The Frontier : A Massive Influence

In 1893, at the 400th anniversary of the appearance of Columbus in the Americas celebrated in Chicago , Frederick Jackson Turner presented an academic paper entitled, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” In this essay, Turner proposes that, “The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development.” The group dynamic that Turner champions is the farmer. More directly it is white, male farmers. While the expansion of the west by white male farmers was a factor in the development of America, it is not the only explanation for this progression. Turner fails to incorporate all of the demographics present during this expansion which were essential to the evolution of America.

In the beginning the frontier was Atlantic coast. The frontier was Europe in some sort of real sense. While moving towards the west the frontier became more American. Form the frontier being advanced it meant a steady movement away from any influence from Europe, a constant growth of independence in American lines. The only way to study the frontier’s advance, the men who were growing up in the conditions, and the economic, and social results of it, is really the study of American part of our

Throughout history society has to go through many changes that not only affect many of the people but also the areas around the transformation. The main point of Fredrick Jackson Turner’s thesis is what the real essence of America is, and how we’re all influenced by the many changes we have to go through. He believes that American history should not be focused on the extension of European enterprise. The society will have to realize that America will have to be emancipated because of the fact that we had a country with an unlimited amount of boundaries and have to come to realization that we have many closed-spaced limits. The views in the seminal essay share his thoughts on the idea of how the frontier shaped

What Turner wants to point out here is that the American West is the most important feature of American history, and of the development of its society. He refers several times to a process of “Americanization” and we will see that the definition he gives of it is a very peculiar one. He gives a definition of the frontier: “it lies at the hither edge of free land”, meaning that he considers the Indian territory to be free land. According to him the frontier is the “meeting point between savagery and civilization”, “the most rapid and effective Americanization”. The process of Americanization he refers to is in fact a double

Patricia Nelson Limerick describes the frontier as being a place of where racial tension predominately exists. In her essay, “The Frontier as a Place of Ethnic and Religion Conflict,” Limerick says that the frontier wasn’t the place where everyone got to escape from their problems from previous locations before; instead she suggested that it was the place in which we all met. The frontier gave many the opportunities to find a better life from all over the world. But because this chance for a new life attracted millions of people from different countries across the seas, the United States experienced an influx of immigrants. Since the east was already preoccupied by settlers, the west was available to new settlement and that

One of the most famous arguments made in the world of environmental history was sparked by Frederick Jackson Turner in his essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History”. In his essay that came to be known as the Frontier/ Turner Thesis, he claimed that modern American culture and innovations had been developed by the growth of America into the western frontier. The migration of Americans to the western frontier originated through their desire for adventure as well as fertile and cheap land that was open for the taking. The frontier promised possibilities of expanding new markets in an unclaimed portion of the country. There are, however, several critics of the thesis, such as George Pierson, who disagree with Turner as to the

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

Frontiersmen have existed throughout America’s history. According to Turner’s hypothesis, they push forwards for civilization and have shaped America. The stories All the Pretty Horses, The Gift of Cochise, and The Martian are all works of frontier literature. Each in their own way show frontiersmen during different times in America’s history with characters that interact with their respective frontiers in different ways. Through these three books one can see how the core interactions between frontiersmen and the frontiers call out the qualities of frontiersmen stated in Turner’s frontier hypothesis.

Topic 1- The frontier had been tamed, great cities and businesses developed, and an overseas empire established, but not all citizens shared in the new wealth, prestige, and optimism.

History is like a die. It can have a small or large number of sides, but it can never have just one. Regarding the United States Westward Expansion in the Post-Civil War era, there were many sides to be taken into account, including (but not limited to) the Apache Indians, the US Government workers and soldiers, the American Elite, journalists, and scholars. How historians and others perceive this era is dependent on the primary sources available. By looking at sources such as Apache Chief Geronimo’s Story of His Life, Harvard Educated Ranch Manager Richard Trimble’s Letters to his Mother, and Financial Editor H.D. Lloyd’s “Story of a Great Monopoly”, one can unearth little nuggets of information that help determine how the process of incorporation affected large and diverse groups of people.

Faragher, Buhle, Cziyron and Armitage ( 2010) note the westward development into the new territories of the United States usually took place in three stages; trade, settlement and statehood. The speed at which this expansion occurred reinforced America's sense of themselves as a pioneering people. This experience worked to create a belief that the United States was a nation of adventurous, optimistic, and democratic people (p. 357).

Faragher, John Mack. Re-reading Frederick Jackson Turner: “The Significance of the Frontier in American History”

The emergence of western history as an important field of scholarship started with Frederick Jackson Turner’s (1861-1932) famous essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American history.”[1] This thesis shaped both popular and scholarly views of the West for the next two generations. In his thesis, Turner argued that the West had to be taken seriously. He felt that up to his time there had not been enough research of what he in his essay call “the fundamental, dominating fact in the U.S. history”: the territorial expansion from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast. The frontier past was, according to Turner, the best way to describe the distinctive American history and character.

In the book The Frontier In American culture the two authors Limerick and White try to address the many different topics throughout the book and try to appreciate their influence in American history and culture. The authors of the book address the different topics with the help of many different artifacts from the Newberry Library, also the authors show their attitudes toward the old American west and explain to us how we know and understand that time era.

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