An Analysis of Frederick Jackson Turner's " The Significance of the Frontier in American History " (original) (raw)

Placing the Frontier in Early American Literature

Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, reveals that there seems to be an obsession with civilizing the wild, firmly placing America as the space which immediately follows the frontier. That space is fundamentally different from the spaces of Europe, which had conquered the wilderness long ago. America's position is thus within such a liminal space, between the established and the undiscovered. It is one which highlights the dichotomy between civilization and nature in spite of, or maybe due to, their close proximity. Crucially, this space is by definition unstable, necessitating a continual drive to advance or perish, correlating with the historical realities of westward expansion. This relentless need for progress, combined with a finite world, ultimately begets the final question: what happens when the frontier is lost? This anxiety is fully articulated in Frederick Jackson Turner's HOU 2

The Closing Gates of Democracy: Frontier Anxiety Before the Official End of the Frontier

1991

Frederick Jackson Turner's contribution to the study of American history is perhaps unparalleled. His 1893 address, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," is probably the best-known work of American historical analysis. But Turner's reputation has clouded historical perceptions. There have been some excellent studies of the historical climate in which Turner conceived his essay, but these studies have, by their nature, reconstructed that climate only as it related to Turner. Thus, pre-1893 expressions of concern over the closing frontier have been examined with an eye to their role in shaping Turner's thesis. Similarly, frontier-related concerns voiced after the appearance of Turner's essay are generally assumed to have been inspired by his thesis. The magnitude of the Turner phenomenon has obscured the significance of a widespread frontier anxiety pervading the last decades of the nineteenth century. Focusing rigidly on Turner, historians ...

Frontier Democracy: The Turner Thesis Revisited

Journal of the Early Republic, 1993

JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC to dismiss him. Perhaps the truest objection to Turner, and the one most often spoken and unspoken, was best expressed in a study of the Midwest where the authors wrote: "We need our own story.''38 As an iconoclast, Turner would not find that idea objectionable. As he wrote, and put in italics, in his essay on "The Significance of History": after all "Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time." Frontier Democracy: The Turner Thesis Revisited Lacy K. Ford, Jr. The one-hundredth anniversary of Frederick Jackson Turner's presentation of his pathbreaking essay, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," to the American Historical Association meeting in Chicago provides a propitious occasion for a brief reassessment of the "frontier thesis" and its lingering influence on the historiography of antebellum America. Turner's frontier thesis, with its emphasis on cheap western land and abundant economic opportunity, captured the popular imagination more than any other sweeping explanation of how the American national character was formed.' The two chief rivals of Turner's frontier thesis-Charles Beard's theme of recurring economic conflict between agrarian interests and commercial capitalism and Louis Hartz's contention that the principal formative influence on American character was a longstanding "liberal" consensus on the efficacy of political democracy and free-market capitalism-have both earned as much attention from scholars as has 38 Ibid., 126.