The Frontier Thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner
Turner from PBS
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"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, 1999)
Links:
- Turner thesis text
- Turner biography from The West by PBS
- Shane and the Turner Thesis from David Daly and Joel Persky, "The Western: Myth and Reality," Journal of the West, April 1990.
- The Problem of the West is Frederick Jackson Turner's 1896 Atlantic Monthly article
- Derman, Josua. "Frederick Jackson Turner and the Gospel of Wealth," Concord Review, Jan. 3, 1997
- McClintock, Thomas C. "The Turner Thesis: After Ninety Years it Still 'Lives On'," The Journal of the American West 25, July 1986, p. 75-82.
