Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," American Historical Association, Annual Report (1893), 199-227; reprinted in, The Frontier in American History (1921), Chapter 1.

This essay explains American institutions by an examination of the frontier experience. The part of America where civilization and savagery meet is the vantage point from which the historian can observe the casting off of the European and the emergence of the truly American civilization The frontier moves westward in the course of expansion, and it is cleared by a series of Indian wars. Turner points to the importance of the Indian frontier in the development of American nationalism. This idea picked up on by Williams in discussions of Imperialism and by Rogin in his discussion of Jackson.

Turner sets up various national regions which at different stages formed the frontier and describes the successive waves of settlement. First the pioneers, then the agriculturalists, and then the capitalists -- a pattern which recurs on each new frontier. The frontier is the basis of the "melting pot" because it integrates immigrant stick into a true American identity. It is the source of unique American participatory democracy, as well as nationalism. Turner closes by lamenting the end of the frontier at the close of the 19th century, but he still holds out the possibility of continued expansion. One is left wondering -- is he pointing to the necessity of overseas empire?

William Cronon "Revisiting the Vanishing Frontier: The Legacy of Frederick Jackson Turner" The Western Historical Quarterly 18 (1987): 157-176

Cronon examines the enduring legacy of Fredrick Jackson Turner and contends that we can still benefit from the Turner thesis over a hundred years later. Recounting the critiques, Cronon reminds that recent scholarship has demonstrated that Turner was too vague, that he ignored the sway that Eastern institutions held over the West, that social mobility in the West was not substantially greater than the East, that the West was a place where minority groups remained marginalized, and ethnic groups stubbornly refused to melt in the melting pot. Yet Turner is still with us. Cronon notes in a footnote that he even uses Turner's thesis in his own courses to organize the material. Though it is primarily a rebuttal of Turner, Turner's presence is essential.

Turning to Turner's broader influence on the profession, Cronon points out that Turner pointed us toward both the history of everyday life and the need to integrate local history into world history. As a teacher he influenced a generation of students who themselves would go on to write prolifically, though he himself would never publish very much. He points out that as a graduate professor, Turner would have his students write two papers -- a problem paper and a correlation paper. In his own writing, the books were problem papers strung together and not all that inspiring. His essays were correlation papers, which his own students went on to elaborate.

The irony of Turner's life is that though he himself failed to write inspiring narrative history, he was responsible for putting in place the central narrative structure that historians have used ever since. The movement west in space and time still organizes our story of the West. Indeed "when the chapters of the standard textbook of western history move from Indians to ranchers to farmers, they do so because no other arrangement seems properly ordered." (p. 167) Ironically, too, he was describing a vanishing frontier -- the subject he was discussing was already gone. Next he moved on to sectional analysis. This too has become an organizing concept for the study of the West, the "West as Section."

What then have critics to complain about? The scholars of post-WWII America have explored much that remained invisible to Turner and his generation:

The result has been to reveal masculine biases of Turner's frontier by exploring the lives of western women, to rediscover the racial and ethnic communities which somehow never quite melted into Turner's "line of most rapid and effective Americanization," and to provide a vastly richer and more accurate picture of the Indian peoples who were all but absent from Turner's vision. (p. 169)

Telling too are those recent histories that focus on the conservative nature of western communities, the role of the federal government in shaping the West and the urban character of the West (Cronon's own work on Chicago comes to mind). The movement westward still remains central to these histories. And the rise of "frontier studies," which proposed to study "the frontier as a region in which peoples of different cultures struggle with each other for control of resources and political power," also owes a debt to Turner. (p. 169) All of these owe Turner credit for his rhetorical strategy, if not for the conclusions he reached.

For Cronon, "the most useful elements of Turner's frontier are its focus on the history of how human beings have interacted with the landscape; its ability to relate local and regional history to the wider history of the nation; its interdisciplinary focus, and, not least, its commitment to putting ordinary people at the center of the story." (p. 170) He also points to David Potter's focus on the importance of abundance of natural resources to the development of the US (Nye also takes this approach). Turner's focus on abundant land was just the tip of the iceberg, as Hofstadter pointed out in his Progressive Historians. People have understood the West in terms of both abundance and scarcity, and the frontier was never isolated as Turner cast it. Contest of the utilization of resources in the West needs to be cast in a framework of conflict between core and periphery and with all due respect to the many different local constituencies who had vested interests in shaping development. It is in the ways in which "local" people defined their own visions of abundance and scarcity that we can give concreteness to the Turnerian rhetoric. Seeing Turner through Potter, land is but one instance of the abundance which the frontier offered.

A look at the influential Turner Thesis that dominated American history for nearly a half century. Two of Frederick Jackson Turner's essays are here with four dissenting and four defending views. Decent selection of varying essays. ( )