why is the frontier thesis problematic

• Recent changes
• Random page
• View source
• What links here
• Related changes
• Special pages
• Printable version
• Permanent link
• Page information
• Create account

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.

While appealing, the Turner thesis stultified scholarship on the West. In 1984, colonial historian James Henretta even stated, “[f]or, in our role as scholars, we must recognize that the subject of westward expansion in itself longer engages the attention of many perhaps most, historians of the United States.” ( Legacy of Conquest , Patricia Limerick, p. 21.) Turner’s thesis had effectively shaped popular opinion and historical scholarship of the American West, but the thesis slowed continued academic interest in the field.

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

Peggy Pascoe’s Relations of Rescue described the creation and operation of Rescue Homes in Salt Lake City, the Sioux Reservation, Denver and San Francisco by missionary women for abused, neglected and exploited women. By focusing on the missionaries and the tenants of these homes, Pascoe depicted not just relations between women, but provided examples of how missionaries responded to issues which they believed were unique in the West. Issues that not only challenged the Victorian moral authority but threatened America’s moral standing. Unlike Turner, the missionary women did not believe that the West was an engine for democracy; instead, they envisioned a place where immoral practice such as polygamy, prostitution, premarital pregnancy, and religious superstition thrived and threatened women’s moral authority. Instead of attempting to portray a prototypical frontier or missionary woman, Pascoe reveals complicated women who defy easy categorization. Instead of re-enforcing stereotypes that women civilized (a dubious term at best) the American West, she instead focused on three aspects of the search for female moral authority: “its benefits and liabilities for women’s empowerment; its relationship to systems of social control; and its implication for intercultural relations among women.” (Pascoe, p. xvii.) Pascoe used a study of intercultural relations between women to better understand each of the sub-cultures (missionaries, unmarried mothers, Chinese prostitutes, Mormon women, and Sioux women) and their relations with governmental authorities and men.

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.

Whether or not Rhonda’s work is an example of the New Western History is debatable, but he sought to eliminate racial stereotypes of Native Americans and describe the first governmental attempt to conquer the western landscape by traversing it. Rhonda described the interactions between the expedition and the various Indians who encountered it. While Rhonda’s book may resemble a classic Lewis and Clark history, it provides a much more nuanced examination of the limitations and effectiveness of the diplomatic aspects of the Lewis and Clark expedition. He took a great of time to describe each of the interactions with the Indian tribes in detail. Rhonda recognized that the interactions between the expedition and the various tribes were nuanced and complex. Rhonda’s work clarified that Native Americans had differing views of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Any stereotypes the reader may have regarding the Native Americans with would have shattered. Additionally, Rhonda described how the expedition persevered despite its clumsy attempts at diplomacy.

Instead of describing the initial interactions of the United States government with the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos, White explained how the self-sufficient economies of these people were destroyed. White described how the United States government turned these successful native people into wards of the American state. His story explained how the United States conquered these tribes without firing a shot. The consequence of this conquest was the creation of weak, dependent nations that could not survive without handouts from the federal government. Like Rhonda, White also sought to shatter long-standing stereotypes and myths regarding Native Americans. White verified that each of these tribes had self-sufficient economies which permitted prosperous lifestyles for their people before the devastating interactions with the United States government occurred. The United States in each case fundamentally altered the tribes’ economies and environments. These alterations threatened the survival of the tribes. In some cases, the United States sought to trade with these tribes in an effort put the tribes in debt. After the tribes were in debt, the United States then forced the tribes to sell their land. In other situations, the government damaged the tribes’ economies even when they sought to help them.

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

The American West was both a borderland and a destination for a multitude of immigrants. Native Americans, Spaniards, Mexicans, Anglos, and Asians have all immigrated into the American West. The American West has seen waves of immigration. These immigrants have constantly changed the complexion of its people. Starting with the Native Americans who first moved into the region and the most recent tide of undocumented Mexican immigrants, the West has always been a place where immigrants seeking their fortunes. The California gold rush brought in a number of immigrants who did not fit their American ideal. When non-whites started immigrating to California, the United States was faced with a new problem, the introduction of people who could not become citizens. Chinese immigrants troubled the Anglo majority because they could not be easily assimilated into American society. Additionally, many Americans were perplexed by their substantially different appearances, clothing, religions, and cultures. Anglos became concerned that the new immigrants differed too much from them. In 1924, after 150 years of unregulated immigration, the United States Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act, the most restrictionist immigration law in US history. The Johnson-Reed Act was specifically designed to keep the most undesirable races out of America, but immigrants continued to arrive in America without documents. Ming Ngai’s Impossible Subjects addresses this new class of immigrants: illegal immigrants. Illegal immigrants began to flow into the United States soon after the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act.

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.

Impossible Subjects is not a book on the American West, but it is a book that is very much about the American West. While Ngai’s story primarily takes place in the American West she does not appear to have any interest in defining the West because her story has national implications. The American West is relevant to her study only because it was where most of the illegal immigrants described in her story lived and worked. Additionally, it is not a story of conquest and its consequences, but it introduced the American public and scholars to members of the American society that are silent. Limerick even stated that while “Indians, Hispanics, Asians, blacks, Anglos, businesspeople, workers, politicians, bureaucrats, natives and newcomers” all shared the same region, they still needed to be introduced to one another. In addition to being a sophisticated policy debate on immigration law, Ngai’s work introduced Americans to these people. (Limerick, p. 349.)

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.

In Nature’s Metropolis , Cronon, used the central place theory to analyze the economic and ecological development of Chicago. Johann Heinrich von Thunen developed the central place theory to explain the development of cities. Essentially, geographically different economic zones form in concentric circles the farther you went from the city. These different zones form because of the time it takes to get the different types of goods to market. Closest to the city and then moving away you would have the following zones: first, intensive agriculture, second, extensive agriculture, third, livestock raising, fourth, trading, hunting and Indian trade and finally, you would have the wilderness. While the landscape of the Mid-West was more complicated than this, Cronon posits that the “city and country are inextricably connected and that market relations profoundly mediate between them.” (Cronon, p. 52.) By emphasizing the connection between the city of Chicago and the rural lands that surrounded it, Cronon was able to explain how the land, including the West, developed. Cronon argued that the development of Chicago had a profound influence on the development and appearance of the Great West. Essentially Cronon used the creation of the Chicago commodities and trading markets to explain how different parts of the Mid-West and West produced different types of resources and fundamentally altered their ecology.

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.

Both Cronon and Worster described how commercial interests shaped the landscape and ecology of the American West, but their approaches were very different. Still, each work fits comfortably into the new western history. Both Cronon and Worster see the West as a place and not as a movement of westward expansion. Cronon re-orders the typical understanding of the sequence of westward expansion. Instead of describing the steady growth of rural communities which transformed into cities, he argued that cities and rural areas formed at the same time. Often the cities developed first and that only after markets were created could land be converted profitable into farms. This development fits westward development much more closely than paradigms that emphasized the creation of family farms. Worster defines the West by its aridity. While these definitions differ from Limerick’s, they reflect new approaches. Conquest plays a critical role in each of these books. Instead of conquering people, the authors describe efforts to conquer western lands. In Cronon, westerners forever altered the landscape of the west. Agricultural activities dominated the zones closest to Chicago, cattle production took over lands previously occupied by the buffalo, and even the wilderness was changed by people to satisfy the markets in Chicago. The extensive damming of the West’s rivers described by Worster required the United States government to conquer, control and discipline nature. While this conquest was somewhat illusory, the United States government was committed to reshaping the West and ecology to fit its vision.

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

• Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History
• Patricia Limerick, Legacy of Conquest
• Peggy Pascoe, Relations of Rescue
• Richard White, The Roots of Dependency
• Nature's Metropolis, William Cronon
• Rivers of Empire, Donald Worster
• Historiography
• Book Review
• This page was last edited on 5 October 2021, at 01:36.
• Privacy policy
• About DailyHistory.org
• Disclaimers
• Mobile view

Was Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis Myth or Reality?

Two scholars debate this question.

Written by: (Claim A) Andrew Fisher, William & Mary; (Claim B) Bradley J. Birzer, Hillsdale College

Suggested sequencing.

• Use this Point-Counterpoint with the  Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” 1893  Primary Source to give students more background on individualism and western expansion.

Issue on the Table

Was Turner’s thesis a myth about the individualism of the American character and the influence of the West or was it essentially correct in explaining how the West and the advancing frontier contributed to the shaping of individualism in the American character?

Instructions

Read the two arguments in response to the question, paying close attention to the supporting evidence and reasoning used for each. Then, complete the comparison questions that follow. Note that the arguments in this essay are not the personal views of the scholars but are illustrative of larger historical debates.

Every nation has a creation myth, a simple yet satisfying story that inspires pride in its people. The United States is no exception, but our creation myth is all about exceptionalism. In his famous essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Frederick Jackson Turner claimed that the process of westward expansion had transformed our European ancestors into a new breed of people endowed with distinctively American values and virtues. In particular, the frontier experience had supposedly fostered democracy and individualism, underpinned by the abundance of “free land” out West. “So long as free land exists,” Turner wrote, “the opportunity for a competency exists, and economic power secures political power.” It was a compelling articulation of the old Jeffersonian Dream. Like Jefferson’s vision, however, Turner’s thesis excluded much of the nation’s population and ignored certain historical realities concerning American society.

Very much a man of his times, Turner filtered his interpretation of history through the lens of racial nationalism. The people who counted in his thesis, literally and figuratively, were those with European ancestry—and especially those of Anglo-Saxon origins. His definition of the frontier, following that of the U.S. Census, was wherever population density fell below two people per square mile. That effectively meant “where white people were scarce,” in the words of historian Richard White; or, as Patricia Limerick puts it, “where white people got scared because they were scarce.” American Indians only mattered to Turner as symbols of the “savagery” that white pioneers had to beat back along the advancing frontier line. Most of the “free land” they acquired in the process came from the continent’s vast indigenous estate, which, by 1890, had been reduced to scattered reservations rapidly being eroded by the Dawes Act. Likewise, Mexican Americans in the Southwest saw their land base and economic status whittled away after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that nominally made them citizens of the United States. Chinese immigrants, defined as perpetual aliens under federal law, could not obtain free land through the Homestead Act. For all these groups, Euro-American expansion and opportunity meant the contraction or denial of their own ability to achieve individual advancement and communal stability.

Turner also exaggerated the degree of social mobility open to white contemporaries, not to mention their level of commitment to an ideology of rugged individualism. Although plenty of Euro-Americans used the homestead laws to get their piece of free land, they often struggled to make that land pay and to keep it in the family. During the late nineteenth century, the commoditization and industrialization of American agriculture caught southern and western farmers in a crushing cost-price squeeze that left many wrecked by debt. To combat this situation, they turned to cooperative associations such as the Grange and the National Farmers’ Alliance, which blossomed into the Populist Party at the very moment Turner was writing about the frontier as the engine of American democracy. Perhaps it was, but not in the sense he understood. Populists railed against the excess of individualism that bred corruption and inequality in Gilded Age America. Even cowboys, a pillar of the frontier myth, occasionally tried to organize unions to improve their wages and working conditions. Those seeking a small stake of their own—what Turner called a “competency”— in the form of their own land or herds sometimes ran afoul of concentrated capital, as during the Johnson County War of 1892. The big cattlemen of the Wyoming Stockgrowers Association had no intention of sharing the range with pesky sodbusters and former cowboys they accused of rustling. Their brand of individualism had no place for small producers who might become competitors.

Turner took such troubles as a sign that his prediction had come true. With the closing of the frontier, he said, the United States would begin to see greater class conflict in the form of strikes and radical politics. There was lots of free land left in 1890, though; in fact, approximately 1 million people filed homestead claims between 1901 and 1913, compared with 1.4 million between 1862 and 1900. That did not prevent the country from experiencing serious clashes between organized labor and the corporations that had come to dominate many industries. Out west, socialistic unions such as the Western Federation of Miners and the Industrial Workers of the World challenged not only the control that companies had over their employees but also their influence in the press and politics. For them, Turner’s dictum that “economic power secures political power” would have held a more sinister meaning. It was the rise of the modern corporation, not the supposed fading of the frontier, that narrowed the meanings of individualism and opportunity as Americans had previously understood them.

Young historian Frederick Jackson Turner presented his academic paper, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago on July 12, 1893. He was the final presenter of that hot and humid day, but his essay ranks among the most influential arguments ever made regarding American history.

Turner was trained at the University of Wisconsin (his home state) and Johns Hopkins University, then the center of Germanic-type graduate studies—that is, it was scientific and objectivist rather than idealist or liberal. Turner rebelled against that purely scientific approach, but not by much. In 1890, the U.S. Census revealed that the frontier (defined as fewer than two people per square mile) was closed. There was no longer an unbroken frontier line in the United States, although frontier conditions lasted in certain parts of the American West until 1920. Turner lamented this, believing the most important phase of American history was over.

No one publicly commented on the essay at the time, but the American Historical Association reprinted it in its annual report the following year, and within a decade, it became known as the “Turner Thesis.”

What is most prominent in the Turner Thesis is the proposition that the United States is unique in its heritage; it is not a European clone, but a vital mixture of European and American Indian. Or, as he put it, the American character emerged through an intermixing of “savagery and civilization.” Turner attributed the American character to the expansion to the West, where, he said, American settlers set up farms to tame the frontier. “The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.” As people moved west in a “perennial rebirth,” they extended the American frontier, the boundary “between savagery and civilization.”

The frontier shaped the American character because the settlers who went there had to conquer a land difficult for farming and devoid of any of the comforts of life in urban parts of the East: “The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick; he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails.”

Politically and socially, according to Turner, the American character—including traits that prioritized equality, individualism, and democracy—was shaped by moving west and settling the frontier. “The tendency,” Turner wrote, “is anti-social. [The frontier] produces antipathy to control, and particularly to any direct control.” Those hardy pioneers on the frontier spread the ideas and practice of democracy as well as modern civilization. By conquering the wilderness, Turner stressed, they learned that resources and opportunity were seemingly boundless, meant to bring the ruggedness out of each individual. The farther west the process took them, the less European the Americans as a whole became. Turner saw the frontier as the  progenitor  of the American practical and innovative character: “That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and acquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking 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 trains of the frontier.”

Turner’s thesis, to be sure, viewed American Indians as uncivilized. In his vision, they cannot compete with European technology, and they fall by the wayside, serving as little more than a catalyst for the expansion of white Americans. This near-absence of Indians from Turner’s argument gave rise to a number of critiques of his thesis, most prominently from the New Western Historians beginning in the 1980s. These more recent historians sought to correct Turner’s “triumphal” myth of the American West by examining it as a region rather than as a process. For Turner, the American West is a progressive process, not a static place. There were many Wests, as the process of conquering the land, changing the European into the American, happened over and over again. What would happen to the American character, Turner wondered, now that its ability to expand and conquer was over?

Historical Reasoning Questions

Use  Handout A: Point-Counterpoint Graphic Organizer  to answer historical reasoning questions about this point-counterpoint.

Primary Sources (Claim A)

Cooper, James Fenimore.  Last of the Mohicans (A Leatherstocking Tale) . New York: Penguin, 1986.

Turner, Frederick Jackson. “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.”  http://sunnycv.com/steve/text/civ/turner.html

Primary Sources (Claim B)

Suggested resources (claim a).

Cronon, William, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin, eds.  Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past . New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992.

Faragher, John Mack.  Women and Men on the Overland Trail . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001.

Grossman, Richard R, ed.  The Frontier in American Culture: Essays by Richard White and Patricia Nelson Limerick . Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994.

Limerick, Patricia Nelson.  The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West . New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1987.

Limerick, Patricia Nelson, Clyde A. Milner II, and Charles E. Rankin, eds.  Trails: Toward a New Western History . Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1991.

Milner II, Clyde A.  A New Significance: Re-envisioning the History of the American West . New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Nugent, Walter.  Into the West: The Story of Its People . New York: Knopf, 1991.

Slotkin, Richard.  The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 . Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998.

Suggested Resources (Claim B)

Billington, Ray Allen, and Martin Ridge.  Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier . Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001.

Etulain, Richard, ed.  Does the Frontier Experience Make America Exceptional?  New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999.

Mondi. Megan. “’Connected and Unified?’: A More Critical Look at Frederick Jackson Turner’s America.”  Constructing the Past , 7 no. 1:Article 7.  http://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/constructing/vol7/iss1/7

Nelson, Robert. “Public Lands and the Frontier Thesis.”  Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States , Digital Scholarship Lab, University of Richmond, 2014.  http://dsl.richmond.edu/fartherafield/public-lands-and-the-frontier-thesis/

More from this Category

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

In our resource history is presented through a series of narratives, primary sources, and point-counterpoint debates that invites students to participate in the ongoing conversation about the American experiment.

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.

Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $19.99

This article is a selection from the January/February 2023 issue of Smithsonian magazine

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.

Get the latest History stories in your inbox?

Click to visit our Privacy Statement .

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.

• The Inventory

Support Quartz

Fund next-gen business journalism with $10 a month

Free Newsletters

Frontier theory: Boundary issues

Giddy up for a grand theory of u.s everything..

One weird trick for understanding U.S. history

All the way back in 1893, at a conference in Chicago, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner introduced what’s become one of the single most influential theories of U.S. history.

Related Content

Reading from a paper he’d only just finished that morning — as rumor has it — Turner argued that American history had always taken shape around an expanding “western wilderness.” Our fledgling east-coast democracy never governed this frontier, he said. Instead, the frontier governed us, molding key institutions and our overall culture in its image. Think of a man-bites-dog joke, only with Stetsons and stallions. Turner called this his “Frontier Thesis.” Nowadays, it’s also called “frontierism” and “frontier theory.”

There’s no single explanation of history, of course. Turner himself disavowed monocausal thinking, while critics have decried his Eurocentric bias. Still, Turner’s thesis remains a compelling narrative of our nation’s past and a useful framework for understanding the present day. Once you begin to conceive of U.S. history in terms of an ever-shifting frontier — be it physical, sociological, or technological — then you’ve got a framework for understanding some very complex realities.

So, get along little doggies. We’re gonna hit the dusty trail, applying Turner’s thesis to all 250 years of American history, below.

By the digits  

60%: Number of U.S college history departments teaching frontier theory by the time of Frederick Jackson Turner’s death in 1932

160: Acres of land awarded to individual homesteaders under the Homestead Act of 1862

300,000: Approximate number of people who journeyed to California to take part in the Gold Rush of 1849

$15 million: Amount the U.S. spent on the Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the size of the country

270 million: Total acres of land distributed to homesteaders as a whole under the Homestead Act

Origin story

It’s a little wild and a little strange

The U.S. has always had a problem with boundaries. From the arrival of European settlers in the 17th century to the 19th-century concept of Manifest Destiny, the push westward represented an opportunity for exploration and fortune-seeking. But this colonization came at a grave cost to indigenous peoples, erasing native territories and cultures. The Indian Removal Act of 1830, for instance, forcibly relocated thousands of Native Americans from their ancestral lands to make way for white settlement.

As the physical frontier of the American West began to close in the late 19th century with the completion of the transcontinental railroad, new frontiers emerged. The turn of the 20th century saw the rise of industrialization and urbanization, with cities — ironically or not —representing both civilization and frontiers because they offered new opportunities and possibilities for individuals and society.

Later, the exploration of space became a new frontier of American endeavor, culminating in the Apollo 11 Moon landing in 1969. The advent of the internet in the 1990s introduced yet another frontier, revolutionizing communication and commerce. This digital frontier continues to emerge with the rise of artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and altered reality, where deep fakes and disinformation allow for what the Stanford-based researcher Renée DiResta calls an “Information World War.”

Today, Americans stand at the threshold of fresh frontiers, navigating the complexities of climate change and the potential of biotechnology. Like ye olde pioneers, or Captain Kirk more recently, we must confront these uncharted spaces with courage, curiosity, and a pinch of skepticism about what exactly constitutes progress.

“The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.” —   Frederick Jackson Turner, “ The Significance of the Frontier in American History ”

What frontier emerged after the closing of the Western frontier in the late 19th century?

A. The Space Frontier

B. The Internet Frontier

C. The Frontier of Artificial Intelligence

D. All of the above

Journey onward through the rest of this email to find the answer.

Brief history

  15,000 years ago: Some of the earliest inhabitants of North America form communities, cultivate plants, and hunt animals.

1607: Some 100 men arrive at Jamestown, Virginia, founding the first permanent European settlement in America.

1830: The Indian Removal Act authorizes the forced relocation of Native American tribes from their ancestral lands in the southeastern U.S. to territories west of the Mississippi River, leading to the Trail of Tears.

1890: The U.S. Census Bureau officially declares the frontier closed.

1893: Frederick Jackson Turner delivers a paper on his “Frontier Thesis” at a history conference.

2020: Greg Grandin wins a Pulitzer for his book, The End of the Myth , which uses frontier theory to explain the struggle for civil rights and present-day political turmoil.

The “ golden spike ,” symbolizing the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad, was driven by Leland Stanford, the president of the Central Pacific Railroad, on May 10, 1869, at Promontory Summit, Utah. This event marked the culmination of a monumental engineering feat that connected the eastern and western halves of the U.S. by rail for the first time.

Watch this!

Turner’s thesis as a... pickup line?

This funny TikTok suggests a knowledge of frontier theory could help your dating life.

Take me down this 🐰 hole!

In this article , writers Nathan Sanders and Bruce Schneier explore how frontier theory offers a lens through which we can envision the vast potential of AI as a new frontier of human exploration — and, at the same time, how this framing also prompts us to confront its ethical implications, exploitative tendencies, downsides, and drawbacks.

Which frontier theory would you like to study?

• AI love: Exploring digital dating with our bot-based soulmates.
• Mars or bust: Riding shotgun in Elon Musk’s Tesla to the red planet.
• Eternal youth: Entering the realm of ageless beauty via juice and surgery.
• TikTok stardom: Conquering the entertainment frontier one viral dance move at a time.

Give us your thoughts !

💬 Let’s talk!

In last week’s obsession poll on pollen , 37% of you said you have Benadryl on speed dial this allergy season; 35% of you don’t have allergies; and 28% of you only get an itch or two.

🐤 X/Tweet this!

🤔 What did you think of today’s email?

💡 What should we obsess over next?

Today’s email was written by Catherine Baab-Muguira (died of dysentery on the Oregon Trail) and edited and produced by Morgan Haefner (is looking for the next frontier in kickball skills).

The correct answer to the pop quiz is D., All of the above .

📬 Sign up for Quartz Weekly Obsession

Want to escape the news cycle? Try our Weekly Obsession.

• Search Menu
• Browse content in Arts and Humanities
• Browse content in Archaeology
• Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Archaeology
• Archaeological Methodology and Techniques
• Archaeology by Region
• Archaeology of Religion
• Archaeology of Trade and Exchange
• Biblical Archaeology
• Contemporary and Public Archaeology
• Environmental Archaeology
• Historical Archaeology
• History and Theory of Archaeology
• Industrial Archaeology
• Landscape Archaeology
• Mortuary Archaeology
• Prehistoric Archaeology
• Underwater Archaeology
• Urban Archaeology
• Zooarchaeology
• Browse content in Architecture
• Architectural Structure and Design
• History of Architecture
• Residential and Domestic Buildings
• Theory of Architecture
• Browse content in Art
• Art Subjects and Themes
• History of Art
• Industrial and Commercial Art
• Theory of Art
• Biographical Studies
• Byzantine Studies
• Browse content in Classical Studies
• Classical Literature
• Classical Reception
• Classical History
• Classical Philosophy
• Classical Mythology
• Classical Art and Architecture
• Classical Oratory and Rhetoric
• Greek and Roman Papyrology
• Greek and Roman Archaeology
• Greek and Roman Epigraphy
• Greek and Roman Law
• Late Antiquity
• Religion in the Ancient World
• Digital Humanities
• Browse content in History
• Colonialism and Imperialism
• Diplomatic History
• Environmental History
• Genealogy, Heraldry, Names, and Honours
• Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing
• Historical Geography
• History by Period
• History of Emotions
• History of Agriculture
• History of Education
• History of Gender and Sexuality
• Industrial History
• Intellectual History
• International History
• Labour History
• Legal and Constitutional History
• Local and Family History
• Maritime History
• Military History
• National Liberation and Post-Colonialism
• Oral History
• Political History
• Public History
• Regional and National History
• Revolutions and Rebellions
• Slavery and Abolition of Slavery
• Social and Cultural History
• Theory, Methods, and Historiography
• Urban History
• World History
• Browse content in Language Teaching and Learning
• Language Learning (Specific Skills)
• Language Teaching Theory and Methods
• Browse content in Linguistics
• Applied Linguistics
• Cognitive Linguistics
• Computational Linguistics
• Forensic Linguistics
• Grammar, Syntax and Morphology
• Historical and Diachronic Linguistics
• History of English
• Language Evolution
• Language Reference
• Language Variation
• Language Families
• Language Acquisition
• Lexicography
• Linguistic Anthropology
• Linguistic Theories
• Linguistic Typology
• Phonetics and Phonology
• Psycholinguistics
• Sociolinguistics
• Translation and Interpretation
• Writing Systems
• Browse content in Literature
• Bibliography
• Children's Literature Studies
• Literary Studies (Romanticism)
• Literary Studies (American)
• Literary Studies (Modernism)
• Literary Studies (Asian)
• Literary Studies (European)
• Literary Studies (Eco-criticism)
• Literary Studies - World
• Literary Studies (1500 to 1800)
• Literary Studies (19th Century)
• Literary Studies (20th Century onwards)
• Literary Studies (African American Literature)
• Literary Studies (British and Irish)
• Literary Studies (Early and Medieval)
• Literary Studies (Fiction, Novelists, and Prose Writers)
• Literary Studies (Gender Studies)
• Literary Studies (Graphic Novels)
• Literary Studies (History of the Book)
• Literary Studies (Plays and Playwrights)
• Literary Studies (Poetry and Poets)
• Literary Studies (Postcolonial Literature)
• Literary Studies (Queer Studies)
• Literary Studies (Science Fiction)
• Literary Studies (Travel Literature)
• Literary Studies (War Literature)
• Literary Studies (Women's Writing)
• Literary Theory and Cultural Studies
• Mythology and Folklore
• Shakespeare Studies and Criticism
• Browse content in Media Studies
• Browse content in Music
• Applied Music
• Dance and Music
• Ethics in Music
• Ethnomusicology
• Gender and Sexuality in Music
• Medicine and Music
• Music Cultures
• Music and Media
• Music and Culture
• Music and Religion
• Music Education and Pedagogy
• Music Theory and Analysis
• Musical Scores, Lyrics, and Libretti
• Musical Structures, Styles, and Techniques
• Musicology and Music History
• Performance Practice and Studies
• Race and Ethnicity in Music
• Sound Studies
• Browse content in Performing Arts
• Browse content in Philosophy
• Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art
• Epistemology
• Feminist Philosophy
• History of Western Philosophy
• Metaphysics
• Moral Philosophy
• Non-Western Philosophy
• Philosophy of Language
• Philosophy of Mind
• Philosophy of Perception
• Philosophy of Action
• Philosophy of Law
• Philosophy of Religion
• Philosophy of Science
• Philosophy of Mathematics and Logic
• Practical Ethics
• Social and Political Philosophy
• Browse content in Religion
• Biblical Studies
• Christianity
• East Asian Religions
• History of Religion
• Judaism and Jewish Studies
• Qumran Studies
• Religion and Education
• Religion and Health
• Religion and Politics
• Religion and Science
• Religion and Law
• Religion and Art, Literature, and Music
• Religious Studies
• Browse content in Society and Culture
• Cookery, Food, and Drink
• Cultural Studies
• Customs and Traditions
• Ethical Issues and Debates
• Hobbies, Games, Arts and Crafts
• Lifestyle, Home, and Garden
• Natural world, Country Life, and Pets
• Popular Beliefs and Controversial Knowledge
• Sports and Outdoor Recreation
• Technology and Society
• Travel and Holiday
• Visual Culture
• Browse content in Law
• Arbitration
• Browse content in Company and Commercial Law
• Commercial Law
• Company Law
• Browse content in Comparative Law
• Systems of Law
• Competition Law
• Browse content in Constitutional and Administrative Law
• Government Powers
• Judicial Review
• Local Government Law
• Military and Defence Law
• Parliamentary and Legislative Practice
• Construction Law
• Contract Law
• Browse content in Criminal Law
• Criminal Procedure
• Criminal Evidence Law
• Sentencing and Punishment
• Employment and Labour Law
• Environment and Energy Law
• Browse content in Financial Law
• Banking Law
• Insolvency Law
• History of Law
• Human Rights and Immigration
• Intellectual Property Law
• Browse content in International Law
• Private International Law and Conflict of Laws
• Public International Law
• IT and Communications Law
• Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law
• Law and Society
• Law and Politics
• Browse content in Legal System and Practice
• Courts and Procedure
• Legal Skills and Practice
• Primary Sources of Law
• Regulation of Legal Profession
• Medical and Healthcare Law
• Browse content in Policing
• Criminal Investigation and Detection
• Police and Security Services
• Police Procedure and Law
• Police Regional Planning
• Browse content in Property Law
• Personal Property Law
• Study and Revision
• Terrorism and National Security Law
• Browse content in Trusts Law
• Wills and Probate or Succession
• Browse content in Medicine and Health
• Browse content in Allied Health Professions
• Arts Therapies
• Clinical Science
• Dietetics and Nutrition
• Occupational Therapy
• Operating Department Practice
• Physiotherapy
• Radiography
• Speech and Language Therapy
• Browse content in Anaesthetics
• General Anaesthesia
• Neuroanaesthesia
• Clinical Neuroscience
• Browse content in Clinical Medicine
• Acute Medicine
• Cardiovascular Medicine
• Clinical Genetics
• Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics
• Dermatology
• Endocrinology and Diabetes
• Gastroenterology
• Genito-urinary Medicine
• Geriatric Medicine
• Infectious Diseases
• Medical Toxicology
• Medical Oncology
• Pain Medicine
• Palliative Medicine
• Rehabilitation Medicine
• Respiratory Medicine and Pulmonology
• Rheumatology
• Sleep Medicine
• Sports and Exercise Medicine
• Community Medical Services
• Critical Care
• Emergency Medicine
• Forensic Medicine
• Haematology
• History of Medicine
• Browse content in Medical Skills
• Clinical Skills
• Communication Skills
• Nursing Skills
• Surgical Skills
• Medical Ethics
• Browse content in Medical Dentistry
• Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery
• Paediatric Dentistry
• Restorative Dentistry and Orthodontics
• Surgical Dentistry
• Medical Statistics and Methodology
• Browse content in Neurology
• Clinical Neurophysiology
• Neuropathology
• Nursing Studies
• Browse content in Obstetrics and Gynaecology
• Gynaecology
• Occupational Medicine
• Ophthalmology
• Otolaryngology (ENT)
• Browse content in Paediatrics
• Neonatology
• Browse content in Pathology
• Chemical Pathology
• Clinical Cytogenetics and Molecular Genetics
• Histopathology
• Medical Microbiology and Virology
• Patient Education and Information
• Browse content in Pharmacology
• Psychopharmacology
• Browse content in Popular Health
• Caring for Others
• Complementary and Alternative Medicine
• Self-help and Personal Development
• Browse content in Preclinical Medicine
• Cell Biology
• Molecular Biology and Genetics
• Reproduction, Growth and Development
• Primary Care
• Professional Development in Medicine
• Browse content in Psychiatry
• Addiction Medicine
• Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
• Forensic Psychiatry
• Learning Disabilities
• Old Age Psychiatry
• Psychotherapy
• Browse content in Public Health and Epidemiology
• Epidemiology
• Public Health
• Browse content in Radiology
• Clinical Radiology
• Interventional Radiology
• Nuclear Medicine
• Radiation Oncology
• Reproductive Medicine
• Browse content in Surgery
• Cardiothoracic Surgery
• Gastro-intestinal and Colorectal Surgery
• General Surgery
• Neurosurgery
• Paediatric Surgery
• Peri-operative Care
• Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery
• Surgical Oncology
• Transplant Surgery
• Trauma and Orthopaedic Surgery
• Vascular Surgery
• Browse content in Science and Mathematics
• Browse content in Biological Sciences
• Aquatic Biology
• Biochemistry
• Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
• Developmental Biology
• Ecology and Conservation
• Evolutionary Biology
• Genetics and Genomics
• Microbiology
• Molecular and Cell Biology
• Natural History
• Plant Sciences and Forestry
• Research Methods in Life Sciences
• Structural Biology
• Systems Biology
• Zoology and Animal Sciences
• Browse content in Chemistry
• Analytical Chemistry
• Computational Chemistry
• Crystallography
• Environmental Chemistry
• Industrial Chemistry
• Inorganic Chemistry
• Materials Chemistry
• Medicinal Chemistry
• Mineralogy and Gems
• Organic Chemistry
• Physical Chemistry
• Polymer Chemistry
• Study and Communication Skills in Chemistry
• Theoretical Chemistry
• Browse content in Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Architecture and Logic Design
• Game Studies
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Mathematical Theory of Computation
• Programming Languages
• Software Engineering
• Systems Analysis and Design
• Virtual Reality
• Browse content in Computing
• Business Applications
• Computer Games
• Computer Security
• Computer Networking and Communications
• Digital Lifestyle
• Graphical and Digital Media Applications
• Operating Systems
• Browse content in Earth Sciences and Geography
• Atmospheric Sciences
• Environmental Geography
• Geology and the Lithosphere
• Maps and Map-making
• Meteorology and Climatology
• Oceanography and Hydrology
• Palaeontology
• Physical Geography and Topography
• Regional Geography
• Soil Science
• Urban Geography
• Browse content in Engineering and Technology
• Agriculture and Farming
• Biological Engineering
• Civil Engineering, Surveying, and Building
• Electronics and Communications Engineering
• Energy Technology
• Engineering (General)
• Environmental Science, Engineering, and Technology
• History of Engineering and Technology
• Mechanical Engineering and Materials
• Technology of Industrial Chemistry
• Transport Technology and Trades
• Browse content in Environmental Science
• Applied Ecology (Environmental Science)
• Conservation of the Environment (Environmental Science)
• Environmental Sustainability
• Environmentalist Thought and Ideology (Environmental Science)
• Management of Land and Natural Resources (Environmental Science)
• Natural Disasters (Environmental Science)
• Nuclear Issues (Environmental Science)
• Pollution and Threats to the Environment (Environmental Science)
• Social Impact of Environmental Issues (Environmental Science)
• History of Science and Technology
• Browse content in Materials Science
• Ceramics and Glasses
• Composite Materials
• Metals, Alloying, and Corrosion
• Nanotechnology
• Browse content in Mathematics
• Applied Mathematics
• Biomathematics and Statistics
• History of Mathematics
• Mathematical Education
• Mathematical Finance
• Mathematical Analysis
• Numerical and Computational Mathematics
• Probability and Statistics
• Pure Mathematics
• Browse content in Neuroscience
• Cognition and Behavioural Neuroscience
• Development of the Nervous System
• Disorders of the Nervous System
• History of Neuroscience
• Invertebrate Neurobiology
• Molecular and Cellular Systems
• Neuroendocrinology and Autonomic Nervous System
• Neuroscientific Techniques
• Sensory and Motor Systems
• Browse content in Physics
• Astronomy and Astrophysics
• Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics
• Biological and Medical Physics
• Classical Mechanics
• Computational Physics
• Condensed Matter Physics
• Electromagnetism, Optics, and Acoustics
• History of Physics
• Mathematical and Statistical Physics
• Measurement Science
• Nuclear Physics
• Particles and Fields
• Plasma Physics
• Quantum Physics
• Relativity and Gravitation
• Semiconductor and Mesoscopic Physics
• Browse content in Psychology
• Affective Sciences
• Clinical Psychology
• Cognitive Psychology
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Criminal and Forensic Psychology
• Developmental Psychology
• Educational Psychology
• Evolutionary Psychology
• Health Psychology
• History and Systems in Psychology
• Music Psychology
• Neuropsychology
• Organizational Psychology
• Psychological Assessment and Testing
• Psychology of Human-Technology Interaction
• Psychology Professional Development and Training
• Research Methods in Psychology
• Social Psychology
• Browse content in Social Sciences
• Browse content in Anthropology
• Anthropology of Religion
• Human Evolution
• Medical Anthropology
• Physical Anthropology
• Regional Anthropology
• Social and Cultural Anthropology
• Theory and Practice of Anthropology
• Browse content in Business and Management
• Business Ethics
• Business History
• Business Strategy
• Business and Technology
• Business and Government
• Business and the Environment
• Comparative Management
• Corporate Governance
• Corporate Social Responsibility
• Entrepreneurship
• Health Management
• Human Resource Management
• Industrial and Employment Relations
• Industry Studies
• Information and Communication Technologies
• International Business
• Knowledge Management
• Management and Management Techniques
• Operations Management
• Organizational Theory and Behaviour
• Pensions and Pension Management
• Public and Nonprofit Management
• Strategic Management
• Supply Chain Management
• Browse content in Criminology and Criminal Justice
• Criminal Justice
• Criminology
• Forms of Crime
• International and Comparative Criminology
• Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice
• Development Studies
• Browse content in Economics
• Agricultural, Environmental, and Natural Resource Economics
• Asian Economics
• Behavioural Finance
• Behavioural Economics and Neuroeconomics
• Econometrics and Mathematical Economics
• Economic History
• Economic Methodology
• Economic Systems
• Economic Development and Growth
• Financial Markets
• Financial Institutions and Services
• General Economics and Teaching
• Health, Education, and Welfare
• History of Economic Thought
• International Economics
• Labour and Demographic Economics
• Law and Economics
• Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics
• Microeconomics
• Public Economics
• Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics
• Welfare Economics
• Browse content in Education
• Adult Education and Continuous Learning
• Care and Counselling of Students
• Early Childhood and Elementary Education
• Educational Equipment and Technology
• Educational Strategies and Policy
• Higher and Further Education
• Organization and Management of Education
• Philosophy and Theory of Education
• Schools Studies
• Secondary Education
• Teaching of a Specific Subject
• Teaching of Specific Groups and Special Educational Needs
• Teaching Skills and Techniques
• Browse content in Environment
• Applied Ecology (Social Science)
• Climate Change
• Conservation of the Environment (Social Science)
• Environmentalist Thought and Ideology (Social Science)
• Natural Disasters (Environment)
• Social Impact of Environmental Issues (Social Science)
• Browse content in Human Geography
• Cultural Geography
• Economic Geography
• Political Geography
• Browse content in Interdisciplinary Studies
• Communication Studies
• Museums, Libraries, and Information Sciences
• Browse content in Politics
• African Politics
• Asian Politics
• Chinese Politics
• Comparative Politics
• Conflict Politics
• Elections and Electoral Studies
• Environmental Politics
• European Union
• Foreign Policy
• Gender and Politics
• Human Rights and Politics
• Indian Politics
• International Relations
• International Organization (Politics)
• International Political Economy
• Irish Politics
• Latin American Politics
• Middle Eastern Politics
• Political Behaviour
• Political Economy
• Political Institutions
• Political Theory
• Political Methodology
• Political Communication
• Political Philosophy
• Political Sociology
• Politics and Law
• Public Policy
• Public Administration
• Quantitative Political Methodology
• Regional Political Studies
• Russian Politics
• Security Studies
• State and Local Government
• UK Politics
• US Politics
• Browse content in Regional and Area Studies
• African Studies
• Asian Studies
• East Asian Studies
• Japanese Studies
• Latin American Studies
• Middle Eastern Studies
• Native American Studies
• Scottish Studies
• Browse content in Research and Information
• Research Methods
• Browse content in Social Work
• Addictions and Substance Misuse
• Adoption and Fostering
• Care of the Elderly
• Child and Adolescent Social Work
• Couple and Family Social Work
• Developmental and Physical Disabilities Social Work
• Direct Practice and Clinical Social Work
• Emergency Services
• Human Behaviour and the Social Environment
• International and Global Issues in Social Work
• Mental and Behavioural Health
• Social Justice and Human Rights
• Social Policy and Advocacy
• Social Work and Crime and Justice
• Social Work Macro Practice
• Social Work Practice Settings
• Social Work Research and Evidence-based Practice
• Welfare and Benefit Systems
• Browse content in Sociology
• Childhood Studies
• Community Development
• Comparative and Historical Sociology
• Economic Sociology
• Gender and Sexuality
• Gerontology and Ageing
• Health, Illness, and Medicine
• Marriage and the Family
• Migration Studies
• Occupations, Professions, and Work
• Organizations
• Population and Demography
• Race and Ethnicity
• Social Theory
• Social Movements and Social Change
• Social Research and Statistics
• Social Stratification, Inequality, and Mobility
• Sociology of Religion
• Sociology of Education
• Sport and Leisure
• Urban and Rural Studies
• Browse content in Warfare and Defence
• Defence Strategy, Planning, and Research
• Land Forces and Warfare
• Military Administration
• Military Life and Institutions
• Naval Forces and Warfare
• Other Warfare and Defence Issues
• Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution
• Weapons and Equipment

• < Previous chapter
• Next chapter >

2 The Making of a National Identity: The Frontier Thesis

Author Webpage

• Published: April 2003
• Cite Icon Cite
• Permissions Icon Permissions

Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis became a significant force in shaping the national identity of the U.S. The ideologies incorporated into Turner's frontier thesis were not only meant to provide a historical interpretation of how the U.S. came into being but also satisfied the national need for a “usable past.” This frontier thesis was able to transmit a series of symbols that became imbedded in the nation's self‐perception and self‐understanding: Virgin land, wilderness, land and democracy, Manifest Destiny, chosen race. Race must be understood as an important piece of this developing national identity because the idea of “purity” of race was used as a rationalization to colonize, exclude, devalue, and even exterminate the native borderlands people.

Signed in as

Institutional accounts.

• GoogleCrawler [DO NOT DELETE]
• Google Scholar Indexing

Personal account

• Sign in with email/username & password
• Get email alerts
• Save searches
• Purchase content
• Activate your purchase/trial code
• Add your ORCID iD

Institutional access

Sign in with a library card.

• Sign in with username/password
• Recommend to your librarian
• Institutional account management
• Get help with access

Access to content on Oxford Academic is often provided through institutional subscriptions and purchases. If you are a member of an institution with an active account, you may be able to access content in one of the following ways:

IP based access

Typically, access is provided across an institutional network to a range of IP addresses. This authentication occurs automatically, and it is not possible to sign out of an IP authenticated account.

Sign in through your institution

Choose this option to get remote access when outside your institution. Shibboleth/Open Athens technology is used to provide single sign-on between your institution’s website and Oxford Academic.

• Click Sign in through your institution.
• Select your institution from the list provided, which will take you to your institution's website to sign in.
• When on the institution site, please use the credentials provided by your institution. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account.
• Following successful sign in, you will be returned to Oxford Academic.

If your institution is not listed or you cannot sign in to your institution’s website, please contact your librarian or administrator.

Enter your library card number to sign in. If you cannot sign in, please contact your librarian.

Society Members

Society member access to a journal is achieved in one of the following ways:

Sign in through society site

Many societies offer single sign-on between the society website and Oxford Academic. If you see ‘Sign in through society site’ in the sign in pane within a journal:

• Click Sign in through society site.
• When on the society site, please use the credentials provided by that society. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account.

If you do not have a society account or have forgotten your username or password, please contact your society.

Sign in using a personal account

Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members. See below.

A personal account can be used to get email alerts, save searches, purchase content, and activate subscriptions.

Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members.

Viewing your signed in accounts

Click the account icon in the top right to:

• View your signed in personal account and access account management features.
• View the institutional accounts that are providing access.

Signed in but can't access content

Oxford Academic is home to a wide variety of products. The institutional subscription may not cover the content that you are trying to access. If you believe you should have access to that content, please contact your librarian.

For librarians and administrators, your personal account also provides access to institutional account management. Here you will find options to view and activate subscriptions, manage institutional settings and access options, access usage statistics, and more.

Our books are available by subscription or purchase to libraries and institutions.

• About Oxford Academic
• Publish journals with us
• University press partners
• What we publish
• New features  
• Open access
• Rights and permissions
• Accessibility
• Advertising
• Media enquiries
• Oxford University Press
• Oxford Languages
• University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

• Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
• Cookie settings
• Cookie policy
• Privacy policy
• Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

Search The Canadian Encyclopedia

Enter your search term

Why sign up?

Signing up enhances your TCE experience with the ability to save items to your personal reading list, and access the interactive map.

• MLA 8TH EDITION
• Owram, D.R.. "Frontier Thesis". The Canadian Encyclopedia , 16 December 2013, Historica Canada . www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/frontier-thesis. Accessed 16 May 2024.
• The Canadian Encyclopedia , 16 December 2013, Historica Canada . www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/frontier-thesis. Accessed 16 May 2024." href="#" class="js-copy-clipboard b b-md b-invert b-modal-copy">Copy
• APA 6TH EDITION
• Owram, D. (2013). Frontier Thesis. In The Canadian Encyclopedia . Retrieved from https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/frontier-thesis
• The Canadian Encyclopedia . Retrieved from https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/frontier-thesis" href="#" class="js-copy-clipboard b b-md b-invert b-modal-copy">Copy
• CHICAGO 17TH EDITION
• Owram, D.R.. "Frontier Thesis." The Canadian Encyclopedia . Historica Canada. Article published February 07, 2006; Last Edited December 16, 2013.
• The Canadian Encyclopedia . Historica Canada. Article published February 07, 2006; Last Edited December 16, 2013." href="#" class="js-copy-clipboard b b-md b-invert b-modal-copy">Copy
• TURABIAN 8TH EDITION
• The Canadian Encyclopedia , s.v. "Frontier Thesis," by D.R. Owram, Accessed May 16, 2024, https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/frontier-thesis
• The Canadian Encyclopedia , s.v. "Frontier Thesis," by D.R. Owram, Accessed May 16, 2024, https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/frontier-thesis" href="#" class="js-copy-clipboard b b-md b-invert b-modal-copy">Copy

Thank you for your submission

Our team will be reviewing your submission and get back to you with any further questions.

Thanks for contributing to The Canadian Encyclopedia.

Frontier Thesis

Article by D.R. Owram

Published Online February 7, 2006

Last Edited December 16, 2013

The Frontier thesis was formulated 1893, when American historian Frederick Jackson Turner theorized that the availability of unsettled land throughout much of American history was the most important factor determining national development. Frontier experiences and new opportunities forced old traditions to change, institutions to adapt and society to become more democratic as class distinctions collapsed. The result was a unique American society, distinct from the European societies from which it originated. In Canada the frontier thesis was popular between the world wars with historians such as A.R.M. LOWER and Frank UNDERHILL and sociologist S.D. CLARK , partly because of a new sense of Canada's North American character.

Since WWII the frontier thesis has declined in popularity because of recognition of important social and cultural distinctions between Canada and the US. In its place a "metropolitan school" has developed, emphasizing Canada's much closer historical ties with Europe. Moreover, centres such as Montréal, Toronto and Ottawa had a profound influence on the settlement of the Canadian frontier. Whichever argument is emphasized, however, any realistic conclusion cannot deny that both the frontier and the ties to established centres were formative in Canada's development.

See also METROPOLITAN-HINTERLAND THESIS .

Recommended

Laurentian thesis, metropolitan-hinterland thesis.

The American Yawp Reader

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.

The Legacy of Conquest

The unbroken past of the american west (book review).

by Jenni Ostwinkle Silva

Patricia Nelson Limerick isn’t setting out to discredit Frederick Jackson Turner as an historian and scholar. And it isn’t that she believes his influential “ Frontier Thesis ” was without merit. On the contrary, she describes Turner as a “scholar with intellectual courage, an innovative spirit, and a forceful writing style” whose thesis served a purpose in the late 19 th /early 20 th centuries. 1  In Limerick’s opinion, the problem lies in the “excessive deference” for Turner that led many historians to believe that Turner’s thesis was the first, final, and only word in Western history. Although his conception of the frontier seemed unifying and efficient, its dominance wedded Western historians to an idea that was static, rigid, and exclusionary. The Frontier Thesis may have “created” Western history but it also set up arbitrary divisions between “the West” and “the rest” – divisions Limerick was determined to break down in The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West.

Much of Limerick’s work hinges on the debate of “process” (how events unfolded) versus “place” (the importance of location). In Turner’s view, the process of settling the frontier served as the basis of American exceptionalism, the belief that the United States are unique among world nations. Limerick and other “New Western” historians have challenged this theory by declaring that the West was always a place, with many different actors and events, not an empty land anxiously awaiting the arrival of white settlers. Turner’s thesis drew a line in time, carving out the arrival of white settlers as the beginning of the West and the closing of the frontier in 1890 (based on his interpretation of census records) as the end of this era. Limerick attempts to restore continuity to both time and space, and in doing so, opens up the field of Western history.

To accomplish this, Limerick addressed the history of the West thematically and divides her book into two tellingly-titled sections: “The Conquerors” and “The Conquerors Meet Their Match.” Turner believed that the frontier, shifting from savagery to civilization, served to “Americanize” the nation. Working under that pretext, scholars and citizens have conceptualized the frontier as a positive process. Using “place” instead of “process,” Limerick characterizes this period of Western history as “conquest.” By viewing the West as a place, she repositions the role of white settlers. These enterprising individuals did not discover a new place – they attempted to conquer a land that was already inhabited by Indians. Although this concept may seem jarring to the uninitiated, Limerick points out the contradiction of believing that “the legacy of slavery was serious business, while the legacy of conquest was not.” 2  The older framework only made sense was through the thick veil of denial. This denial, in turn, allowed for the proliferation of a number of myths in Western history, such as the idea of rugged individualism. Under this model, Westerners were fully removed from the rest of the country. When other actors appeared, they were viewed as imposing upon the Western (white) settlers. And if the settlers themselves happened to be imposing upon the Plains Indians, it was only because the forward march of history demanded it – and because the settlers had convinced themselves that Indians were a doomed race.

Unfortunately for this last myth, she states, the conquered refused to be or remain conquered, nor were they passive participants in the drama of the West. Attacking the notion that the history of the West is the history of the white man, Limerick turns her attention to Plains Indians, Hispanic, Chinese, Japanese, and blacks. Although she addresses these groups of people in a fairly general manner, she makes a strong case for the study of borderlands history. Viewed from a 21 st -century perspective, it can be easy to forget that the giant coast-to-coast landmass of the United States was never preordained. Battles were fought, treaties were drawn, and revenge was sought before state lines could be carved into the map of America. Introducing other ethnic and racial groups broadens the scope of Western history and highlights the centrality of conquest in the creation of the West. As Limerick makes clear, the history of the West is a nuanced and multi-faceted tale. While an historian annoyed “by the ethnocentricity of earlier frontier history” may be tempted by the desire to “take the Indian side,” doing so will not erase ethnocentricity. 3 The Indian (or Hispanic, or Chinese, or Japanese, or black) “side” is a difficult thing to locate. Instead, she recommends that historians view these groups – she is speaking of Indians in particular, but the same motivation carries throughout her other discussions – as “people steering their way through a difficult terrain of narrowing choices.” 4 The history books may not have treated these groups kindly (if they addressed them at all) but that does not mean they did not act, react, and affect the environment and the people around them.

In her final chapter, Limerick attempts to wrestle with the enduring power of the mythologized West and the problems that remain. The “frontier” still commands great respect and politicians from John Kennedy to Ronald Reagan have invoked its notion of progress. 5 Mexicans became “aliens” in their homeland when the United States conquered the Southwest and today, immigration remains a hot-button issue. Indians, still decidedly not-extinct , continue to maneuver through legal and political channels in an attempt to recoup their losses. But a restoration of rights does not, as Limerick points out, solve the larger problem of scarce resources. Although white settlers and the U.S. government were determined to “manage nature,” drought and limited access to water remain critical concerns.

Ironically, Limerick, considered one of the greatest scholars in the field of New Western history, is actually opposed to viewing Western history as an area of specialized study; her intention is to create connections. Reaching across the fields of economics, geography, anthropology and dipping into the current events, Limerick is trying to erase the lines Turner drew around the West. If the old ways of understanding Western history no longer work, new ways must be introduced. Here, environmental history and borderlands history take center stage.

A number of historians have followed in a similar vein. William Cronon and Elliot West address many of the same issues as Limerick – and then push them further. West affords Plains Indians an even more prominent position on the Western stage, portraying them as active participants in a history that is sometimes of their own making and sometimes out of their control. In examining the importance of 19 th -century Chicago, Cronon points out the problems with ideas of Western independence. In both of these works, as with Limerick, environmental history looms large. These Contested Plains and Nature’s Metropolis simply could not have been written in the framework provided by Turner even if they largely discredit its theories.

There are several minor missteps in The Legacy of Conquest , many of which Limerick admits to in the preface to the 2006 reprint. For one, she does not investigate the role of fur traders in the West, which would have given her an avenue to explore more fluid conceptions of identity. She also does not take into account the role of cities, reverting, against her best intentions, to the tired “idea that the real West meant the rural West!” 6 Although Limerick employed contemporary examples to illustrate her argument about continuity (and these topics are now 20-plus years old), the book has aged well – perhaps as more evidence of continuity of the West. Many of the issues she discussed remain unresolved: issues about resource conservation, immigration, and the management of nature seem as relevant today as they did in the 1980s – or even the 1880s.

Below, Patricia Limerick delivers her lecture, “The Winning of the West Revisited,” at the 2011 Theodore Roosevelt Symposium in Medora, North Dakota on October 29, 2011. Q&A session follows the lecture.

If anything, Limerick seems to run the risk of overselling her case. In her fifth chapter, “The Meeting Ground of the Past and Present,” Limerick thoroughly grounds her discussion in the political and environmental problems of 1970s and 1980s. It is a somewhat distracting diversion from the technique that Limerick employs in her other chapters. Her argument about continuity is most effective when woven within the larger narrative, not considered separately. Instead of drawing connections, it can seem as though Limerick is only pushing her agenda – perhaps the danger of any historian venturing into the present. Additionally, perhaps because many of the themes she addresses have been long-adopted by the historical profession, the reader is often willing to accept her ideas before Limerick has concluded her argument.

These issues are minor. The Legacy of Conquest stands out as a cogent, well-written, and gloriously accessible examination of the major themes in Western history. While experts are unlikely to be surprised, Legacy of Conquest serves as an excellent starting point for Western historians and, she hopes, American historians in general (after all, as Limerick might ask, what’s the difference?) Limerick cheerfully admits that her book is a work of synthesis. Many of the stories and characters she highlights are purposefully familiar to illustrate their previous historical immobility. Cast in the new light of environmental history or borderlands history, what is old becomes new again. Limerick is arguing (beseeching, pleading) for a new focus on inclusivity and continuity in Western scholarship. It is a point well made, and, judging by the durability of Legacy of Conquest and endurance of the New Western history, a point still well-taken.

For more information: Visit the U.S. History Scene reading lists for Environmental History , History of the American West , and Native American History

Westward Expansion Reader

Primary source: 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.

• The American Yawp Reader. Located at : http://www.americanyawp.com/reader.html . License : CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike

We will keep fighting for all libraries - stand with us!

Internet Archive Audio

• This Just In
• Grateful Dead
• Old Time Radio
• 78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings
• Audio Books & Poetry
• Computers, Technology and Science
• Music, Arts & Culture
• News & Public Affairs
• Spirituality & Religion
• Radio News Archive

• Flickr Commons
• Occupy Wall Street Flickr
• NASA Images
• Solar System Collection
• Ames Research Center

• All Software
• Old School Emulation
• MS-DOS Games
• Historical Software
• Classic PC Games
• Software Library
• Kodi Archive and Support File
• Vintage Software
• CD-ROM Software
• CD-ROM Software Library
• Software Sites
• Tucows Software Library
• Shareware CD-ROMs
• Software Capsules Compilation
• CD-ROM Images
• ZX Spectrum
• DOOM Level CD

• Smithsonian Libraries
• FEDLINK (US)
• Lincoln Collection
• American Libraries
• Canadian Libraries
• Universal Library
• Project Gutenberg
• Children's Library
• Biodiversity Heritage Library
• Books by Language
• Additional Collections

• Prelinger Archives
• Democracy Now!
• Occupy Wall Street
• TV NSA Clip Library
• Animation & Cartoons
• Arts & Music
• Computers & Technology
• Cultural & Academic Films
• Ephemeral Films
• Sports Videos
• Videogame Videos
• Youth Media

Search the history of over 866 billion web pages on the Internet.

Mobile Apps

• Wayback Machine (iOS)
• Wayback Machine (Android)

Browser Extensions

Archive-it subscription.

• Explore the Collections
• Build Collections

Save Page Now

Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in the future.

Please enter a valid web address

• Donate Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape

The Turner thesis concerning the role of the frontier in American history

Bookreader item preview, share or embed this item, flag this item for.

• Graphic Violence
• Explicit Sexual Content
• Hate Speech
• Misinformation/Disinformation
• Marketing/Phishing/Advertising
• Misleading/Inaccurate/Missing Metadata

plus-circle Add Review comment Reviews

170 Previews

9 Favorites

Better World Books

DOWNLOAD OPTIONS

No suitable files to display here.

EPUB and PDF access not available for this item.

IN COLLECTIONS

Uploaded by ttscribe14.hongkong on October 28, 2018

SIMILAR ITEMS (based on metadata)

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Thomas L. Friedman

Why the Campus Protests Are So Troubling

By Thomas L. Friedman

Opinion Columnist

Readers have been asking me, and I have been asking myself of late, how I feel about the campus demonstrations to stop the war in Gaza. Anyone reading this column since Oct. 7 knows that my focus has been on events on the ground in the Middle East, but this phenomenon has become too big to ignore. In short: I find the whole thing very troubling, because the dominant messages from the loudest voices and many placards reject important truths about how this latest Gaza war started and what will be required to bring it to a fair and sustainable conclusion.

My problem is not that the protests in general are “antisemitic” — I would not use that word to describe them, and indeed, I am deeply uncomfortable as a Jew with how the charge of antisemitism is thrown about on the Israel-Palestine issue. My problem is that I am a hardheaded pragmatist who lived in Beirut and Jerusalem, cares about people on all sides and knows one thing above all from my decades in the region: The only just and workable solution to this issue is two nation-states for two indigenous peoples.

If you are for that, whatever your religion, nationality or politics, you’re part of the solution. If you are not for that, you’re part of the problem.

And from everything I have read and watched, too many of these protests have become part of the problem — for three key reasons.

First, they are virtually all about stopping Israel’s shameful behavior in killing so many Palestinian civilians in its pursuit of Hamas fighters, while giving a free pass to Hamas’s shameful breaking of the cease-fire that existed on Oct. 7. On that morning, Hamas launched an invasion in which it murdered Israeli parents in front of their children, children in front of their parents — documenting it on GoPro cameras — raped Israeli women and kidnapped or killed everyone they could get their hands on, from little kids to sick grandparents.

Again, you can be — and should be — appalled at Israel’s response: bombing everything in its path in Gaza so disproportionately that thousands of children have been killed, maimed and orphaned . But if you refuse to acknowledge what Hamas did to trigger this — not to justify what Israel has done, but to explain how the Jewish state could inflict so much suffering on Palestinian men, women and children in reverse — you’re just another partisan throwing another partisan log on the fire. By giving Hamas a pass, the protests have put the onus on Israel to such a degree that its very existence is a target for some students, while Hamas’s murderous behavior is passed off as a praiseworthy adventure in decolonization .

Second, when people chant slogans like “liberate Palestine” and “from the river to the sea,” they are essentially calling for the erasure of the state of Israel, not a two-state solution. They are arguing that the Jewish people have no right to self-determination or self-defense. I don’t believe that about Jews, and I don’t believe that about Palestinians. I believe in a two-state solution in which Israel, in return for security guarantees, withdraws from the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Arab areas of East Jerusalem, and a demilitarized Palestinian state that accepts the principle of two states for two peoples is established in those territories occupied in 1967.

I believe in that so strongly that the thing I am most proud of in my 45-year career is my interview in February 2002 with the Saudi crown prince, Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz, in which he, for the first time, called on the entire Arab League to offer full peace and normalization of relations with Israel in exchange for full withdrawal to the 1967 lines — a call that led the Arab League to hold a peace conference the next month, on March 27 and 28, in Beirut to do just that. It was called the Arab Peace Initiative .

And do you know what Hamas’s response was to that first pan-Arab peace initiative for a two-state solution? I’ll let CNN tell you . Here’s its report from Israel on the evening of March 27, 2002, right after the Arab League peace summit opened:

NETANYA, Israel — A suicide bomber killed at least 19 people and injured 172 at a popular seaside hotel Wednesday, the start of the Jewish religious holiday of Passover. At least 48 of the injured were described as “severely wounded.” The bombing occurred in a crowded dining room at the Park Hotel, a coastal resort, during the traditional meal marking the start of Passover. … The Palestinian group Hamas, an Islamic fundamentalist group labeled a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department, claimed responsibility for the attack.

Yes, that was Hamas’s response to the Arab peace initiative of two nation-states for two peoples: blowing up a Passover Seder in Israel.

Hey, Friedman, but what about all the violence that Israeli settlers perpetrated against Palestinians and how Bibi Netanyahu deliberately built up Hamas and undermined the Palestinian Authority, which embraced Oslo?

Answer: That violence and those Netanyahu actions are awful and harmful to a two-state solution as well. That is why I am intensely both anti-Hamas and anti-Netanyahu. And if you oppose just one and not also the other, you should reflect a little more on what you are shouting at your protest or your anti-protest. Because no one has done more to harm the prospects of a two-state solution than the codependent Hamas and Netanyahu factions.

Hamas is not against the post-1967 occupation. It is against the existence of a Jewish state and believes there should be an Islamic state between the river and the sea. When protests on college campuses ignore that, they are part of the problem. Just as much as Israel supporters who ignore the fact that the far-right members in Netanyahu’s own coalition government are for a Jewish state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. How do I know? Because Netanyahu wrote it into the coalition agreemen t between himself and his far-right partners.

The third reason that these protests have become part of the problem is that they ignore the view of many Palestinians in Gaza who detest Hamas’s autocracy. These Palestinians are enraged by precisely what these student demonstrations ignore: Hamas launched this war without permission from the Gazan population and without preparation for Gazans to protect themselves when Hamas knew that a brutal Israeli response would follow. In fact, a Hamas official said at the start of the war that its tunnels were for only its fighters, not civilians.

That is not to excuse Israel in the least for its excesses, but, again, it is also not to give Hamas a pass for inviting them.

My view: Hamas was ready to sacrifice thousands of Gazan civilians to win the support of the next global generation on TikTok. And it worked. But one reason it worked was a lack of critical thinking by too many in that generation — the result of a campus culture that has become way too much about what to think and not how to think.

I highly recommend a few different articles about how angry Gazans are at Hamas for starting this war without any goal in mind other than the fruitless task of trying to destroy Israel so Hamas’s leader, Yahya Sinwar, could get his personal revenge.

I was particularly struck by a piece in The National, a newspaper in Abu Dhabi, by Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a Palestinian American raised in Gaza. The headline is: “Israel’s War Has Killed 31 Members of My Family, Yet It’s Vital to Speak Out Against Hamas.” Alkhatib placed Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack in the context of the rising protests against its inept and autocrat rule that have broken out periodically in Gaza since 2019, under the banner of “We Want to Live.”

Wrote Alkhatib, a political analyst who is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council: “Having grown up in Gaza, I experienced Hamas’s rise to power and their gradual grip over the Strip and Palestinian politics and society, hiding behind a resistance narrative and using extremist politics to sabotage prospects for a peaceful resolution to the conflict with Israel. Months before Oct. 7, tens of thousands of Gazans protested in the streets in defiance of Hamas, just as they had in 2019 and 2017.”

Alkhatib added that the “‘We Want to Live’ protest movement decried living conditions and unemployment in Gaza, as well as the lack of a political horizon for meaningful change in the territory’s realities and opportunities. Hamas’s regime consisted of a criminal and despotic enterprise that used Gaza as a haven for the group’s members and affiliates and turned Palestinians there into aid-dependent subjects reliant on the international community” and turned Gaza into “a ‘resistance citadel’ that was part of a nefarious regional alliance with Iran.”

A campus with critical thinkers might have had a teach-in on the central lawn on that subject, not just on the violence of Israeli settlers.

Against this backdrop, we are seeing college presidents at places like Rutgers and Northwestern agree to some of the demands by students to end their protests. As NPR summarized them, the “demands vary by school, though they generally call for an end to the Israel-Hamas war, disclosures of institutional investments and divestment from companies with ties to Israel or that otherwise profit from its military operation in Gaza.”

What Palestinians and Israelis need most now are not performative gestures of disinvestment but real gestures of impactful investment, not the threat of a deeper war in Rafah but a way to build more partners for peace. Invest in groups that promote Arab-Jewish understanding, like the Abraham Initiatives or the New Israel Fund. Invest in management skills capacity-building for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, like the wonderful Education for Employment network or Anera, that will help a new generation to take over the Palestinian Authority and build strong, noncorrupt institutions to run a Palestinian state.

This is not a time for exclusionary thinking. It is a time for complexity thinking and pragmatic thinking: How do we get to two nation-states for two indigenous peoples? If you want to make a difference and not just make a point, stand for that, work for that, reject anyone who rejects it and give a hug to anyone who embraces it.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .

Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs Opinion columnist. He joined the paper in 1981 and has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” which won the National Book Award. @ tomfriedman • Facebook

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

The Indicator from Planet Money

• LISTEN & FOLLOW
• Apple Podcasts
• Google Podcasts
• Amazon Music
• Amazon Alexa

Your support helps make our show possible and unlocks access to our sponsor-free feed.

The "Winner Take All" problem

Wailin Wong

Cooper Katz McKim

Kate Concannon

A 2017 march against sexual assault and harassment in Hollywood. Damian Dovarganes/AP hide caption

A 2017 march against sexual assault and harassment in Hollywood.

When June Carbone, Naomi Cahn and Nancy Levit set out to write a book about women in the workforce, they initially thought it would be a story all about women's march towards workplace equality. But when they looked at the data, they found something more disturbing: of the ways in which women's push toward workplace equality has actually been stalled for years. In today's episode, law professor June Carbone argues that the root of the problem lies in something they call the "winner take all" approach to business. That's the thesis of their new book, " Fair Shake: Women & the Fight to Build a Just Economy ". Related episodes: What would it take to fix retirement? ( Apple / Spotify ) For sponsor-free episodes of The Indicator from Planet Money, subscribe to Planet Money+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org . Music by Drop Electric . Find us: TikTok , Instagram , Facebook , Newsletter .

• workplace discrimination
• gender pay gap