The Frontier in American History

The frontier stands in American history as both a reality and a concept, a locale--one that moved, it is true, but still a locale--and as an idea, an attitude that helped shape the American character. The idea of Manifest Destiny told Americans that they would inevitably extend their domain from the Atlantic to the Pacific, which meant that the frontier would have to cease being the frontier and be civilized by settlers. The frontier became, then, a place to which settlers went, and they goal in American life was to battle the frontier and to bring it into the American fold.

Frederick Jackson Turner offered a paper at a meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago in 1893 that said in effect that the frontier was dead and that there was proof of this fact in the 1890 census data which showed that the country no longer had a frontier settlement:

Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.

Turner analyzes the significance of the frontier in American history and finds that the frontier helped to form what has come to be known as the American character:

From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of profound importance. The works of travelers along each frontier from colonial days onward describe certain common traits, and thes

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there. The frontier became known as the edge of the westward movement: The above approach to frontier history, while undoubtedly serving a useful purpose within the framework of Anglo-American nationalism, is essentially one-sided and ethnocentric. It is in effect looking at an intergroup contact situation entirely from the point of view of one of the interested participants; and it would seem that such a definition of frontier needs to be discarded by the social scientist. Forbes says "frontier" has a clear meaning in European usage so that it means the front of anything or that part of a country which fronts upon another country: The term has been used for centuries to designate that area where one group of people, or one political entity, borders upon another (in effect making the terms frontier and borderland synonymous). Forbes says that a frontier is a meeting point where two forces come up against one another. There must be a meeting of at least two entities for there to be a frontier. Forbes sees the frontier as a complex mechanism in American history. Each Anglo-Indian frontier was a unique and distinct frontier in his view, and there were also frontiers between Indian tribes. Because of the complexities,

Category: History - T