Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Theory

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Frederick Jackson Turner’s popular “Frontier Theory” proposed that American democracy and culture was founded on the western frontier as Americans let go of their European ideals and, instead, accepted egalitarianism, violence, and a new national identity. Although widely accepted by most historians in the mid-twentieth century, Turner’s theory fell into deep scrutiny in the latter half of the century, mainly by Midwestern Historians such as John Mack Faragher. Through his book Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie, Faragher sought to demonstrate how life on the western frontier was more comparable to the small, rural villages of medieval Europe rather than the imagined birthplace of American democracy. Most importantly, he focused on the

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