The American Frontier consisted of a vibrant and expansive land made for the opportunity of American settlement. Unfortunately, the age of exploration of the Frontier officially ended in 1890 with the U.S Census Bureau declaring that “here can hardly be said to be a frontier line." A historian, Frederick Jackson Turner, claimed that the Frontier shaped American culture and the attitude of Americans. By evaluating U.S Census Bureau statistics, he famously wrote the Frontier Thesis. Along with the Frontier Thesis, Turner contributed to the field of New History, primarily analyzing the West and Sectionalism of the United States. Today, historians acknowledge the tremendous impact Turner’s role in American Exceptionalism and the study of geographic …show more content…
sectionalism. Prior to late 19th century, Turner fascination of the West derived from where grew up, in the small melting pot of Portage, Wisconsin. Born in Portage, Wisconsin in 1861, Turner idolized his father, a local journalist, and historian. He followed in his father's footsteps by enrolling as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin. He eventually graduated and completed his Ph.D. at John Hopkins University in 1889. His dissertation, "The Character and Influence of the Indian Trade in Wisconsin.", focused more on his native frontier rather than the national spectrum of american history. After receiving his doctorate, he returned to the University of Wisconsin to begin historical research and teaching. During the midst of his popularity, Turner spent a brief period of time as president of the American Historical Association in 1910 and served on the board the American Historical Review from 1910 to 1915. After teaching at Wisconsin, he decided to join the faculty at Harvard University until 1924. After serving as the chair for Harvard's Department of History, he retired from teaching but continued research at the Huntington Library. He remained at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California until his death in 1932. Some of Turner's achievements included posthumously receiving the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1933 and the historical significance of expanding America's fascination with the West. Through his literature, Turner showed that history was not necessary defined by period, rather, it was always progressing. As a historian during the Progressive Era, Turner helped developed the new idea of New History. This idea of New History required, not a just theoretical analysis of data but with the resilient use of the social sciences: geography, anthropology sociology, psychology, economics, and political science. Turner wanted the new historian to be a master of the humanities. He encouraged his students to look and evaluate history by using these new historical tactics. Today, historiographer use methods that Turner himself help encourage. With the development of the progressive movement, Turner shaped the how we evaluate historiography by looking at the closing of the unknown. In summer of 1893, Turner and others historians gave an address at the 400 year anniversary of Columbus discovering America at World Columbian Exchange Conference in Chicago, Illinois.
Before the humongous crowd, Turner presented his essay The Significance of the Frontier in American History. The address today is famously regarded as one of the most important American historical writings: The Frontier Thesis. Turner declared that the first chapter in American history has concluded with the disappearance of the Frontier: “The Frontier marked a great end of a historic movement . . . 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.” Turner acknowledged that “the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explains American development.” The thesis includes three big claims that supported his warrants for American development. First being that free lands opened up the colonization for in across the frontier. Secondly, The two divisions of inhabitants of the Frontier were the uncivilized and the civilized; encountering other through brutal force. Lastly, the values of the Americans and the Native Americans are by law and chaos. However, American exploration in the frontier made them different than their European Counterparts.Turner commented on the disguishing that: “The American frontier is sharply distinguished from the European frontier ---a fortified boundary line running through dense
populations” Turner evaluated, through his newly developed historiography, the frontier created the opportunity for the growth and expansion of American democracy. The further westward Americans traveled, the more individualist and “American” they became. This gave birth to the idea of American Exceptionalism: the belief that the United States is unique solely on the ideals of democracy and personal freedom. Thus, Turner declared what made America exceptional was the prevalence of the expanding Egalitarian society. Along with the Frontier Thesis, Turner also looks the geographic sectionalism of the country. In the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of essays, The Significance of Sections in American History, the sectional hypothesis stated that each geographic-cultural sections of the United States are revealed distinctly in the terms of politics, economics, and geography. Each section develops economic enterprises for sustainability of its territory. Examining each political institution in the region, he concluded that the United States could be understood as a series of compromises between sectional interests. Turner did not ordinarily see sectionalism as factor for the cause of the Civil War between the North and the South, but as a fundamental geographic interest to understanding America: “We need a mapping by human geographers that shall take account of these factors, in politics, economics, society, literature, in all the social sciences. Until then sectional delimitation can only be in the nature of a reconnaissance, needing refinement.” He recognized the impact of fully interpreting data through multiple methods by the social sciences. Frederick Jackson Turner made a significant impact in the historiography of American development. While his progressive tactics of the Frontier Thesis are still challenged by historians today, the historical literature of Turner changed the course of American history. The idea of geographic sectionalism changed how historians look a historiography by using other social sciences in order to interpret data fully. The Frontier thesis sprouted American exceptionalism, the idea that America is different from European societies by its drive, colonization, and growth by traveling through the frontier.
Turner, Frederick Jackson. "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," Learner: Primary Sources. Annenberg Learner, Web. 25 Mar. 2014.
There are many ways in which we can view the history of the American West. One view is the popular story of Cowboys and Indians. It is a grand story filled with adventure, excitement and gold. Another perspective is one of the Native Plains Indians and the rich histories that spanned thousands of years before white discovery and settlement. Elliot West’s book, Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers and the Rush to Colorado, offers a view into both of these worlds. West shows how the histories of both nations intertwine, relate and clash all while dealing with complex geological and environmental challenges. West argues that an understanding of the settling of the Great Plains must come from a deeper understanding, a more thorough knowledge of what came before the white settlers; “I came to believe that the dramatic, amusing, appalling, wondrous, despicable and heroic years of the mid-nineteenth century have to be seen to some degree in the context of the 120 centuries before them” .
According to the thesis of Fredrick Jackson Turner, the frontier changed America. Americans, from the earliest settlement, were always on the frontier, for they were always expanding to the west. It was Manifest Destiny; spreading American culture westward was so apparent and so powerful that it couldn’t be stopped. Turner’s Frontier Theory says that this continuous exposure to the frontier has shaped the American character. The frontier made the American settlers revert back to the primitive, stripping them from their European culture. They then created something brand new; it’s what we know today as the American character. Turner argues that we, as a culture, are a product of the frontier. The uniquely American personality includes such traits as individualism, futuristic, democratic, aggressiveness, inquisitiveness, materialistic, expedite, pragmatic, and optimistic. And perhaps what exemplifies this American personality the most is the story of the Donner Party.
Joseph Mallord William Turner, 1775-1851, born the son of a London Barber and Wigmaker, is considered one of the greatest European artists of the 19th century. Turner, the English romantic landscape painter, watercolourists and printmaker, was regarded as a controversial and revolutionary figure by his contemporaries despite his training being similar to other artists of the time. His work ‘Walton Bridge’, Oil on Canvas 1806-10, reflects much of his training as a young artists as well as his well-known Romantic style. In this essay I will follow the beginnings of Turners artistic life, showing how his influences, training and opinions surrounding landscape painting have influenced his work ‘Walton Bridge.’ I will further explore how art critics, fellow artists and the wider public of the 19th Century received ‘Walton Bridge’ and his Landscape paintings in general.
However, it is relevant that we understand the ripple effect that Turner’s thesis had on the world. Soon to be President had already written three of the fourteen four volumes of Winning the West, prior to reading the pamphlet. The concern I see that effects our society is that Turner was able through a speech able to not on influence but encourage Roosevelt to continue to write more in regards to Winning the Race in the West. The impact of Turner’s ideas and Roosevelt’s rise to presidency are a great indication of how significant the thesis was through the “frontiers” which included the Chinese Boxer Rebellion and the Philippine-American War. During both of these engagements, American soldiers were accused and found guilty of brutally beating, killing and even raping women and men in both regions. The tolerance of “manifest destiny” was still alive and well as Roosevelt then Governor of the Philippines would soon take over as President of the United States in 1904. Although this was a negative impact, this is still significant to our history even
This historical document, The Frontier as a Place of Conquest and Conflict, focuses on the 19th Century in which a large portion of society faced discrimination based on race, ethnicity, and religion. Its author, Patricia N. Limerick, describes the differences seen between the group of Anglo Americans and the minority groups of Native Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanics Americans and African Americans. It is noted that through this document, Limerick exposes us to the laws and restrictions imposed in addition to the men and women who endured and fought against the oppression in many different ways. Overall, the author, Limerick, exposes the readers to the effects that the growth and over flow of people from the Eastern on to the Western states
...to Americans: if their prospects in the East were poor, then they could perhaps start over in the West as a farmer, rancher, or even miner. The frontier was also romanticized not only for its various opportunities but also for its greatly diverse landscape, seen in the work of different art schools, like the “Rocky Mountain School” and Hudson River School, and the literature of the Transcendentalists or those celebrating the cowboy. However, for all of this economic possibility and artistic growth, there was political turmoil that arose with the question of slavery in the West as seen with the Compromise of 1850 and Kansas-Nebraska Act. As Frederick Jackson Turner wrote in his paper “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” to the American Historical Association, “the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.”
"Chapter 2 Western Settlement and the Frontier." Major Problems in American History: Documents and Essays. Ed. Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, Edward J. Blum, and Jon Gjerde. 3rd ed. Vol. II: Since 1865. Boston, MA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2012. 37-68. Print.
Turner’s essay is motivated essentially by the fact that the frontier is disappearing. The 1890 Census explicitly states that “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….[the frontier’s extent] can not therefore have a place in the census reports”. Turner’s essay is sparked by this statement because he does not want the frontier to disappear, since he believes that the frontier has given so much to the American culture and contributed so much to American history, and he believes
The significance of Frontier in American History is a thesis paper that was written and delivered by Jackson Turner on 12th July 1893. Turner delivered this paper during a yearly meeting of the fledging American Historical Association that was being held at Chicago. I believe this paper had a lot of impact on the study of American History specifically in colleges and universities. The original paper was informed from twelve sources. Turner wrote this paper and formed the frontier theory following the work of Achille Loria- An Italian economist- who proposed that the key to changes in human society was free land and that America would be the best place to research on this proposal. The other event that precipitated Turners paper was the announcement of superintendent in 1890 census which claimed that there is insufficient free land in US to allow frontier to feature in the census report as had been previously done until 1790 (Turnver, 3).
While the US may have prided themselves in the fact that we didn’t practice imperialism or colonialism, and we weren’t an Empire country, the actions conquering land in our own country may seem to rebuff that claim. In the 19th century, the West was a synonym for the frontier, or edge of current settlement. Early on this was anything west of just about Mississippi, but beyond that is where the Indian tribes had been pushed to live, and promised land in Oklahoma after policies like Indian removal, and events like the Trail of Tears. Indian’s brief feeling of security and this promise were shattered when American’s believed it was their god given right, their Manifest Destiny, to conquer the West; they began to settle the land, and relatively quickly. And with this move, cam...
...or wider opportunities. Even the safety valve theory has an element of truth when applied to ambitious young men of the professional class who had a better chance of making it big much quicker in the West than in the East. Without the open frontier, moreover, there would have been a much larger migration of young people from the farms to the cities; thus the frontier helped indirectly to check the exploitation of the working class by preventing it from expanding too rapidly. The Westward Expansion also weakened state and regional loyalties and promoted national unity due to its inherent mobility. Most westerners thought of themselves primarily as Americans, and wanted strong national government with broad powers for developing transportation and promoting the general welfare. The most significant feature of the Westward Expansion was that the pioneers took with them the essential institutions of their civilization. Thus we must look upon the Westward Expansion as one of the factors in the shaping of the American civilization but not the only one. AKSHARA PRADHAN Roll No. 385 Tute. Grp.- Tuesday, 1st Pd.
Over the years, the idea of the western frontier of American history has been unjustly and falsely romanticized by the movie, novel, and television industries. People now believe the west to have been populated by gun-slinging cowboys wearing ten gallon hats who rode off on capricious, idealistic adventures. Not only is this perception of the west far from the truth, but no mention of the atrocities of Indian massacre, avarice, and ill-advised, often deceptive, government programs is even present in the average citizen’s understanding of the frontier. This misunderstanding of the west is epitomized by the statement, “Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis was as real as the myth of the west. The development of the west was, in fact, A Century of Dishonor.” The frontier thesis, which Turner proposed in 1893 at the World’s Columbian Exposition, viewed the frontier as the sole preserver of the American psyche of democracy and republicanism by compelling Americans to conquer and to settle new areas. This thesis gives a somewhat quixotic explanation of expansion, as opposed to Helen Hunt Jackson’s book, A Century of Dishonor, which truly portrays the settlement of the west as a pattern of cruelty and conceit. Thus, the frontier thesis, offered first in The Significance of the Frontier in American History, is, in fact, false, like the myth of the west. Many historians, however, have attempted to debunk the mythology of the west. Specifically, these historians have refuted the common beliefs that cattle ranging was accepted as legal by the government, that the said business was profitable, that cattle herders were completely independent from any outside influence, and that anyone could become a cattle herder.
The cowboys of the frontier have long captured the imagination of the American public. Americans, faced with the reality of an increasingly industrialized society, love the image of a man living out in the wilderness fending for himself against the dangers of the unknown. By the end of the 19th century there were few renegade Indians left in the country and the vast expanse of open land to the west of the Mississippi was rapidly filling with settlers.
history. This is where New Social historians saw an opportunity to fashion a new, more diverse,