The Frontier in American History

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,
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Approximate Word count = 1643
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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