Frederick Jackson Turner

Frederick Jackson Turner delivered the most important paper in the history of American historical writing on a summer evening in Chicago in 1893, at a meeting of the American Historical Association held in conjunction with the World’s Columbian Exposition. “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” was a brief essay — barely thirty pages — but it transformed the way Americans understood their own past and inaugurated a debate about the meaning of the frontier that has never ended. Turner’s thesis was simple and sweeping: American democracy, American individualism, and the American national character were not inherited from Europe but were created by the experience of the frontier — the continuous westward expansion into free land that had shaped American institutions and American identity for three centuries.

Portage

Frederick Jackson Turner was born in 1861 in Portage, Wisconsin, a small town on the Wisconsin River that had been, within living memory, a genuine frontier community. His father was a journalist and local politician, and Turner grew up in an atmosphere of small-town democracy, immigrant diversity, and closeness to the land that shaped his historical imagination. He attended the University of Wisconsin, where he studied under William Francis Allen, and received his PhD from Johns Hopkins in 1890, studying under Herbert Baxter Adams.

The contrast between Adams’s “germ theory” of American institutions — which traced American democracy to the forests of medieval Germany — and Turner’s own experience of the American West was decisive. Turner knew from his own boyhood that something happened to European institutions when they encountered the American frontier, and his essay was an attempt to articulate what that something was.

The Frontier Thesis

The thesis was deceptively simple. Turner argued that the distinguishing feature of American history was the existence of a frontier — a moving line between civilisation and wilderness that had advanced steadily westward from the Atlantic coast for three centuries. At the frontier, European civilisation was stripped down to its essentials: settlers abandoned their old institutions, their old hierarchies, and their old ways of life and created new ones adapted to the conditions of the wilderness. This process of destruction and recreation produced the distinctive qualities of American civilisation: democracy, individualism, pragmatism, restless energy, and hostility to authority.

The 1890 census had declared that the frontier was officially closed — there was no longer a continuous line of unsettled territory. Turner’s essay was, among other things, an elegy for a vanished world and a warning that the closing of the frontier would fundamentally change American society.

Influence and Criticism

The frontier thesis dominated American historiography for fifty years. Turner spent his career at the University of Wisconsin (1889–1910) and Harvard (1910–1924) elaborating his ideas and training a generation of graduate students who carried the frontier interpretation into every department of American history. The Frontier in American History (1920) collected his major essays. The Significance of Sections in American History (1932, posthumous, Pulitzer Prize) extended his analysis from the frontier to the “sections” — the great geographical regions of the United States — that he believed were the key to understanding American politics.

The criticism began in earnest in the 1930s and has never stopped. Turner was accused of ignoring the role of slavery, of romanticising westward expansion at the expense of the Native Americans who were dispossessed, of overemphasising environmental determinism, and of offering a thesis that was impossible to verify empirically. Modern historians have pointed out that the frontier was not “free land” — it was land taken by force from indigenous peoples — and that Turner’s thesis was essentially a justification of westward expansion and Manifest Destiny.

These criticisms are largely valid, but they have not destroyed the thesis so much as complicated it. The frontier remains a central category of American historical analysis, even for historians who reject Turner’s specific arguments.

Collecting Turner

The Frontier in American History (Henry Holt, 1920) in first edition is the primary collecting target. The Significance of Sections in American History (Henry Holt, 1932) is the posthumous Pulitzer winner. The original 1893 essay was published in the Proceedings of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin and in the Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1893 — copies of either publication are scarce and valuable.