The Frontier & the American Character

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 these traits have, while softening down, still persisted as survivals in the place of their origin, even when a higher social organization succeeded.

The West attracted Americans who wanted to be part of the taming of the frontier. The frontier developed a mythos of its own and stood in sharp contrast to the civilized East. Turner finds that the frontier served as a force to develop democracy in American life. The development of the nation is related to the existence of the frontier and to the passage of legislation regarding tariff, land, and internal improvements that were

. . .
ly "civilized" form of society. Forbes points out the ethnocentric view of the frontier taken by Turner and others, for they saw the frontier solely in terms of Anglo-Americans. What these people came into contact with was not part of the frontier but was instead an obstacle to the frontier, and this included the Native Americans who already lived 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 poi
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Approximate Word count = 1267
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)

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