Frederick Jackson Turner

Frontier Thesis

"The emergence of western history as an important field of scholarship can best be traced to the famous paper Frederick Jackson Turner delivered at a meeting of the American Historical Association in 1893. It was entitled "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." The "Turner thesis" or "frontier thesis," as his argument quickly became known, shaped both popular and scholarly views of the West (and of much else) for two generations. Turner stated his thesis simply. The settlement of the West by white people - "the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward" - was the central story of American history. The process of westward expansion had transformed a desolate and savage land into modem civilization. It had also continually renewed American ideas of democracy and individualism and had, therefore, shaped not just the West but the nation as a whole. "What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bonds of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States." The Turner thesis shaped the writing of American history for a generation, and it shaped the writing of western American history for even longer. " (quoted from "Where Historians Disagree: The 'Frontier' and the West" in Alan Brinkley, American History: A Survey, Chapter 16)

Turner believed that historians up to that time had not devoted sufficient research to what he termed in an earlier essay "the fundamental, dominating fact in United States history," the territorial expansion from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.

Central to Turner's frontier thesis is the notion that the development of the American frontier helped to shape not only the character of the American people but also the nature of its institutions. More specifically, Turner claimed that traits and characteristics which developed during the Nineteenth-Century push from East to West -- individualism, nationalism, mobility, egalitarianism -- not only deviated from the perceived standard American cultural attitudes which prevailed at the time, but eventually came to dominate the formation of the American character. With his announcement of the "closing" of the frontier, moreover, Turner implied that the nation would be forced to undergo a painful transition, from a perception of America as a land of endless boundaries, to one which required Americans to accept that their nation was finally a closed-space world, replete with the limitations inherent therein.
The Turner Theses
Thesis Synopsis Turner Quote
The Frontier The frontier thesis is the assertion that the American character, including such traits as democracy and materialism, derived from the frontier experience. "The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement, explain American development."
The Safety Valve The safety valve thesis is the assertion that the frontier, as a place of opportunity and escape, defused social discontent in America. "So long as free land exists, the opportunity for a competency exists, and economic power secures political power."
Successive Frontiers Turner said that in the development of any frontier area, one phase of economic and social development followed another in distinct stages. This is the concept of successive frontiers. "Stand at Cumberland Gap and watch the procession of civilization, marching single file--the buffalo following the trail to the salt springs, the Indian, the fur-trader and hunter, the cattle-raiser, the pioneer farmer--and the frontier has passed by. Stand at South Pass in the Rockies a century later and see the same procession with wider intervals between."

http://www.ndsu.nodak.edu/instruct/isern/103/turner.htm

Turner's thesis can be considered: