Frontier Thesis

The Frontier Thesis, also referred to as the Turner Thesis, is the argument advanced by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893 that the origin of the distinctive egalitarian, democratic, aggressive, and innovative features of the American character has been the American frontier experience. He stressed the process—the moving frontier line—and the impact it had on pioneers going through the process. In the thesis, the frontier established liberty by releasing Americans from European mind-sets and ending prior customs of the 19th century. Turner first announced his thesis in a paper entitled "The Significance of the Frontier in American History", delivered to the American Historical Association in 1893 in Chicago.

Other historians had begun to explore the meaning of the frontier, such as Theodore Roosevelt, who had a different theory. Roosevelt argued that the battles between the trans-Appalachian pioneers and the Indians in the "Winning of the West" had forged a new people, the American race.

Evolution

Turner set up an evolutionary model (he had studied evolution with a leading geologist, Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin), using the time dimension of American history, and the geographical space of the land that became the United States. The first settlers who arrived on the east coast in the 17th century acted and thought like Europeans. They encountered environmental challenges that were different from those they had known in Europe. Most important was the presence of uncultivated arable land. They adapted to the new environment in certain ways — the cumulative effect of these adaptations was Americanization. According to Turner, the forging of the unique and rugged American identity had to occur precisely at the juncture between the civilization of settlement and the savagery of wilderness. The dynamic of these oppositional conditions engendered a process by which citizens were made, citizens with the power to tame the wild and upon whom the wild had conferred strength and individuality...

Successive generations moved further inland, shifting the lines of settlement and wilderness, but preserving the essential tension between the two. European characteristics fell by the wayside and the old country's institutions (e.g. established churches, established aristocracies, intrusive government, and class-based land distribution) were increasingly out of place. Every generation moved further west and became more American, more democratic, and as intolerant of hierarchy as they were removed from it. They became more violent, more individualistic, more distrustful of authority, less artistic, less scientific, and more dependent on ad-hoc organizations they formed themselves. In broad terms, the further west, the more American the community.

Closed Frontier

Turner saw the land frontier was ending, since the U.S. Census of 1890 had officially stated that the American frontier had broken up. He sounded an alarming note, speculating as to what this meant for the continued dynamism of American society as the source of America's innovation and democratic ideals was disappearing.

Impact

Turner's thesis quickly became popular among intellectuals. It explained why the American people and American government were so different from their European counterparts.

Many believed that the end of the frontier represented the beginning of a new stage in American life and that the United States must expand overseas. For this reason, some critics on the left saw the Frontier Thesis as the impetus for a new wave in the history of United States imperialism. However, Turner's work, in contrast to Roosevelt's work The Winning of the West, places greater emphasis on the development of American republicanism than on territorial conquest or the subjugation of the Native Americans. Radical historians of the 1970s who wanted to focus scholarship on minorities, especially Native Americans and Hispanics, disparaged the frontier thesis because it did not attempt to explain the evolution of those groups. Indeed their approach was to reject the frontier as an important process and limit the story to what happened inside the western areas of the U.S.

New frontiers

Subsequent critics, historians, and politicians have suggested that other 'frontiers,' such as scientific innovation, could serve similar functions in American development. Historians have noted that John F. Kennedy in the early 1960s explicitly called upon the ideas of the frontier. He promoted his political platform as the "New Frontier," with a particular emphasis on space exploration and technology. White points out that Kennedy assumed that "the campaigns of the Old Frontier had been successful, and morally justified." The "frontier" metaphor thus maintained its rhetorical ties to American social progress. The frontier thesis is one of the most influential documents on the American west today.

Kolb and Hoddeson argues that during the heyday of Kennedy's "New Frontier," the physicists who built the Fermi Labs explicitly sought to recapture the excitement of the old frontier. Rejecting the east and west coast life styles which most scientists preferred, they selected a Chicago suburb. They rejected the militaristic design of Los Alamos and Brookhaven as well as the academic architecture of the Lawrence-Berkeley Laboratory and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Instead Fermilab's planners sought to return to Turnerian themes. The emphasized the values of individualism, empiricism, simplicity, equality, courage, discovery, independence, and naturalism in the service of democratic access, human rights, ecological balance, and the resolution of social, economic, and political issues. Milton Stanley Livingston, the lab's associate director said in 1968, "The frontier of high energy and the infinitesimally small is a challenge to the mind of man. If we can reach and cross this frontier, our generations will have furnished a significant milestone in human history."

See also

• American Old West
• Frontier
• Manifest destiny
• Rural history
• Frederick Jackson Turner

Further reading: Scholarly studies

• The Frontier In American History the original 1893 essay by Turner
• Ray Allen Billington. The American Frontier (1958) 35 page essay on the historiography
• Billington, Ray Allen. Frederick Jackson Turner: historian, scholar, teacher. (1973), highly detailed scholarly biography.
• Billington, Ray Allen, ed,. The Frontier Thesis: Valid Interpretation of American History? (1966); the major attacks and defenses of Turner.
• Billington, Ray Allen. America's Frontier Heritage (1984), an analysis of Turner's theories in relation to social sciences and historiography
• Billington, Ray Allen. Land of Savagery / Land of Promise: The European Image of the American Frontier in the Nineteenth Century (1981)
• Bogue, Allan G. . Frederick Jackson Turner: Strange Roads Going Down. (1988), highly detailed scholarly biography.
• Brown, David S. Beyond the Frontier: Midwestern Historians in the American Century. (2009).
• Coleman, William, "Science and Symbol in the Turner Frontier Hypothesis," American Historical Review (1966) 72#1 pp. 22-49 in JSTOR
• Etulain, Richard W. Does the Frontier Experience Make America Exceptional? (1999)
• Etulain, Richard W. Writing Western History: Essays on Major Western Historians (2002)
• Etulain, Richard W. and Gerald D. Nash, eds. Researching Western History: Topics in the Twentieth Century (1997)] online
• Faragher, John Mack ed. Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: "The Significance of the Frontier in American History". (1999)
• Hine, Robert V. and John Mack Faragher. The American West: A New Interpretive History (2000), deals with events, not historiography; concise edition is Frontiers: A Short History of the American West (2008)
• Hofstadter, Richard. The Progressive Historians—Turner, Beard, Parrington. (1979). interpretation of the historiography
• Jensen, Richard. "On Modernizing Frederick Jackson Turner," Western Historical Quarterly 11 (1980), 307-20. in JSTOR
• Lamar, Howard R. ed. The New Encyclopedia of the American West (1998), 1000+ pages of articles by scholars
• Milner, Clyde A., ed. Major Problems in the History of the American West 2nd ed (1997), primary sources and essays by scholars
• Milner, Clyde A. et al. Trails: Toward a New Western History (1991)
• Nichols, Roger L. ed. American Frontier and Western Issues: An Historiographical Review (1986) essays by 14 scholars
• Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (1973), complex literary reinterpretation of the frontier myth from its origins in Europe to Daniel Boone
• Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950)