Turner's Frontier Thesis

10 Key excerpts on "Turner's Frontier Thesis"

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  Frontier Country

  The Politics of War in Early Pennsylvania

  • Patrick Spero(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • University of Pennsylvania Press

    (Publisher)

  1

  For several decades, Turner’s ideas reigned supreme in a new field of historical inquiry often called “Western History” or “Frontier Studies.” Yet Turner never lacked critics, and his death in 1932, Richard Hofstadter noted, “unleashed a veritable avalanche of criticism” that was “precipitated in large degree by the new ideological currents set in motion by the Great Depression.” These “debunkers,” as Turner’s most ardent supporters labeled them, took Turner’s thesis at face value, agreeing that there was such a thing as an American frontier, that it played a role in America’s political development, and that it shifted over time. They disagreed with the Turnerians, however, by arguing that the frontier played a far less significant role in the country’s past. A particular target of the debunker’s wrath was the claim that the frontier served as a “safety valve” for urban discontent. A range of economic historians relegated this idea to the realm of popular myth.2

  Beginning in the 1960s, but picking up speed in the 1980s and 1990s, a new generation of historians, styled as “revisionists,” took more fundamental issue with Turner’s frontier thesis. These critics focused their energy on two fronts. First, they wanted to address all of the perspectives of American life that Turner’s thesis failed to consider. Turnerianism, they argued, was “ethnocentric and nationalistic,” made “English-speaking white men … the stars of the story,” and was crippled by “gender bias and linearity.” A second and often overlapping group challenged Turner’s argument that the process of settling on a frontier was responsible for America’s distinctive character and greatness. Instead they portrayed the frontier as a font of moral shortcomings, a site of imperialism, greed, violence, and deception. The criticism became so considerable that many scholars questioned the usefulness of the term frontier in historical analysis altogether. As Patricia Limerick, Turner’s most prominent critic, concluded, “The frontier is … an unsubtle concept in a subtle world.”3

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  Exploring the Next Frontier

  Vietnam, NASA, Star Trek and Utopia in 1960s and 70s American Myth and History

  • Matthew Wilhelm Kapell(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  What Brooks, in detail, suggested was that scholarship in the United States needed to help decide, “what is important for us? … [what] ought we to elect to remember?” (1918, 340). Brooks may claim to be writing of history, but as will be shown, such questions are far more important mythologically. And, because Turner’s essay had so carefully presented American history with that very question in mind, each successive generation of historians’ work considering the American West has been forced to deal with Turner, whether through accepting the thesis, revising it, or reacting against it. In each case all historians of the frontier have had no choice but to work through the ideas first presented by Turner. For generations of historians the Turner Thesis will be the operating paradigm of American historiography. From the time of Turner’s death in 1932 until the emergence of the new western history of the 1980s the thesis waxed, waned, and was occasionally vilified in American scholarship, but it never disappeared. The thesis was revised, and altered, and expanded, and simplified throughout the century. Historians such as Turner’s “champion,” Frederick L. Paxson, offered multiple editions of his History of the American Frontier, 1763–1893 (1967) throughout the century, and Ray Allen Billington offered his own overview of the thesis, claiming that “no one force did more to ‘Americanize’ the nation’s people and institutions than the repeated rebirth of civilization along the Western edge of settlement during the three centuries required to occupy the continent” (1974, 1). The historical moment where the Thesis moves from strictly an attempt at historiographical explanation to paradigm to full-fledged myth can be found in Walter Webb’s 1951 volume The Great Frontier

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  Writing and America

  • Gavin Cologne-Brookes, Neil Sammells, David Timms(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Like all modern myths, the ultimate function of this frontier-inspired myth-history is ideological, a means to contain the tragedies and tensions of the new order, notably imperialism, racism, monopoly and economic inequality. This containment was achieved through Turner’s integration of pioneer-hero traits into those of national character – an ‘inventive turn of mind’, ‘restless, nervous energy’, ‘coarseness and strength’ and ‘masterful grasp of material things’ – which Turner accepted were inevitably translated into the gospels of success and wealth. The Frontier Thesis thus attempted to create an ahistorical uniqueness for America which contradicted the commonly accepted notion that history is created as a process of contemporary social change. While Turner might at one level there disapprove of the robber baronage, they were, he had to admit, the transhistorical sons of the frontier, possessing its spirit and experience. It was this determining power of the frontier which constituted the second important aspect of his myth-history and which revealed the conservative nature of his theory of slow-paced social change.

  For Turner, the determining power of the frontier ensured American nationality and American exceptionalism. Because Turner believed in ‘the peculiar importance of American history’ as a mode of contemporary social investigation which could reveal ‘processes of social development’42 he was sure he had discovered the laws of social change in his connection of space and time in his power/knowledge equation.43

  That American nationality as determined by the heterotopic frontier experience was the site of cultural power-struggle is evidenced among other things in the causes of the Civil War, which for Turner was ‘a conflict between the Lake and Prairie plainsmen, on the one side, and the Gulf plainsmen, on the other, for the control of the Mississippi Valley’.44

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  Foreign Policy of The 50 Stars

  Different Angles of The U.S Foreign Policy

  • Ellias Aghili Dehnavi(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • tredition

    (Publisher)

  Thus Turner consciously sought a dynamic explanation of America's more happy history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He had the answer by 1891. "The ever-retreating frontier of free land is the key to American development." Then, in 1893, he changed the formulation of that thesis from a negative to a positive construction, and in the process used a vigorous, active verb-expansion. "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 life." Expansion, he concluded, promoted individualism which "from the beginning promoted democracy."

  Expansion, Individualism, and Democracy was the catechism offered by this young messiah of America's uniqueness and omnipotence. The frontier, he cried, was "a magic fountain of youth in which America continuously bathed and rejuvenated." Without it, "fissures begin to open between classes, fissures that may widen into chasms." But he was confident that these dangers could and would be avoided. "American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise." Ultimately, he lauded the pioneer as the "foreloper" of empire. And to drive home the lesson he quoted Rudyard Kipling, the laureate of British imperialism. Turner had explained the past and implied a program for the present. Materialistic individualism and democratic idealism could be married and maintained by a foreign policy of expansion.

  Turner gave Americans a nationalistic world view that eased their doubts, settled their confusions, and justified their aggressiveness. The frontier thesis was a bicarbonate of soda for emotional and intellectual indigestion. His thesis rolled through the universities and into popular literature as a tidal wave. Expansion a la Turner was good for business and at the same time extended white Protestant democracy. Patrician politicians like Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson could agree with railway magnate Edward H. Harriman, financier J. P. Morgan, and the missionaries on the validity of Turner's explanation of America's greatness. Turner's thesis thus played an important role in the history of American foreign relations. For his interpretation did much to Americanize and popularize the heretofore alien ideas of economic imperialism and the White Man's Burden.

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  The Ruins of Urban Modernity

  Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day

  • Utku Mogultay(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  The frontier settler thus followed in the footsteps of the self-sufficient yeoman farmer, in that both were seen as morally superior to the urbanite. Undergoing a process of decivilization, the frontier settler would be “denuded of the disabling sophistications of urban culture” (Mendieta 2009: 210). Advancing into the wilderness, he would adapt to a brute environment in which lawlessness reigns, but eventually reemerge as a new man, as “an American individualist—tough, independent, resourceful, manly” (Lears 2009: 40). More than just demarcating a geographical territory, the frontier then figures as a myth ical realm, a “liminal space of both death and birth, a kenotic space in which the old self is emptied and eviscerated so that a new self can be born” (Mendieta 2009: 214). Yet, given that the 1890 United States Census had declared the end of the concept of the frontier, Turner also had to face the prospect that the future might belong to urban America. 2 In this sense, his frontier thesis must be seen as an attempt “to make sure that the American past at least was understood to be an anti-urban romance” (Conn 2014: 20). Notwithstanding that Turner’s paper has been sharply criticized for overstating the significance of frontier life and disregarding the role of cities in the development of American democracy, it remains “without question one of the most formative and influential pieces of scholarship” (Mendieta 2009: 212) in US history. 3 Moreover, the frontier thesis obviously struck a popular chord with many audiences, coinciding with the increasing “transformation of frontier history into mass-marketed entertainment and popular mythology” (Lears 2009: 40). Accordingly, frontier mythology was consolidated and perpetuated over decades in countless novels, paintings, stage performances, and movies

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  The Medieval Frontiers of Latin Christendom

  Expansion, Contraction, Continuity

  • Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, James Muldoon(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2 The American Frontier — Frontier of What?

  Carlton J.H. Hayes *

  I

  IT IS now over half a century since Frederick Jackson Turner assisted in Chicago at the international celebration of the discovery of America by reading his famous paper on "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," "Almost without critical test," as Professor Paxson has remarked, the frontier hypothesis in that paper met with prompt and well-nigh unanimous acceptance by historians of the United States.1 And during succeeding years, we all know, it has inspired and been exploited in a multitude of tomes and monographs. Nowadays none of our university departments of history is complete without a frontier specialist, and no one, even a New Yorker, would essay a history of the United States, whether for the profession, the general reader, or the schools, without paying homage to the Turner hypothesis.

  Our historical guild should have no illusion or pessimism about its ability, in the long run, to lodge in popular consciousness practically any interpretation or reconstruction of the past upon which it may concentrate. It can certainly perceive and rejoice that its concentration for a half century on the significance of the frontier in American history has been productive not only of caviar for seminars but of common fare for journalists and radio commentators. The hypothesis has become axiomatic that our democracy and social progress and national mores have been chiefly, if unconsciously, the creation of frontiersmen, as these, in an epic sweep westward across the continent, successively wrested new free lands from the wilderness and the Indians and there, "as nowhere else in recorded history, set up institutions relatively free from coercion by either law or habit."

  I have neither the intention nor the competence to criticize this hypothesis. I can only bow, with respect and envy, to the numerous scholars in American history who, with extraordinary industry and enthusiasm, and in great detail, have applied and tested it during the last half century. I wonder, however, if the time has not come when our historians might profitably broaden their conception of the frontier and extend their researches and writing into a wider field. For granting that the frontier has been a major factor in the historical conditioning and development of what is distinctive in the United States, a large and now, I believe, most pertinent question remains about the American frontier. It is a frontier of what?

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  Cultural Frames, Framing Culture

  White Men and Myth in the Post-Sixties American Historical Romance

  • James J. Donahue(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • University of Virginia Press

    (Publisher)

  The first is characterized by Frederick Jackson Turner’s comments addressed to an audience of historians in 1893, where he claims: “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.” 63 For Turner, the frontier is a thing of the past, a dead space whose closing marks the passing of an era in the history of the nation. With no more “West” to explore and conquer, America had no more frontier space. However, despite the official closing of the frontier by the Census Bureau in 1890—in which it was decided that “there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. . . . [I]ts westward movement. . . can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports”—the more positive inheritance of the frontier mythology remains prominent in the definition of American values. 64 On the other hand, in his acceptance of the Democratic Party’s nomination for the presidency of the United States, Senator John F. Kennedy employed the familiar notions of the frontier as that space upon which the common good, the overcoming of hardships, and the exploration of horizons define America’s mission, a modern reclamation of John Winthrop’s vision of America as “a city upon a hill”: “For I stand tonight facing west on what was once the last frontier. From the lands that stretch three thousand miles behind me, the pioneers of old gave up their safety, their comfort and sometimes their lives to build a new world here in the West. They were not the captives of their own doubts, the prisoners of their own price tags. Their motto was not ‘every man for himself’—but ‘all for the common cause.’ They were determined to make that new world strong and free, to overcome its hazards and its hardships, to conquer the enemies that threatened from without and within

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  Regional Conflict and National Policy

  • Kent A. Price(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • RFF Press

    (Publisher)

  1 Turner's Frontier Thesis, first essayed in 1893, has shaped the research interests and strategies of several generations of American historians. While some monograph writers have concentrated on the distinctive features of different frontiers—the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, the Pacific Northwest, and so on—the political historians have focused on the series of compromises involved in perpetuating a federal system comprising divergent and often centrifugal regional interest groups.

  States, Regions, Controversy

  The westward movement was critically important to the federal structure because the organization of territories into states constantly threatened to upset the balance of power within that structure. From the Missouri Compromise of 1820 through the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, and the final cataclysm following southern secession in 1861, the central political issue was regional domination of the federal government. And this question incessantly was thrust into the center of American political life by the westward movement of the frontier. "Even the slavery struggle," Turner argued, ". . . occupies its important place in American history because of its relation to westward expansion."2

  Even on issues that did not appear to be—and indeed were not—explicitly regional in substance, well-defined regional positions usually developed that reflected the interests of the dominant groups of each region. The essential reason then, as now, is that these positions were based on calculations of regional and local incidence of costs and benefits. If, for simplicity, we consider the three major, well-defined antebellum regions—a manufacturing North, an agricultural West, and a cotton-producing South—we could show that, on the four great economic issues of the tariff, internal improvements, alienation of public lands, and banking and credit policy, calculations of anticipated regional incidence dominated the pattern of congressional voting behavior. Indeed, it would be surprising only if this were not so. It is useful to recall, for example, that the southern states raised the doctrine of nullification (the view that states could reject and fail to enforce federal legislation of which they disapproved) long before the Civil War, and in a context quite independent of the issue of slavery. When it was raised—or, more accurately, revived—it was in the context of implacable southern opposition to the high tariff levels established by Congress in 1824 and 1828. The South raised the doctrine of nullification because it accurately perceived high tariffs as a serious threat to its economic interests. High tariffs arguably might benefit a North anxious to encourage a nascent industrialism. To a South increasingly linked to European markets for its staple cotton exports and as a source of low-priced industrial imports, high tariffs were an "abomination," as southern spokesmen characterized them at the time.

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  Connecting Past and Present

  Concepts and Models for Service-Learning in History

  • Ira Harkavy, Bill M. Donovan, Ira Harkavy, Bill M. Donovan(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  If, then, their work in West Philadelphia allowed them no more than a brush with realities beyond those of their own past and prospective affluence, the worth of that work would be sufficient. If their teaching assignments at Turner afforded them no more than an inkling, for a few hours of a few weeks of their youthful lives, of how the other half lives, the importance of those assignments would still be palpable. But the hours at 59th and Baltimore did even more than open out to those students an ampler understanding of their country. Those scant sessions inspired in them thoughts that were actually their own rather than those of their milieu. And it is not beyond the pale of possibility that those thoughts may model for them a more independent way of meeting the world that could be considered educative rather than conventionally inculcative. We say that we seek such things for our students.

  We say, too, that we seek to stir hope for the future in our youth, whose favorite movies and music are so often bleak and holocaustic. We say that we seek to instill compassion in those young people, whose ways are so often self-centered and mean. In the final papers that my students submitted, I sometimes saw a tempered optimism that promised to outlast the Panglossian patina I’d encountered in the papers of previous years. I sometimes saw a tenderness that made me melt.

  Postscript

  Frontier people in America were always a restless, westering lot. I and my History 443 course have also moved on since the “Turnerian Frontier” experiment described above, though we have not moved far or west. Where our pioneering predecessors vaulted across vast river valleys and mountain ranges, we merely went a couple of miles east. Where they ventured into the unknown, we came closer to home. Where they conquered a continent, my students and I conquered nothing, except perhaps a bit—a very small bit—of our ignorance and fear.

  After my extraordinary experience at the Turner Middle School, I moved my course to the University City High School with immense trepidation. Still, the incentives to move were obvious. Turner was 20 blocks away by trolley. My students spent 15 minutes getting there even if they lived right by the trolley stop and the trolley came right away. Half an hour or more if they didn’t and it didn’t. And then the same coming back. But they could walk the three blocks to University City in five minutes.

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  The Frontier in American History

  • Frederick Jackson Turner(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Open Road Media

    (Publisher)

  * On the tide of the Father of Waters, 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.” 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 anti-social. 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,* 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, 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.*

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