed in the communities that the Victorian Protestant missionary judged to be the least “civilized” parts of America (Lakota Territory, San Francisco’s Chinatown, rough and tumble Denver and Salt Lake City.) Instead of being a story of conquest by Victorian or western morality, it was a story of how that morality was often challenged and its terms were negotiated by culturally different communities. Pascoe’s primary goal in this work was not only to eliminate stereotypes but to challenge the notion that white women civilized the west. While conquest may be a component of other histories, no one group in Pascoe’s story successfully dominated any other.

Changing the Narrative of Native Americans in the West

Two books were written before Legacy was published, Lewis and Clark Among the Indians (James Rhonda) and The Roots of Dependency (Richard White) both provide a window into the world of Native Americans. Both books took new approaches to Native American histories. Rhonda’s book looked at the familiar Lewis and Clark expedition but from an entirely different angle. Rhonda described the interactions between the expedition and the various Native American tribes they encountered. White’s book also sought to describe the interactions between the United States and the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos, but he sought to explain why the economies of these tribes broke down after contact. Each of these books covers new ground by addressing the impact of these interactions between the United States and the Native Americans.

Even though White book was published a few years before Legacy, The Roots of Dependency certainly satisfies some of Limerick’s stated goals. Conquest and its consequences are at the heart of White’s story. White details the problems these societies developed after they became dependant on American trade goods and handouts. White also dissuaded anyone from believing that the Native American economies were inefficient. The Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos economies were successful. The Choctaws and Pawnees had thriving economies and their food supplies were more than sufficient. While the Navajos were not as successful as the other two tribes, their story was remarkable because they learned how to survive in some of the most inhospitable lands in the American West. These stories exploded the myths that the Native Americans subsistence economies were somehow insufficient.

The Impact of Immigrants to the West

While illegal immigration is not an issue isolated to the history of the American West, the immigrants moved predominantly into California, Texas and the American Southwest. Like Anglo settlers who were attracted to the West for the potential for new life in the nineteenth century, illegal immigrants continued to move in during the twentieth. The illegal immigrants were welcomed, despite their status, because California’s large commercial farms needed inexpensive labor to harvest their crops. Impossible Subjects describes four groups of illegal immigrants (Filipinos, Japanese, Chinese and Mexican braceros) who were created by the United States immigration policy. Ngai specifically examines the role that the government played in defining, controlling and disciplining these groups for their allegedly illegal misconduct.

The Rise of Western Environmental History

Environmental history has become an increasingly important component of the history of the American West. Originally, the American West was seen as an untamed wilderness, but over time that description has changed. Two conceptually different, but nonetheless important books on environmental history discussed the American West and its importance in America. Nature’s Metropolis by William Cronon and Rivers of Empire by Donald Worster each explored the environment and the economy of the American West. Cronon examined the formation of Chicago and the importance of its commodities market for the development of the American West. Alternatively, Worster focuses on the creation of an extensive network of government subsidized dams in the early twentieth century. Rivers of Empire describes that despite the aridity of the natural landscape the American West became home to massive commercial farms and enormous swaths of urban sprawl.

According to Donald Worster’s Rivers of Empire, economics played an equally important role in the economic and environmental development of the Rocky Mountain and Pacific Slope states. Worster argued that the United States wanted to continue creating family farms for Americans in the West. Unfortunately, the aridity of the west made that impossible. The land in the West simply could not be farmed without water. Instead of adapting to the natural environment, the United States government embarked on the largest dam building project in human history. The government built thousands of dams to irrigate millions of acres of land. Unfortunately, the cost of these numerous irrigation projects was enormous. The federal government passed the cost on to the buyers of the land which prevented family farmers from buying it. Therefore, instead of family farms, massive commercial farms were created. The only people who could afford to buy the land were wealthy citizens. The massive irrigation also permitted the creation of cities which never would have been possible without it. Worster argues that the ensuing ecological damage to the West has been extraordinary. The natural environment throughout the region was dramatically altered. The west is now the home of oversized commercial farms, artificial reservoirs which stretch for hundreds of miles, rivers that run only on command and sprawling cities which depend on irrigation.

Each of these books demonstrates that the Turner thesis no longer holds a predominant position in the scholarship of the American West. The history of the American West has been revitalized by its demise. While westward expansion plays an important role in the history of the United States, it did not define the west. Turner’s thesis was fundamentally undermined because it did not provide an accurate description of how the West was peopled. The nineteenth century of the west is not composed primarily of family farmers. Instead, it is a story of a region peopled by a diverse group of people: Native Americans, Asians, Chicanos, Anglos, African Americans, women, merchants, immigrants, prostitutes, swindlers, doctors, lawyers, farmers are just a few of the characters who inhabit western history.

Suggested Readings

How the Myth of the American Frontier Got Its Start

Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis informed decades of scholarship and culture. Then he realized he was wrong

Colin Woodard

On the evening of   July 12, 1893, in the hall of a massive new Beaux-Arts building that would soon house the Art Institute of Chicago, a young professor named Frederick Jackson Turner rose to present what would become the most influential essay in the study of U.S. history.

It was getting late. The lecture hall was stifling from a day of blazing sun, which had tormented the throngs visiting the nearby Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, a carnival of never-before-seen wonders, like a fully illuminated electric city and George Ferris’ 264-foot-tall rotating observation wheel. Many of the hundred or so historians attending the conference, a meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA), were dazed and dusty from an afternoon spent watching Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show at a stadium near the fairground’s gates. They had already sat through three other speeches. Some may have been dozing off as the thin, 31-year-old associate professor from the University of Wisconsin in nearby Madison began his remarks.

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Turner told them the force that had forged Americans into one people was the frontier of the Midwest and Far West. In this virgin world, settlers had finally been relieved of the European baggage of feudalism that their ancestors had brought across the Atlantic, freeing them to find their true selves: self-sufficient, pragmatic, egalitarian and civic-minded. “The frontier promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people,” he told the audience. “In the crucible of the frontier, the immigrants were Americanized, liberated and fused into a mixed race, English in neither nationality nor characteristics.”

The audience was unmoved.

In their dispatches the following morning, most of the newspaper reporters covering the conference didn’t even mention Turner’s talk. Nor did the official account of the proceedings prepared by the librarian William F. Poole for The Dial , an influential literary journal. Turner’s own father, writing to relatives a few days later, praised Turner’s skills as the family’s guide at the fair, but he said nothing at all about the speech that had brought them there.

Yet in less than a decade, Turner would be the most influential living historian in the United States, and his Frontier Thesis would become the dominant lens through which Americans understood their character, origins and destiny. Soon, Jackson’s theme was prevalent in political speech, in the way high schools taught history, in patriotic paintings—in short, everywhere. Perfectly timed to meet the needs of a country experiencing dramatic and destabilizing change, Turner’s thesis was swiftly embraced by academic and political institutions, just as railroads, manufacturing machines and telegraph systems were rapidly reshaping American life.

By that time, Turner himself had realized that his theory was almost entirely wrong.

American historians had long believed that Providence had chosen their people to spread Anglo-Saxon freedom across the continent. As an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, Turner was introduced to a different argument by his mentor, the classical scholar William Francis Allen. Extrapolating from Darwinism, Allen believed societies evolved like organisms, adapting themselves to the environments they encountered. Scientific laws, not divine will, he advised his mentee, guided the course of nations. After graduating, Turner pursued a doctorate at Johns Hopkins University, where he impressed the history program’s leader, Herbert Baxter Adams, and formed a lifelong friendship with one of his teachers, an ambitious young professor named Woodrow Wilson. The connections were useful: When Allen died in 1889, Adams and Wilson aided Turner in his quest to take Allen’s place as head of Wisconsin’s history department. And on the strength of Turner’s early work, Adams invited him to present a paper at the 1893 meeting of the AHA, to be held in conjunction with the World’s Congress Auxiliary of the World’s Columbian Exposition.

The resulting essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” offered a vivid evocation of life in the American West. Stripped of “the garments of civilization,” settlers between the 1780s and the 1830s found themselves “in the birch canoe” wearing “the hunting shirt and the moccasin.” Soon, they were “planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick” and even shouting war cries. Faced with Native American resistance—Turner largely overlooked what the ethnic cleansing campaign that created all that “free land” might say about the American character—the settlers looked to the federal government for protection from Native enemies and foreign empires, including during the War of 1812, thus fostering a loyalty to the nation rather than to their half-forgotten nations of origin.

He warned that with the disappearance of the force that had shaped them—in 1890, the head of the Census Bureau concluded there was no longer a frontier line between areas that had been settled by European Americans and those that had not—Americans would no longer be able to flee west for an easy escape from responsibility, failure or oppression. “Each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past,” Turner concluded. “Now … the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.”

When he left the podium on that sweltering night, he could not have known how fervently the nation would embrace his thesis.

Like so many young scholars, Turner worked hard to bring attention to his thesis. He incorporated it into the graduate seminars he taught, lectured about it across the Midwest and wrote the entry for “Frontier” in the widely read Johnson’s Universal Cyclopædia. He arranged to have the thesis reprinted in the journal of the Wisconsin Historical Society and in the AHA’s 1893 annual report. Wilson championed it in his own writings, and the essay was read by hundreds of schoolteachers who found it reprinted in the popular pedagogical journal of the Herbart Society, a group devoted to the scientific study of teaching. Turner’s big break came when the Atlantic Monthly ’s editors asked him to use his novel viewpoint to explain the sudden rise of populists in the rural Midwest, and how they had managed to seize control of the Democratic Party to make their candidate, William Jennings Bryan, its nominee for president. Turner’s 1896 Atlantic Monthly essay , which tied the populists’ agitation to the social pressures allegedly caused by the closing of the frontier—soil depletion, debt, rising land prices—was promptly picked up by newspapers and popular journals across the country.

Meanwhile, Turner’s graduate students became tenured professors and disseminated his ideas to the up-and-coming generation of academics. The thrust of the thesis appeared in political speeches, dime-store western novels and even the new popular medium of film, where it fueled the work of a young director named John Ford who would become the master of the Hollywood western. In 1911, Columbia University’s David Muzzey incorporated it into a textbook—initially titled History of the American People —that would be used by most of the nation’s secondary schools for half a century.

Americans embraced Turner’s argument because it provided a fresh and credible explanation for the nation’s exceptionalism—the notion that the U.S. follows a path soaring above those of other countries—one that relied not on earlier Calvinist notions of being “the elect,” but rather on the scientific (and fashionable) observations of Charles Darwin. In a rapidly diversifying country, the Frontier Thesis denied a special role to the Eastern colonies’ British heritage; we were instead a “composite nation,” birthed in the Mississippi watershed. Turner’s emphasis on mobility, progress and individualism echoed the values of the Gilded Age—when readers devoured Horatio Alger’s rags-to-riches stories—and lent them credibility for the generations to follow.

But as a researcher, Turner himself turned away from the Frontier Thesis in the years after the 1890s. He never wrote it down in book form or even in academic articles. He declined invitations to defend it, and before long he himself lost faith in it.

For one thing, he had been relying too narrowly on the experiences in his own region of the Upper Midwest, which had been colonized by a settlement stream originating in New England. In fact, he found, the values he had ascribed to the frontier’s environmental conditioning were actually those of this Greater New England settlement culture, one his family and most of his fellow citizens in Portage, Wisconsin, remained part of, with their commitment to strong village and town governments, taxpayer-financed public schools and the direct democracy of the town meeting. He saw that other parts of the frontier had been colonized by other settlement streams anchored in Scots-Irish Appalachia or in the slave plantations of the Southern lowlands, and he noted that their populations continued to behave completely differently from one another, both politically and culturally, even when they lived in similar physical environments. Somehow settlers moving west from these distinct regional cultures were resisting the Darwinian environmental and cultural forces that had supposedly forged, as Turner’s biographer, Ray Allen Billington, put it, “a new political species” of human, the American. Instead, they were stubbornly remaining themselves. “Men are not absolutely dictated to by climate, geography, soils or economic interests,” Turner wrote in 1922. “The influence of the stock from which they sprang, the inherited ideals, the spiritual factors, often triumph over the material interests.”

Turner spent the last decades of his life working on what he intended to be his magnum opus, a book not about American unity but rather about the abiding differences between its regions, or “sections,” as he called them. “In respect to problems of common action, we are like what a United States of Europe would be,” he wrote in 1922, at the age of 60. For example, the Scots-Irish and German small farmers and herders who settled the uplands of the southeastern states had long clashed with nearby English enslavers over education spending, tax policy and political representation. Turner saw the whole history of the country as a wrestling match between these smaller quasi-nations, albeit a largely peaceful one guided by rules, laws and shared American ideals: “When we think of the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, as steps in the marking off of spheres of influence and the assignment of mandates [between nations] … we see a resemblance to what has gone on in the Old World,” Turner explained. He hoped shared ideals—and federal institutions—would prove cohesive for a nation suddenly coming of age, its frontier closed, its people having to steward their lands rather than striking out for someplace new.

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Colin Woodard | | READ MORE

Colin Woodard is a journalist and historian, and the author of six books including Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood . He lives in Maine.

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• Frontier Thesis

1920 Turner's Frontier Thesis

Source:(New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1920, 1947; reprinted by Holt, Rinehart and Winston Inc., 1962), pp. 257-262.

The Turner's Frontier Thesis is a seminal work of American history, written by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893. In his thesis, Turner argued that the existence of a continuously expanding frontier in the American West was a defining characteristic of American democracy and society. Turner argued that the frontier was not just a physical place, but a symbol of the American spirit of individualism, democracy, and self-reliance. He believed that the frontier had shaped American democracy by creating a unique American character that was egalitarian, independent, and democratic. Turner's thesis also suggested that the closing of the frontier in 1890 marked the end of a crucial period in American history. He argued that the end of the frontier would lead to the decline of the American character and democracy, and that America needed to find new ways to maintain its democratic ideals in the absence of the frontier. The Frontier Thesis was highly influential in shaping American history and historiography. It has been debated, discussed, and analyzed by historians and scholars for over a century, and its impact can still be seen in American culture and politics today.

Frederick Jackson Turner

The Frontier in American History

(New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1920, 1947; reprinted by Holt, Rinehart and Winston Inc., 1962), pp. 257-262.

The last chapter in the development of Western democracy is the one that deals with its conquest over the vast spaces of the new West. At each new stage of Western development, the people have had to grapple with larger areas, with bigger combinations. The little colony of Massachusetts veterans that settled at Marietta received a land grant as large as the State of Rhode Island. The band of Connecticut pioneers that followed Moses Cleveland to the Connecticut Reserve occupied a region as large as the parent State. The area which settlers of New England stock occupied on the prairies of northern Illinois surpassed the combined area of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Men who had become accustomed to the narrow valleys and little towns of the East found themselves out on the boundless spaces of the West dealing with units of such magnitude as dwarfed their former Experiences. The Great Lakes, the Prairies, the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, the Mississippi and the Missouri, furnished new standards of measurement for the achievement of this industrial democracy. Individualism began to give way to cooperation and to governmental activity.

Even in the earlier days of the democratic conquest of the wilderness, demands had been made upon the government for support in internal improvements, but this new West showed a growing tendency to call to its assistance the powerful arm of national authority. In the period since the Civil War, the vast public domain has been donated to the individual farmer, to States for education, to railroads for the construction of transportation lines. Moreover, with the advent of democracy in the last fifteen years upon the Great Plains, new physical conditions have presented themselves which have accelerated the social tendency of Western democracy.

The pioneer farmer of the days of Lincoln could place his family on a flatboat, strike into the wilderness, cut out his clearing, and with little or no capital go on to the achievement of industrial independence. Even the homesteader on the Western prairies found it possible to work out a similar independent destiny, although the factor of transportation made a serious and increasing impediment to the free working-out of his individual career. But when the arid lands and the mineral resources of the Far West were reached, no conquest was possible by the old individual pioneer methods. Here expensive irrigation works must be constructed, cooperative activity was demanded in the utilization of the water supply, capital beyond the reach of the small farmer was required. In a word, the physiographic province itself decreed that the destiny of this new frontier should be social rather than individual.

Magnitude of social achievement is the watchword of the democracy since the Civil War. From petty towns built in the marshes, cities arose whose greatness and industrial power are the wonder of our time. The conditions were ideal for the production of captains of industry. The old democratic admiration for the self-made man, its old deference to the rights of competitive individual development, together with the stupendous natural resources that opened to the conquest of the keenest and the strongest, gave such conditions of mobility as enabled the development of the large corporate industries which in our own decade have marked the West.

Thus, in brief, have been outlined the chief phases of the development of Western democracy in the different areas which it has conquered. There has been a steady development of the industrial ideal, and a steady increase of the social tendency, in this later movement of Western democracy. While the individualism of the frontier, so prominent in the earliest days of the Western advance, has been preserved as an ideal, more and more these individuals struggling each with the other, dealing with vaster and vaster areas, with larger and larger problems, have found it necessary to combine under the leadership of the strongest.

This is the explanation of the rise of those preeminent captains of industry whose genius has concentrated capital to control the fundamental resources of the nation. If now in the way of recapitulation, we try to pick out from the influences that have gone to the making of Western democracy the factors which constitute the net result of this movement, we shall have to mention at least the following:--

Most important of all has been the fact that an area of free land has continually lain on the western border of the settled area of the United States. Whenever social conditions tended to crystallize in the East, whenever capital tended to press upon labor or political restraints to impede the freedom of the mass, there was this gate of escape to the free conditions of the frontier. These free lands promoted individualism, economic equality, freedom to rise, democracy. Men would not accept inferior wages and a permanent position of social subordination when this promised land of freedom and equality was theirs for the taking. Who would rest content under oppressive legislative conditions when with a slight effort he might reach a land wherein to become a co-worker in the building of free cities and free States on the lines of his own ideal?

In a word, then, free lands meant free opportunities. Their existence has differentiated the American democracy from the democracies which have preceded it, because ever, as democracy in the East took the form of highly specialized and complicated industrial society, in the West it kept in touch with primitive conditions, and by action and reaction these two forces have shaped our history.

In the next place, these free lands and this treasury of industrial resources have existed over such vast spaces that they have demanded of democracy increasing spaciousness of design and power of execution. Western democracy is contrasted with the democracy of all other times in the largeness of the tasks to which it has set its hand, and in the vast achievements which it has wrought out in the control of nature and of politics. It would be difficult to over-emphasize the importance of this training upon democracy. Never before in the history o the world has democracy existed on so vast an area and handled things in the gross with such success, with such largeness of design, and such grasp upon the means of execution.

In short, democracy has learned in the West of the United States how to deal with the problems of magnitude. The old historic democracies were but little states with primitive economic conditions.... Western democracy has been from the time of its birth idealistic. The very fact of the wilderness appealed to men as a fair, blank page on which to write a new chapter in the story of man's struggle for a higher type of society. The Western wilds, from the Alleghanies to the Pacific, constituted the richest free gift that was ever spread out before civilized man. To the peasant and artisan of the Old World, bound by the chains of social class, as old as custom and as inevitable as fate, the West offered an exit into a free life and greater well-being among the bounties of nature, into the midst of resources that demanded manly exertion, and that gave in return the chance for indefinite ascent in the scale of social advance.

"To each she offered gifts after his will".

Never again can such an opportunity come to the sons of men. It was unique, and the thing is so near us, so much a part of our lives, that we do not even yet comprehend its full significance. The existence of this land of opportunity has made America the goal of idealists from the days of the Pilgrim Fathers. With all the materialism of the pioneer movements, this idealistic conception of the vacant lands as an opportunity for a new order of things is unmistakably present....

Cite Article : www.britsihcolumbiahistory.ca.com/sections/documents

Reference: Article by (Staff Historian), 2023

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• > Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis and the...

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Frederick jackson turner's frontier thesis and the self-consciousness of america.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

In their work on Turner's formative period, Ray A. Billington and Fulmer Mood have shown that the Frontier Thesis, formulated in 1893 in “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” is not so much a brilliant early effort by a young scholar as a mature study in which Turner gave his ideas an organization that proved to be final. During the rest of his life he developed but never disclaimed or modified them. Billington and Mood also add that the Frontier Thesis is meant to test a new approach to history that Turner had been developing since the beginning of his academic career. We can fully understand it, then, only by setting it within the framework of the assumptions and goals of his 1891 essay, “The Significance of History,” Turner's only attempt to sketch a philosophy of history.

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1 Billington , Ray A. , The Genesis of the Frontier Thesis: A Study in Historical Creativity ( San Marino, Ca. : The Huntington Library , 1971 ) Google Scholar ; Mood , Fulmer , “ The Development of Frederick J.Turner as a Historical Thinker ,” Transactions of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts , 1937–42, 34 ( 1943 ), 283 – 352 . Google Scholar

2 Turner , Frederick J. , “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Proceedings of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin , 14 12 1893 . Google Scholar

3 Turner , Frederick J. , “ The Significance of History ,” Wisconsin Journal of Education , 21 ( 10 1891 ), 230 –4, ( 11 1891 ), 253–6. Google Scholar

4 Turner , , “The Significance of History,” in Frontier and Section: Selected Essays of F. J. Turner , Billington , Ray A. ed. ( Englewood Cliffs, N.J. : Prentice-Hall , 1961 ), 20 . Google Scholar

5 Turner , , “The Significance of History,” 17 . Google Scholar

7 Ibid. , 18.

8 Ibid. , 27.

9 Ibid. , 18.

10 Turner , Frederick J. , “Problems in American History,” in Frontier and Section , Billington, ed., 29 . Google Scholar

11 Billington , Ray A. , Frederick J. Turner: Historian, Scholar, Teacher ( New York : Oxford University Press , 1973 ), chapter 5 Google Scholar ; Coleman , William , “ Science and Symbol in Turner Frontier Hypothesis ,” American Historical Review , 72 , 3 ( 1966 ), 22 – 49 . CrossRef Google Scholar

12 Turner , , “The Significance of the Frontier,” 1 – 2 Google Scholar ; see also “Problems in American History,” 29 . Google Scholar

13 Turner , , “The Significance of the Frontier,” 2 . Google Scholar

14 The link between the “instinct for moving” and the development of human history and culture was forcefully made by Turner in an 1891 address to the Madison Literary Club: “The colonizing spirit is one form of the nomadic instinct. The immigrant train on its way to the far west or the steamer laden with passengers for Australia is but the last embodiment of the impulse that took Abraham out of Ur of the Chaldees and sent our Aryan forefathers from their primitive pasture lands to Greece and Italy and India and Scandinavia”: Turner , Frederick J. , “American Colonization,” published in Carpenter , Ronald H. , The Eloquence of Frederick J. Turner ( San Marino, Ca. : The Huntington Library , 1893 ), 176 . Google Scholar

15 Turner , , “The Significance of the Frontier,” 11 . Google Scholar

16 See, for instance, his treatment of populism, “The Significance of the Frontier,” 32 . Google Scholar

17 Ibid. , 37.

18 Ibid. , 4.

19 Turner , , “The Problem of the West,” in Frontier and Section , Billington ed, 206 Google Scholar ; also: “At first the frontier was the Atlantic coast. It was the frontier of Europe in a very real sense. Moving westward, the frontier became more and more American,” Turner , , “The Significance of the Frontier,” 4 . Google Scholar

20 Foucault , Michel , L'ordre du discours ( Paris : 1970 ). Google Scholar

21 See, Trails: Toward a New Western History , Limerick , Patricia Nelson , Milner , Clyde A. II , Rankin , Charles E. eds. ( University Press of Kansas ). CrossRef Google Scholar

22 Turner , , “The Significance of the Frontier,” 3 – 4 . Google Scholar

23 Turner , , “The Problem of the West,” 205 . Google Scholar

24 Ibid. , 207.

25 Turner , , “The Significance of the Frontier,” 2 . Google Scholar

26 See Morgan , Lewis Henry , Ancient Society ( 1877 ). Google Scholar

27 Billington , , Frederick Jackson Turner , 76 –9, 122–3. Google Scholar

28 Turner , , “The Significance of the Frontier,” 21 , 38. Google Scholar

29 Ibid. , 12.

30 Ibid. , 4.

31 Turner , , “The Problem of the West,” 205 . Google Scholar

32 See Morgan , Lewis H. , Ancient Society ( 1877 ) Google Scholar , and Bagehot , Walter , Physics and Politics: An Application of the Principles of Natural Selection and Heredity to Political Society ( 1872 ) Google Scholar , on the first and second points respectively. The pervasive influence in late 19th century culture of Sumner Maine's theory of the transition from status to contract should also be kept in mind.

33 Turner , , “The Significance of the Frontier,” 30 . Google Scholar

34 Ibid. , 37; “The problem of the West,” 211 . Google Scholar

35 Ibid. , quoted.

36 Turner , , “The Significance of the Frontier,” 31 . Google Scholar

37 Turner , , “The Problem of the West,” 213 . Google Scholar

38 Billington , , Frederick Jackson Turner , 425 . Google Scholar

39 Bonazzi , Tiziano , “Un'analisi della American Promise: ordine e senso nel discorso storico-politico,” in Bonazzi , Tiziano , Struttura e metamorfosi della civilta' progressista ( Venezia : Marsilio , 1974 ), 41 – 140 . Google Scholar

40 Baritz , Loren , “ The Idea of the West ,” American Historical Review , 66 , 3 ( 1961 ), 618 –40. CrossRef Google Scholar An important parallel can also be made with Walzer , Michael , Exodus and Revolution ( New York : Basic Books , 1985 ). Google Scholar

41 Smith , Henry Nash , Virgin Land: The American West As Symbol and Myth ( Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press , 1950 ). Google Scholar On the importance of foundation myths, see Voegelin , Eric , The New Science of Politics ( Chicago : University of Chicago Press , 1952 ). Google Scholar

42 Noble , David W. , Historians against History. The Frontier Thesis and the National Covenant in American Historical Writing since 1830 ( Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press , 1965 ) Google Scholar , and The End of American History ( Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press , 1985 ). Google Scholar

43 Turner , to Becker , Carl , 21 01 1911 Google Scholar , in Jacobs , Wilbur R. , The Historical World of Frederick J. Turner ( New Haven-London : Yale University Press , 1968 ), 135 Google Scholar ; also, Turner , to Skinner , Constance Lindsay , 15 03 1922 Google Scholar , in Jacobs , , The Historical World , 56 . Google Scholar

44 Turner , , “Problems in American History,” 29 . Google Scholar

45 Ibid. , 32.

46 Turner , , “The Problem of the West,” 68 –9. Google Scholar

47 Ibid. , 69. This expression follows immediately upon the sentence previously quoted.

48 Turner , , “The Significance of the Frontier,” 38 . Google Scholar

49 Turner , to Becker , Carl , in Jacobs , , The Historical World , 135 . Google Scholar

50 Turner , , “Contributions of the West to American Democracy,” Google Scholar in Turner , , The Frontier in American History , 264 –6. Google Scholar

51 Ibid. , 258.

52 Turner , , “The Problem of the West,” 216 . Google Scholar

53 Turner , , “The West and American Ideals,” Google Scholar in Turner , , The Frontier in American History , 305 . Google Scholar

54 Turner , , “Social Forces in American History,” Google Scholar in Turner , , The Frontier in American History , 331 . Google Scholar

55 Turner , , “Pioneer Ideals and the State University,” Google Scholar in Turner , , The Frontier in American History , 284 . Google Scholar

56 Turner , , “The State University,” in America's Great Frontier and Sections: Frederick Jackson Turner's Unpublished Essays , Jacobs , Wilbur R. ed. ( Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press , 1969 ), 196 . Google Scholar

57 Turner , , “The West and American Ideals,” 300 . Google Scholar

58 See his “Pioneer Ideals and the State University,” 269 –89. Google Scholar

59 Turner , , “The Significance of History,” in Frontier and Section , Billington ed., 21 . Google Scholar

60 Ibid. , 18.

61 Lyotard , Jean-Francois , La condition postmoderne ( Paris : Les Editions de Minuit , 1979 ). Google Scholar

62 Reference is made here to Wallerstein , Immanuel , The Modern World-System ( New York : Academic Press , 1976 ). Google Scholar

63 Bercovitch , Sacvan , The American Jeremiad ( Madison : Wisconsin University Press , 1978 ) Google Scholar ; also Bercovitch , Sacvan , “The Rites of Assent: Rhetoric, Ritual, and the Ideology of American Consensus,” in The American Self: Myth, Ideology and Popular Culture , Girgus , Sam B. ed. ( Albuquerque : New Mexico University Press , 1980 ), 5 – 45 . Google Scholar On the “rhetorical impact” of the Frontier Thesis upon the American public mind see Carpenter , Ronald H. , The Eloquence of F. J. Turner , 47 – 95 . Google Scholar

64 Wiebe , Robert H. , The Search for Order , 1877–1920 ( New York : Hill and Wang , 1967 ), ch. 5. Google Scholar

65 The idea of a transition from an age of scarcity to an age of abundance was articulated by Patten , Simon N. , professor of economics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, in The New Basis of Civilization ( New York : Macmillan , 1907 ). Google Scholar

66 Tudor , Henry , Political Myth ( London : 1972 ) CrossRef Google Scholar ; also, Bonazzi , Tiziano , “Mito politico,” in Dizionario di politico , Bobbio , Norberto and Matteucci , Nicola eds. ( Torino : UTET , 1976 ), 587 –94. Google Scholar The most important interpretation of politics based on the dialectics amicus-hostis is that of Carl Schmitt, see, among his many publications, Der Bergriff des Politischen. Text von 1932 mit einem Vorwort und drei Corollarien (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1963 ). Google Scholar

67 Barthes , Ronald , Mythologies ( Paris : Editions du Seuil , 1957 ). Google Scholar

68 See Turner's articles on immigration in Chicago Record-Herald , 28 08 , 4, 11, 18, 25 09 , 16 10 1901 . Google Scholar Let us not forget, however, that Marcus Hansen was one of Turner's students.

69 Derrida , Jacques , L'autre cap ( Paris : Les Editions de Minuit , 1991 ). Google Scholar

70 Turner , , “The Significance of the Frontier,” 3 . Google Scholar

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• Volume 27, Issue 2
• Tiziano Bonazzi (a1)
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875800031509

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Frederick Jackson Turner

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• Wisconsin Life - Frederick Jackson Turner and the History of the American West
• Weber State University - Biography of Frederick Jackson Turner
• National Humanities Center - The Significance of the Frontier in American History 1893
• Frederick Jackson Turner - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)

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 United States was attributable to its long history of “westering.” Despite the fame of this monocausal interpretation, as the teacher and mentor of dozens of young historians, Turner insisted on a multicausal model of history , with a recognition of the interaction of politics, economics , culture , and geography. Turner’s penetrating analyses of American history and culture were powerfully influential and changed the direction of much American historical writing.

Born in frontier Wisconsin and educated at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Turner did graduate work at Johns Hopkins University under Herbert Baxter Adams . Awarded a doctorate in 1891, Turner was one of the first historians professionally trained in the United States rather than in Europe. He began his teaching career at the University of Wisconsin in 1889. He began to make his mark with his first professional paper, “ The Significance of History” (1891), which contains the famous line “Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time.” The controversial notion that there was no fixed historical truth, and that all historical interpretation should be shaped by present concerns, would become the hallmark of the so-called “New History,” a movement that called for studies illuminating the historical development of the political and cultural controversies of the day. Turner should be counted among the “progressive historians,” though, with the political temperament of a small-town Midwesterner, his progressivism was rather timid. Nevertheless, he made it clear that his historical writing was shaped by a contemporary agenda.

Turner first detailed his own interpretation of American history in his justly famous paper, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” delivered at a meeting of historians in Chicago in 1893 and published many times thereafter. Adams, his mentor at Johns Hopkins , had argued that all significant American institutions derived from German and English antecedents . Rebelling against this view, Turner argued instead that Europeans had been transformed by the process of settling the American continent and that what was unique about the United States was its frontier history . (Ironically, Turner passed up an opportunity to attend Buffalo Bill ’s Wild West show so that he could complete “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” on the morning that he presented it.) He traced the social evolution of frontier life as it continually developed across the continent from the primitive conditions experienced by the explorer, trapper, and trader, through maturing agricultural stages, finally reaching the complexity of city and factory. Turner held that the American character was decisively shaped by conditions on the frontier, in particular the abundance of free land, the settling of which engendered such traits as self-reliance, individualism , inventiveness, restless energy, mobility, materialism, and optimism. Turner’s “frontier thesis” rose to become the dominant interpretation of American history for the next half-century and longer. In the words of historian William Appleman Williams, it “rolled through the universities and into popular literature like a tidal wave.” While today’s professional historians tend to reject such sweeping theories, emphasizing instead a variety of factors in their interpretations of the past, Turner’s frontier thesis remains the most popular explanation of American development among the literate public.

For a scholar of such wide influence, Turner wrote relatively few books. His Rise of the New West, 1819–1829 (1906) was published as a volume in The American Nation series, which included contributions from the nation’s leading historians. The follow-up to that study, The United States, 1830–1850: The Nation and Its Sections (1935), would not be published until after his death. Turner may have had difficulty writing books, but he was a brilliant master of the historical essay. The winner of an oratorical medal as an undergraduate, he also was a gifted and active public speaker. His deep, melodious voice commanded attention whether he was addressing a teachers group, an audience of alumni, or a branch of the Chautauqua movement . His writing, too, bore the stamp of oratory; indeed, he reworked his lectures into articles that appeared in the nation’s most influential popular and scholarly journals.

Many of Turner’s best essays were collected in The Frontier in American History (1920) and The Significance of Sections in American History (1932), for which he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1933. In these writings Turner promoted new methods in historical research, including the techniques of the newly founded social sciences , and urged his colleagues to study new topics such as immigration , urbanization , economic development , and social and cultural history . He also commented directly on the connections he saw between the past and the present.

The end of the frontier era of continental expansion, Turner reasoned, had thrown the nation “back upon itself.” Writing that “imperious will and force” had to be replaced by social reorganization, he called for an expanded system of educational opportunity that would supplant the geographic mobility of the frontier. “The test tube and the microscope are needed rather than ax and rifle,” he wrote; “in place of old frontiers of wilderness, there are new frontiers of unwon fields of science.” Pioneer ideals were to be maintained by American universities through the training of new leaders who would strive “to reconcile popular government and culture with the huge industrial society of the modern world.”

Whereas in his 1893 essay he celebrated the pioneers for the spirit of individualism that spurred migration westward, 25 years later Turner castigated “these slashers of the forest, these self-sufficing pioneers, raising the corn and livestock for their own need, living scattered and apart.” For Turner the national problem was “no longer how to cut and burn away the vast screen of the dense and daunting forest” but “how to save and wisely use the remaining timber.” At the end of his career, he stressed the vital role that regionalism would play in counteracting the atomization brought about by the frontier experience. Turner hoped that stability would replace mobility as a defining factor in the development of American society and that communities would become stronger as a result. What the world needed now, he argued, was “a highly organized provincial life to serve as a check upon mob psychology on a national scale, and to furnish that variety which is essential to vital growth and originality.” Turner never ceased to treat history as contemporary knowledge, seeking to explore the ways that the nation might rechannel its expansionist impulses into the development of community life.

Turner taught at the University of Wisconsin until 1910, when he accepted an appointment to a distinguished chair of history at Harvard University . At these two institutions he helped build two of the great university history departments of the 20th century and trained many distinguished historians, including Carl Becker , Merle Curti, Herbert Bolton , and Frederick Merk, who became Turner’s successor at Harvard. He was an early leader of the American Historical Association , serving as its president in 1910 and on the editorial board of the association’s American Historical Review from 1910 to 1915. Poor health forced his early retirement from Harvard in 1924. Turner moved to the Huntington Library in San Marino, California , where he remained as senior research associate until his death.

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Frederick jackson turner, “significance of the frontier in american history” (1893).

Perhaps the most influential essay by an American historian, Frederick Jackson Turner’s address to the American Historical Association on “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” defined for many Americans the relationship between the frontier and American culture and contemplated what might follow “the closing of the frontier.”

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 can not, 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!” So saying, he touched the distinguishing feature of American life. All peoples show development; the germ theory of politics has been sufficiently emphasized. 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; the differentiation of simple colonial governments 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. …

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.

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 not  tabula rasa . 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.

Source: Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History, 1919.

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The Frontier Thesis and its Impact on American History

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Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis, presented at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, posits that the American frontier was central to shaping the nation's democracy and character. Turner's analysis of westward expansion and its role in fostering individualism and a unique American identity challenged existing theories of racial or environmental determinism. His ideas influenced American ideology and expansionist policies, despite criticisms regarding his portrayal of indigenous peoples.

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The Frontier Thesis

Introduction of the frontier thesis.

Historian Frederick Jackson Turner presented his influential Frontier Thesis at the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893

Turner's Argument

The Role of the American Frontier in Shaping Democracy and Character

Turner argued that the American frontier played a crucial role in promoting individualism and democracy, shaping the nation's character

The End of an Era

Turner's thesis was a response to the 1890 announcement that the American frontier line was no longer distinguishable, marking the end of an era

The Frontier as a Crucible for American Culture

Turner saw the frontier as a place where diverse cultures and the wilderness converged, fostering a unique American identity

The Impact of the Frontier Thesis

Influence on american ideology.

Turner's thesis shaped the perspectives of politicians, intellectuals, and historians on the American character and the nation's future trajectory

Justification for American Expansionist Policies

Turner's ideas underpinned justifications for American expansionist policies and informed foreign policy theories of subsequent scholars

Critiques of the Frontier Thesis

While influential, Turner's thesis has been critiqued for its portrayal of indigenous peoples and its perceived parallels with Nazi ideology

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The exposition, marking ______ years since Columbus's voyage, attracted over ______ million attendees and showcased new ______ innovations.

400th 27 technological

Turner's view on the role of the frontier in American history

Frontier fostered individualism and democracy, shaping a unique American identity separate from European influences.

Impact of westward expansion according to Turner

Pioneers adapting to new challenges in the West led to innovative and democratic characteristics in American society.

The ______ Purchase was a significant event that spread democratic ideals during the ______ and ______ eras, as per Turner's historical examination.

Louisiana Jeffersonian Jacksonian

Turner's view on social structures in the frontier

Minimal social structures; settlers often distrusted government officials.

Impact of frontier on American identity according to Turner

Frontier life fostered strong personal independence, key to American identity.

In his thesis, Turner contested the notion that the ______ conquest of European forests represented the peak of societal progress, suggesting instead that the ______ frontier had a unique role in shaping its society.

Germanic American

Turner's thesis influence on academics

Shaped historians' views on American character, nation's destiny without frontier.

Turner's thesis and expansionist policy

Justified US expansionism, influenced foreign policy theories, Wisconsin school.

Turner's Frontier Thesis has been criticized for its depiction of ______ peoples and its perceived similarities with the ______ ideology linked to Nazi Germany.

indigenous Blood and Soil

Despite its influence, Turner's work is questioned for not explaining why similar ______ transformations didn't happen in other areas with frontiers, like the former ______ colonies.

democratic Spanish

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What was the central claim of frederick jackson turner's frontier thesis presented in 1893, what event prompted turner to develop his frontier thesis, how did turner describe the process of westward expansion in america, what role did individualism play in turner's frontier thesis, how did turner's frontier thesis differ from other prevalent theories of his time, what was the broader impact of turner's frontier thesis on american thought, what are some criticisms of the frontier thesis, and how has it remained relevant, contenuti simili, esplora altre mappe su argomenti simili.

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Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition

The Closing of the American Frontier

Waves of expansion and democracy, individualism and the american identity, breaking with previous theories, the impact and influence of turner's frontier thesis, criticisms and legacy of the frontier thesis.

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What was wrong with Fredrick Jackson Turner's "Frontier Thesis"

Frankly, I feel it makes a great deal of sense for the most part. I have had several professors denounce the thesis as incorrect, but important to learn about.