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Frederick Jackson Turner

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• Wisconsin Life - Frederick Jackson Turner and the History of the American West
• Weber State University - Biography of Frederick Jackson Turner
• National Humanities Center - The Significance of the Frontier in American History 1893
• Frederick Jackson Turner - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)

Frederick Jackson Turner (born November 14, 1861, Portage , Wisconsin , U.S.—died March 14, 1932, San Marino , California) was an American historian best known for the “ frontier thesis.” The single most influential interpretation of the American past, it proposed that the distinctiveness of the United States was attributable to its long history of “westering.” Despite the fame of this monocausal interpretation, as the teacher and mentor of dozens of young historians, Turner insisted on a multicausal model of history , with a recognition of the interaction of politics, economics , culture , and geography. Turner’s penetrating analyses of American history and culture were powerfully influential and changed the direction of much American historical writing.

Born in frontier Wisconsin and educated at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Turner did graduate work at Johns Hopkins University under Herbert Baxter Adams . Awarded a doctorate in 1891, Turner was one of the first historians professionally trained in the United States rather than in Europe. He began his teaching career at the University of Wisconsin in 1889. He began to make his mark with his first professional paper, “ The Significance of History” (1891), which contains the famous line “Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time.” The controversial notion that there was no fixed historical truth, and that all historical interpretation should be shaped by present concerns, would become the hallmark of the so-called “New History,” a movement that called for studies illuminating the historical development of the political and cultural controversies of the day. Turner should be counted among the “progressive historians,” though, with the political temperament of a small-town Midwesterner, his progressivism was rather timid. Nevertheless, he made it clear that his historical writing was shaped by a contemporary agenda.

Turner first detailed his own interpretation of American history in his justly famous paper, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” delivered at a meeting of historians in Chicago in 1893 and published many times thereafter. Adams, his mentor at Johns Hopkins , had argued that all significant American institutions derived from German and English antecedents . Rebelling against this view, Turner argued instead that Europeans had been transformed by the process of settling the American continent and that what was unique about the United States was its frontier history . (Ironically, Turner passed up an opportunity to attend Buffalo Bill ’s Wild West show so that he could complete “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” on the morning that he presented it.) He traced the social evolution of frontier life as it continually developed across the continent from the primitive conditions experienced by the explorer, trapper, and trader, through maturing agricultural stages, finally reaching the complexity of city and factory. Turner held that the American character was decisively shaped by conditions on the frontier, in particular the abundance of free land, the settling of which engendered such traits as self-reliance, individualism , inventiveness, restless energy, mobility, materialism, and optimism. Turner’s “frontier thesis” rose to become the dominant interpretation of American history for the next half-century and longer. In the words of historian William Appleman Williams, it “rolled through the universities and into popular literature like a tidal wave.” While today’s professional historians tend to reject such sweeping theories, emphasizing instead a variety of factors in their interpretations of the past, Turner’s frontier thesis remains the most popular explanation of American development among the literate public.

For a scholar of such wide influence, Turner wrote relatively few books. His Rise of the New West, 1819–1829 (1906) was published as a volume in The American Nation series, which included contributions from the nation’s leading historians. The follow-up to that study, The United States, 1830–1850: The Nation and Its Sections (1935), would not be published until after his death. Turner may have had difficulty writing books, but he was a brilliant master of the historical essay. The winner of an oratorical medal as an undergraduate, he also was a gifted and active public speaker. His deep, melodious voice commanded attention whether he was addressing a teachers group, an audience of alumni, or a branch of the Chautauqua movement . His writing, too, bore the stamp of oratory; indeed, he reworked his lectures into articles that appeared in the nation’s most influential popular and scholarly journals.

Many of Turner’s best essays were collected in The Frontier in American History (1920) and The Significance of Sections in American History (1932), for which he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1933. In these writings Turner promoted new methods in historical research, including the techniques of the newly founded social sciences , and urged his colleagues to study new topics such as immigration , urbanization , economic development , and social and cultural history . He also commented directly on the connections he saw between the past and the present.

The end of the frontier era of continental expansion, Turner reasoned, had thrown the nation “back upon itself.” Writing that “imperious will and force” had to be replaced by social reorganization, he called for an expanded system of educational opportunity that would supplant the geographic mobility of the frontier. “The test tube and the microscope are needed rather than ax and rifle,” he wrote; “in place of old frontiers of wilderness, there are new frontiers of unwon fields of science.” Pioneer ideals were to be maintained by American universities through the training of new leaders who would strive “to reconcile popular government and culture with the huge industrial society of the modern world.”

Whereas in his 1893 essay he celebrated the pioneers for the spirit of individualism that spurred migration westward, 25 years later Turner castigated “these slashers of the forest, these self-sufficing pioneers, raising the corn and livestock for their own need, living scattered and apart.” For Turner the national problem was “no longer how to cut and burn away the vast screen of the dense and daunting forest” but “how to save and wisely use the remaining timber.” At the end of his career, he stressed the vital role that regionalism would play in counteracting the atomization brought about by the frontier experience. Turner hoped that stability would replace mobility as a defining factor in the development of American society and that communities would become stronger as a result. What the world needed now, he argued, was “a highly organized provincial life to serve as a check upon mob psychology on a national scale, and to furnish that variety which is essential to vital growth and originality.” Turner never ceased to treat history as contemporary knowledge, seeking to explore the ways that the nation might rechannel its expansionist impulses into the development of community life.

Turner taught at the University of Wisconsin until 1910, when he accepted an appointment to a distinguished chair of history at Harvard University . At these two institutions he helped build two of the great university history departments of the 20th century and trained many distinguished historians, including Carl Becker , Merle Curti, Herbert Bolton , and Frederick Merk, who became Turner’s successor at Harvard. He was an early leader of the American Historical Association , serving as its president in 1910 and on the editorial board of the association’s American Historical Review from 1910 to 1915. Poor health forced his early retirement from Harvard in 1924. Turner moved to the Huntington Library in San Marino, California , where he remained as senior research associate until his death.

How the Myth of the American Frontier Got Its Start

Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis informed decades of scholarship and culture. Then he realized he was wrong

Colin Woodard

On the evening of   July 12, 1893, in the hall of a massive new Beaux-Arts building that would soon house the Art Institute of Chicago, a young professor named Frederick Jackson Turner rose to present what would become the most influential essay in the study of U.S. history.

It was getting late. The lecture hall was stifling from a day of blazing sun, which had tormented the throngs visiting the nearby Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, a carnival of never-before-seen wonders, like a fully illuminated electric city and George Ferris’ 264-foot-tall rotating observation wheel. Many of the hundred or so historians attending the conference, a meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA), were dazed and dusty from an afternoon spent watching Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show at a stadium near the fairground’s gates. They had already sat through three other speeches. Some may have been dozing off as the thin, 31-year-old associate professor from the University of Wisconsin in nearby Madison began his remarks.

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This article is a selection from the January/February 2023 issue of Smithsonian magazine

Turner told them the force that had forged Americans into one people was the frontier of the Midwest and Far West. In this virgin world, settlers had finally been relieved of the European baggage of feudalism that their ancestors had brought across the Atlantic, freeing them to find their true selves: self-sufficient, pragmatic, egalitarian and civic-minded. “The frontier promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people,” he told the audience. “In the crucible of the frontier, the immigrants were Americanized, liberated and fused into a mixed race, English in neither nationality nor characteristics.”

The audience was unmoved.

In their dispatches the following morning, most of the newspaper reporters covering the conference didn’t even mention Turner’s talk. Nor did the official account of the proceedings prepared by the librarian William F. Poole for The Dial , an influential literary journal. Turner’s own father, writing to relatives a few days later, praised Turner’s skills as the family’s guide at the fair, but he said nothing at all about the speech that had brought them there.

Yet in less than a decade, Turner would be the most influential living historian in the United States, and his Frontier Thesis would become the dominant lens through which Americans understood their character, origins and destiny. Soon, Jackson’s theme was prevalent in political speech, in the way high schools taught history, in patriotic paintings—in short, everywhere. Perfectly timed to meet the needs of a country experiencing dramatic and destabilizing change, Turner’s thesis was swiftly embraced by academic and political institutions, just as railroads, manufacturing machines and telegraph systems were rapidly reshaping American life.

By that time, Turner himself had realized that his theory was almost entirely wrong.

American historians had long believed that Providence had chosen their people to spread Anglo-Saxon freedom across the continent. As an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, Turner was introduced to a different argument by his mentor, the classical scholar William Francis Allen. Extrapolating from Darwinism, Allen believed societies evolved like organisms, adapting themselves to the environments they encountered. Scientific laws, not divine will, he advised his mentee, guided the course of nations. After graduating, Turner pursued a doctorate at Johns Hopkins University, where he impressed the history program’s leader, Herbert Baxter Adams, and formed a lifelong friendship with one of his teachers, an ambitious young professor named Woodrow Wilson. The connections were useful: When Allen died in 1889, Adams and Wilson aided Turner in his quest to take Allen’s place as head of Wisconsin’s history department. And on the strength of Turner’s early work, Adams invited him to present a paper at the 1893 meeting of the AHA, to be held in conjunction with the World’s Congress Auxiliary of the World’s Columbian Exposition.

The resulting essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” offered a vivid evocation of life in the American West. Stripped of “the garments of civilization,” settlers between the 1780s and the 1830s found themselves “in the birch canoe” wearing “the hunting shirt and the moccasin.” Soon, they were “planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick” and even shouting war cries. Faced with Native American resistance—Turner largely overlooked what the ethnic cleansing campaign that created all that “free land” might say about the American character—the settlers looked to the federal government for protection from Native enemies and foreign empires, including during the War of 1812, thus fostering a loyalty to the nation rather than to their half-forgotten nations of origin.

He warned that with the disappearance of the force that had shaped them—in 1890, the head of the Census Bureau concluded there was no longer a frontier line between areas that had been settled by European Americans and those that had not—Americans would no longer be able to flee west for an easy escape from responsibility, failure or oppression. “Each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past,” Turner concluded. “Now … the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.”

When he left the podium on that sweltering night, he could not have known how fervently the nation would embrace his thesis.

Like so many young scholars, Turner worked hard to bring attention to his thesis. He incorporated it into the graduate seminars he taught, lectured about it across the Midwest and wrote the entry for “Frontier” in the widely read Johnson’s Universal Cyclopædia. He arranged to have the thesis reprinted in the journal of the Wisconsin Historical Society and in the AHA’s 1893 annual report. Wilson championed it in his own writings, and the essay was read by hundreds of schoolteachers who found it reprinted in the popular pedagogical journal of the Herbart Society, a group devoted to the scientific study of teaching. Turner’s big break came when the Atlantic Monthly ’s editors asked him to use his novel viewpoint to explain the sudden rise of populists in the rural Midwest, and how they had managed to seize control of the Democratic Party to make their candidate, William Jennings Bryan, its nominee for president. Turner’s 1896 Atlantic Monthly essay , which tied the populists’ agitation to the social pressures allegedly caused by the closing of the frontier—soil depletion, debt, rising land prices—was promptly picked up by newspapers and popular journals across the country.

Meanwhile, Turner’s graduate students became tenured professors and disseminated his ideas to the up-and-coming generation of academics. The thrust of the thesis appeared in political speeches, dime-store western novels and even the new popular medium of film, where it fueled the work of a young director named John Ford who would become the master of the Hollywood western. In 1911, Columbia University’s David Muzzey incorporated it into a textbook—initially titled History of the American People —that would be used by most of the nation’s secondary schools for half a century.

Americans embraced Turner’s argument because it provided a fresh and credible explanation for the nation’s exceptionalism—the notion that the U.S. follows a path soaring above those of other countries—one that relied not on earlier Calvinist notions of being “the elect,” but rather on the scientific (and fashionable) observations of Charles Darwin. In a rapidly diversifying country, the Frontier Thesis denied a special role to the Eastern colonies’ British heritage; we were instead a “composite nation,” birthed in the Mississippi watershed. Turner’s emphasis on mobility, progress and individualism echoed the values of the Gilded Age—when readers devoured Horatio Alger’s rags-to-riches stories—and lent them credibility for the generations to follow.

But as a researcher, Turner himself turned away from the Frontier Thesis in the years after the 1890s. He never wrote it down in book form or even in academic articles. He declined invitations to defend it, and before long he himself lost faith in it.

For one thing, he had been relying too narrowly on the experiences in his own region of the Upper Midwest, which had been colonized by a settlement stream originating in New England. In fact, he found, the values he had ascribed to the frontier’s environmental conditioning were actually those of this Greater New England settlement culture, one his family and most of his fellow citizens in Portage, Wisconsin, remained part of, with their commitment to strong village and town governments, taxpayer-financed public schools and the direct democracy of the town meeting. He saw that other parts of the frontier had been colonized by other settlement streams anchored in Scots-Irish Appalachia or in the slave plantations of the Southern lowlands, and he noted that their populations continued to behave completely differently from one another, both politically and culturally, even when they lived in similar physical environments. Somehow settlers moving west from these distinct regional cultures were resisting the Darwinian environmental and cultural forces that had supposedly forged, as Turner’s biographer, Ray Allen Billington, put it, “a new political species” of human, the American. Instead, they were stubbornly remaining themselves. “Men are not absolutely dictated to by climate, geography, soils or economic interests,” Turner wrote in 1922. “The influence of the stock from which they sprang, the inherited ideals, the spiritual factors, often triumph over the material interests.”

Turner spent the last decades of his life working on what he intended to be his magnum opus, a book not about American unity but rather about the abiding differences between its regions, or “sections,” as he called them. “In respect to problems of common action, we are like what a United States of Europe would be,” he wrote in 1922, at the age of 60. For example, the Scots-Irish and German small farmers and herders who settled the uplands of the southeastern states had long clashed with nearby English enslavers over education spending, tax policy and political representation. Turner saw the whole history of the country as a wrestling match between these smaller quasi-nations, albeit a largely peaceful one guided by rules, laws and shared American ideals: “When we think of the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, as steps in the marking off of spheres of influence and the assignment of mandates [between nations] … we see a resemblance to what has gone on in the Old World,” Turner explained. He hoped shared ideals—and federal institutions—would prove cohesive for a nation suddenly coming of age, its frontier closed, its people having to steward their lands rather than striking out for someplace new.

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Colin Woodard | | READ MORE

Colin Woodard is a journalist and historian, and the author of six books including Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood . He lives in Maine.

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2 The Making of a National Identity: The Frontier Thesis

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Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis became a significant force in shaping the national identity of the U.S. The ideologies incorporated into Turner's frontier thesis were not only meant to provide a historical interpretation of how the U.S. came into being but also satisfied the national need for a “usable past.” This frontier thesis was able to transmit a series of symbols that became imbedded in the nation's self‐perception and self‐understanding: Virgin land, wilderness, land and democracy, Manifest Destiny, chosen race. Race must be understood as an important piece of this developing national identity because the idea of “purity” of race was used as a rationalization to colonize, exclude, devalue, and even exterminate the native borderlands people.

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The American Yawp Reader

Frederick jackson turner, “significance of the frontier in american history” (1893).

Perhaps the most influential essay by an American historian, Frederick Jackson Turner’s address to the American Historical Association on “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” defined for many Americans the relationship between the frontier and American culture and contemplated what might follow “the closing of the frontier.”

In a recent bulletin of the Superintendent of the Census for 1890 appear these significant words: “Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports.” This brief official statement marks the closing of a great historic movement. 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.

Behind institutions, behind constitutional forms and modifications, lie the vital forces that call these organs into life and shape them to meet changing conditions. The peculiarity of American institutions is, the fact that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people—to the changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and in developing at each area of this progress out of the primitive economic and political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life. Said Calhoun in 1817, “We are great, and rapidly—I was about to say fearfully—growing!” So saying, he touched the distinguishing feature of American life. All peoples show development; the germ theory of politics has been sufficiently emphasized. In the case of most nations, however, the development has occurred in a limited area; and if the nation has expanded, it has met other growing peoples whom it has conquered. But in the case of the United States we have a different phenomenon. Limiting our attention to the Atlantic coast, we have the familiar phenomenon of the evolution of institutions in a limited area, such as the rise of representative government; the differentiation of simple colonial governments into complex organs; the progress from primitive industrial society, without division of labor, up to manufacturing civilization. But we have in addition to this a recurrence of the process of evolution in each western area reached in the process of expansion. Thus American development has exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area. American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character. The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is the Great West. …

In this advance, the frontier is the outer edge of the wave—the meeting point between savagery and civilization. Much has been written about the frontier from the point of view of border warfare and the chase, but as a field for the serious study of the economist and the historian it has been neglected.

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 result is that to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom—these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier. Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them. He would be a rash prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life has now entirely ceased. Movement has been its dominant fact, and, unless this training has no effect upon a people, the American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise. But never again will such gifts of free land offer themselves. For a moment, at the frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant. There is not  tabula rasa . The stubborn American environment is there with its imperious summons to accept its conditions; the inherited ways of doing things are also there; and yet, in spite of environment, and in spite of custom, each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifference to its lessons, have accompanied the frontier. What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the nations of Europe more remotely. And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.

Source: Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History, 1919.

Excerpts from writings of Frederick Jackson Turner, 1890s-1920s

Frederick Jackson Turner is most famous for expounding the influential “Frontier Thesis” of American history, a thesis he first introduced in 1893 and which he expanded upon for the remainder of his scholarly career.   See the following link for a short biography.

In the settlement of America we have to observe how European life entered the continent, and how America modified and developed that life and reacted on Europe. . . . [T]he frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick; he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes or perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails.

Little by little he transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe . . .. The fact is, that here is a new product that is American. At first, the frontier was the Atlantic coast. It was the frontier of Europe in a very real sense. Moving westward, the frontier became more and more American. As successive terminal moraines result from successive glaciations, so each frontier leaves its traces behind it, and when it becomes a settled area the region still partakes of the frontier characteristics. Thus the advance of the frontier has meant a steady movement away from the influence of Europe, a steady growth of independence on American lines. And to study this advance, the men who grew up under these conditions, and the political, economic, and social results of it, is to study the really American part of our history.

. . [T]he frontier promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people. The coast was preponderantly English, but the later tides of continental immigration flowed across to the free lands. . . . In the crucible of the frontier the immigrants were Americanized, liberated, and fused into a mixed race, English   in neither nationality nor characteristics.   The process has gone on from the early days to our own.

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 result is that, to the frontier, the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness, that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients, that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends, that restless, nervous energy, that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom -- these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier.

The last chapter in the development of Western democracy is the one that deals with its conquest over the vast spaces of the new West. At each new stage of Western development, the people have had to grapple with larger areas, with bigger combinations. The little colony of Massachusetts veterans that settled at Marietta received a land grant as large as the State of Rhode Island. The band of Connecticut pioneers that followed Moses Cleaveland to the Connecticut Reserve occupied a region as large as the parent State. The area which settlers of New England stock occupied on the prairies of northern Illinois surpassed the combined area of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Men who had become accustomed to the narrow valleys and the little towns of the East found themselves out on the boundless spaces of the West dealing with units of such magnitude as dwarfed their former experience. The Great Lakes, the Prairies, the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, the Mississippi and the Missouri, furnished new standards of measurement for the achievement of this industrial democracy. Individualism began to give way to coöperation and to governmental activity. Even in the earlier days of the democratic conquest of the wilderness, demands had been made upon the government for support in internal improvements, but this new West showed a growing tendency to call to its assistance the powerful arm of national authority. In the period since the Civil War, the vast public domain has been donated to the individual farmer, to States for education, to railroads for the construction of transportation lines.

Moreover, with the advent of democracy in the last fifteen years upon the Great Plains, new physical conditions have presented themselves which have accelerated the social tendency of Western democracy. The pioneer farmer of the days of Lincoln could place his family on a flatboat, strike into the wilderness, cut out his clearing, and with little or no capital go on to the achievement of industrial independence. Even the homesteader on the Western prairies found it possible to work out a similar independent destiny, although the factor of transportation made a serious and increasing impediment to the free working-out of his individual career. But when the arid lands and the mineral resources of the Far West were reached, no conquest was possible by the old individual pioneer methods. Here expensive irrigation works must be constructed, coöperative activity was demanded in utilization of the water supply, capital beyond the reach of the small farmer was required. In a word, the physiographic province itself decreed that the destiny of this new frontier should be social rather than individual.

Magnitude of social achievement is the watchword of the democracy since the Civil War. From petty towns built in the marshes, cities arose whose greatness and industrial power are the wonder of our time. The conditions were ideal for the production of captains of industry. The old democratic admiration for the self-made man, its old deference to the rights of competitive individual development, together with the stupendous natural resources that opened to the conquest of the keenest and the strongest, gave such conditions of mobility as enabled the development of the large corporate industries which in our own decade have marked the West. Thus, in brief, have been outlined the chief phases of the development of Western democracy in the different areas which it has conquered. There has been a steady development of the industrial ideal, and a steady increase of the social tendency, in this later movement of Western democracy. While the individualism of the frontier, so prominent in the earliest days of the Western advance, has been preserved as an ideal, more and more these individuals struggling each with the other, dealing with vaster and vaster areas, with larger and larger problems, have found it necessary to combine under the leadership of the strongest. This is the explanation of the rise of those preëminent captains of industry whose genius has concentrated capital to control the fundamental resources of the nation.

If now in the way of recapitulation, we try to pick out from the influences that have gone to the making of Western democracy the factors which constitute the net result of this movement, we shall have to mention at least the following:-- Most important of all has been the fact that an area of free land has continually lain on the western border of the settled area of the United States. Whenever social conditions tended to crystallize in the East, whenever capital tended to press upon labor or political restraints to impede the freedom of the mass, there was this gate of escape to the free conditions of the frontier. These free lands promoted individualism, economic equality, freedom to rise, democracy. Men would not accept inferior wages and a permanent position of social subordination when this promised land of freedom and equality was theirs for the taking. Who would rest content under oppressive legislative conditions when with a slight effort he might reach a land wherein to become a co-worker in the building of free cities and free States on the lines of his own ideal? In a word, then, free lands meant free opportunities. Their existence has differentiated the American democracy from the democracies which have preceded it, because ever, as democracy in the East took the form of highly specialized and complicated industrial society, in the West it kept in touch with primitive conditions, and by action and reaction these two forces have shaped our history.

In the next place, these free lands and this treasury of industrial resources have existed over such vast spaces that they have demanded of democracy increasing spaciousness of design and power of execution. Western democracy is contrasted with the democracy of all other times in the largeness of the tasks to which it has set its hand, and in the vast achievements which it has wrought out in the control of nature and of politics. It would be difficult to over-emphasize the importance of this training upon democracy. Never before in the history of the world has a democracy existed on so vast an area and handled things in the gross with such success, with such largeness of design, and such grasp upon the means of execution. In short, democracy has learned in the West of the United States how to deal with the problem of magnitude. The old historic democracies were but little states with primitive economic conditions.

But the very task of dealing with vast resources, over vast areas, under the conditions of free competition furnished by the West, has produced the rise of those captains of industry whose success in consolidating economic power now raises the question as to whether democracy under such conditions can survive. For the old military type of Western leaders like George Rogers Clark, Andrew Jackson, and William Henry Harrison have been substituted such industrial leaders as James J. Hill, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie.

The question is imperative, then, What ideals persist from this democratic experience of the West, and have they acquired sufficient momentum to sustain themselves under conditions so radically unlike those in the days of their origin? In other words, the question put at the beginning of this discussion becomes pertinent. Under the forms of the American democracy is there in reality evolving such a concentration of economic and social power in the hands of a comparatively few men as may make political democracy an appearance rather than a reality? The free lands are gone. The material forces that gave vitality to Western democracy are passing away. It is to the realm of the spirit, to the domain of ideals and legislation, that we must look for Western influence upon democracy in our own days.

Western democracy has been from the time of its birth idealistic. The very fact of the wilderness appealed to men as a fair, blank page on which to write a new chapter in the story of man's struggle for a hi,,her type of society. The Western wilds, from the Alleghanies to the Pacific, constituted the richest free gift that was ever spread out before civilized man. To the peasant and artisan of the Old World, bound by the chains of social class, as old as custom and as inevitable as fate, the West offered an exit into a free life and greater well-being among the bounties of nature, into the midst of resources that demanded manly exertion, and that gave in return the chance for indefinite ascent in the scale of social advance. "To each she offered gifts after his will." Never again can such an opportunity come to the sons of men. It was unique, and the thing is so near us, so much a part of our lives, that we do not even yet comprehend its full significance. The existence of this land of opportunity has made America the goal of idealists from the days of the Pilgrim Fathers. With all the materialism of the pioneer movements, this idealistic conception of the vacant lands as an opportunity for a new order of things is unmistakably present.

This, at least, is clear: American democracy is fundamentally the outcome of the experiences of the American people in dealing with the West. Western democracy through the whole of its earlier period tended to the production of a society of which the most distinctive fact was the freedom of the individual to rise under conditions of social mobility, and whose ambition was the liberty and well-being of the masses. This conception has vitalized all American democracy, and has brought it into sharp contrasts with the democracies of history, and with those modern efforts of Europe to create an artificial democratic order by legislation. The problem of the United States is not to create democracy, but to conserve democratic institutions and ideals.

• CAMPAIGN TRAIL

Frontier Thesis

The Frontier Thesis or Turner Thesis , is the argument advanced by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893 that American democracy was formed by the American frontier. He stressed the process—the moving frontier line—and the impact it had on pioneers going through the process. He also stressed results, especially that American democracy was the primary result, along with egalitarianism , a lack of interest in high culture , and violence. "American democracy was born of no theorist's dream; it was not carried in the Sarah Constant to Virginia, nor in the Mayflower to Plymouth. It came out of the American forest, and it gained new strength each time it touched a new frontier," said Turner. In the thesis, the American frontier established liberty by releasing Americans from European mindsets and eroding old, dysfunctional customs. The frontier had no need for standing armies, established churches, aristocrats or nobles, nor for landed gentry who controlled most of the land and charged heavy rents. Frontier land was free for the taking. Turner first announced his thesis in a paper entitled " The Significance of the Frontier in American History ", delivered to the American Historical Association in 1893 in Chicago. He won wide acclaim among historians and intellectuals. Turner elaborated on the theme in his advanced history lectures and in a series of essays published over the next 25 years, published along with his initial paper as The Frontier in American History.

Turner's emphasis on the importance of the frontier in shaping American character influenced the interpretation found in thousands of scholarly histories. By the time Turner died in 1932, 60% of the leading history departments in the U.S. were teaching courses in frontier history along Turnerian lines.

Full article ...

Books/Sources

• The Frontier Thesis: Valid Interpretation of American History? - Ray Allen Billington
• The Turner Thesis: Concerning the Role of the Frontier in American History (Problems in American civilization)... - George Rogers Taylor
• Block 6 Lecture 1 Turner's Frontier Thesis
• 7 1 c 6 TURNER'S THESIS OF EXPANSION OF FRONTIER 7 1 C 6

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The Past is Present

Does Turner Still Live? Considerations on the Popular Afterlife of the American Frontier

Walter Nugent  

Last July marked the 125th anniversary of the “Turner thesis,” which boldly asserted that the westward-moving frontier determined the shape and nature of American civilization. The Turner thesis resonated profoundly. It became the accepted explanation of U.S. development for generations, both among professional historians and the broader public. Does it today?

Let us have a look at the birth of the Turner thesis in July 1893. It took place in Chicago, at the World’s Columbian Exposition, which was in full swing that summer. It boasted a huge Ferris wheel on the Midway Plaisance, along the south side of the newly-opened University of Chicago, and a host of classical-styled buildings eastward to Lake Michigan. (All but one was temporary; it became, and still is, the Museum of Science and Industry.) Exotic ethnic exhibits of strange, “primitive” peoples entertained thousands of visitors; ethnic-themed concerts edified them (Antonín Dvořák, for example, conducted his and other composers’ works on Bohemian Day on August 12th ); and Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show delighted many fair-goers . Several miles to the north, just off the Loop, another freshly-built, classical structure—the only one on the east side of Michigan Avenue and about to become the Art Institute of Chicago—served as the venue for scholarly and literary conferences from May into October. The nine-year-old American Historical Association (AHA) sponsored one of them.

The AHA meeting opened on the hot and humid night of Tuesday, July 11—Chicago’s daytime temperature was in the nineties that week—with a session chaired by James B. Angell, president of the University of Michigan and of the Association. It included four academic papers. Jesse Macy of Iowa College spoke on “The Relation of History to Politics.” George Kreihn of Johns Hopkins described “English Popular Uprisings in the Middle Ages,” followed by Reuben Gold Thwaites of the Wisconsin Historical Society on “Lead Mining in Illinois and Wisconsin.” The final speaker was thirty-year-old Frederick Jackson Turner of the University of Wisconsin, who spoke on “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Press coverage of the session began bravely in the Chicago Herald, which gave Professor Macy seven paragraphs, but the reporting petered out after that. The press probably had their deadlines to meet and had likely braved enough of the day’s heat. In even the most conscientious newspapers, Turner received only a mention. The journalists did not describe or discuss it, then or in the following days. His eventual biographers doubted that he could have read the entire paper or even much of it, given the length of the program, the heat of the evening, and the fatigue of the historians who had spent the afternoon with Buffalo Bill. When it was published later in the Proceedings of the AHA, it ran to nearly fifty pages.

Turner’s thoughts on the frontier’s significance did not catch on immediately, but they gained momentum and attention after 1900. In fact, his accumulating fame propelled him to the presidency of the AHA in 1910, when he was only forty-eight, making him one of the youngest ever to receive that honor. The Chicago daily newspapers, and for that matter, historians at that time, little noted what Turner said. But in time, historians and a good bit of the general public would long remember “the Turner thesis.”

In even the most conscientious newspapers, Turner received only a mention. The journalists did not describe or discuss it, then or in the following days.

What, then, was that thesis? Turner began by noting a fact: that the official report of the results of the 1890 U.S. Census observed that it was no longer possible to draw a “frontier line” between the Canadian and Mexican borders, east of which was settled territory and west of which was unsettled. The “frontier line” had, up to then, demarcated the two regions. By the end of the 1880s, the Census report found, “the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line.” This, Turner concluded, “marks the closing of a great historic movement. Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West.” And here comes the thesis: “The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development. ” (Italics added.) And, he would go on to say, that movement explains American culture. A student once said in a class of mine that she did not think much of Western history because it lacked ideas. I should have quoted Turner to her (but failed to), as it’s almost impossible to conceive of a more comprehensive statement than his—or one more audacious.

Only later did historians and others point out that the land was not “free”—it usually cost good money to own it and start a working farm on it, and it was certainly not empty. Indians already lived there. But those objections surfaced in the years ahead. The conventional wisdom in the 1890s among those who pondered America’s origins was that Europeans had brought with them the germs of civilization, and those germs evolved, in time, into the forms of American civilization. Not so, said Turner. “The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is the Great West…. The frontier is the outer edge of the wave—the meeting point between savagery and civilization…. Little by little [the American] transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe, not simply the development of Germanic germs…. The fact is, that here is a new product that is American.”

So strikingly comprehensive was this proclamation, so in contrast with the conventional wisdom, yet so flattering to Americans’ nationalism, that it took firm hold among historians, academic and amateur, who concerned themselves with how America came to be whatever it had become. Although the thesis had some serious flaws, they were not immediately obvious. For one thing, the frontier was not over in 1890. A line may have been gone, but a great many unsettled places remained. Homesteading, the creation of quarter-section (160-acre) farms by personal and family industriousness, had indeed been chartered by the Homestead Act of 1862 and reinforced by later statutes, but its heyday was post-1890. More homesteads were patented from 1900 to 1920 than in the previous forty years. The “Indian wars” were over by 1890, after the surrender of the Apache Geronimo in New Mexico Territory in 1886 and the murder of Sitting Bull and the Army’s massacre of Sioux at Wounded Knee in 1890. For that matter, the consigning of indigenous peoples to “savagery” placed Turner within a comfortable consensus among Euro-Americans who did not doubt the superiority of their own “civilization.” It would be decades before reflective “New Western Historians” would seriously question these categories.

The official report of the results of the 1890 U.S. Census observed that it was no longer possible to draw a “frontier line” between the Canadian and Mexican borders, east of which was settled territory and west of which was unsettled.

The Turner thesis took firm hold beginning in the late 1890s because it was a simple explanation, tied to a Census fact, the “end of the frontier,” and because it was uncritically nationalistic and self-assuring. Territorial expansion, thought to be over after Oregon and the northern half of Mexico were incorporated into the continental U.S. by 1854, resumed with the taking of Hawaii and the Spanish colonies of Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico after the “splendid little war” of 1898. Through “protectorates” over Central American countries and Cuba from 1898 to the 1930s, the Caribbean became an American lake. The Turner thesis seemed to ratify and resurrect, in academic language, the old idea of Manifest Destiny. National chest-thumping continued anew, and Turner’s thesis gave it resonance.

Turner and his thesis flourished for several ensuing decades. One of his biographers, Ray Allan Billington, remarked that by 1950 or so, the entire field of American historians had become “one big Turnerverein .” [1] Turner mentored many graduate students at Wisconsin and then at Harvard where he taught from 1910 until retiring in 1924. By the 1930s and 1940s they were scattered in history departments around the country, engaging in research on aspects of the Turnerian West and producing their own students who carried the Turnerian torch a generation further. Turner kept track of when his students gave papers at the AHA or the Mississippi Valley Historical Association (now the Organization of American Historians), the two national organizations of professional historians. They “sometimes number a third of those reading papers.” [2] My undergraduate teacher of American history, Peter Beckman, earned his Ph.D. at the Catholic University in Washington in the late 1940s. Asked one time what his dissertation topic had been, he replied, “What was anybody’s dissertation at the Catholic University about at that time? The Catholic Church on the XYZ frontier, from bumpty-bump to bumpty-bump.” (His was on Kansas in the 1850s and 1860s). History departments made sure they included faculty who specialized in regions of the U.S., so as to explore their development in the Turnerian mode. In the late 1940s, the AHA named Turner and Francis Parkman the most outstanding U.S. historians ever. [3] In 1963, when I joined the faculty at Indiana University, history students could take Oscar Winther’s “History of the Far West,” or Chase Mooney’s “History of the South,” or John Barnhart’s (himself a Turner student) “History of the Middle West.” By 1970 all three of these senior colleagues had died or retired. They were not replaced. Their courses, begun in the late 1930s heyday of Turnerism, were not taught again. The department prioritized newer subfields—first, quantification, and soon, African-American history, and a bit later, women’s history. The Turnerian hegemony had begun to erode.

More homesteads were patented from 1900 to 1920 than in the previous forty years.

By the 1980s it was definitely crumbling. Turner himself wrote many essays, but only one book. That book, The Rise of the New West 1819-1829 (1906) and a good portion of his published articles were on events that took place in the early nineteenth century. His students and followers traced frontiers of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, concentrating on trans-Appalachia to the Mississippi and a little westward before the frontier was reputed to have closed. But in time, the sheer weight of eighty years of further history after 1893, whether of “frontiers” or simply of events that happened in the West, however defined, made younger historians uneasy. How to fit the twentieth century within Turner’s framework? Often, it didn’t work. Historians were also aware of trends and currents in the general culture—the civil rights movement, women’s rights in its various aspects, a troubling suspicion that Native American history had not been told fairly, and that ethnic minorities in the West—Asians, Latinos and others—had never had a frontier history in the Turnerian sense, but they undoubtedly had histories. Beyond those areas that the Turnerian canvas hardly covered, the United States had changed from a society and economy in which farm life was the norm, as it still was in Turner’s own day and certainly was in the times he wrote about, to the urban, even metropolitan, society of the late twentieth century. The Turner thesis was showing too many holes. Too many monographs and journal articles were appearing that owed nothing to it. It was time, by the 1980s, for a new thesis—a new paradigm—a new Western history.

And lo, that appeared. A one-time student of Howard R. Lamar at Yale and a native of inland Southern California, Patricia Nelson Limerick brought out The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West in 1987. [4] Within a few years, the book was acclaimed and recognized as the charter of the “New Western History.” Limerick treated Turner with appropriate deference. He was, she wrote, “a scholar with intellectual courage, an innovative spirit, and a forceful writing style. But respect for [Turner] the individual flowed over into excessive deference to the individual’s ideas.” [5] Turner’s assertion, based on the Census, that the frontier had “closed” in 1890, left a question: what came, or comes, after? (Turner never could decide; late in his life he suggested some form of capitalism, maybe socialism, something as yet inchoate.) And if it had closed, then pre-1890 American history was walled off from anything later. That alone fossilized the field of Western history. Limerick’s answer was to break the end of the frontier from the Census straitjacket. How to date the “end of the frontier”? Perhaps with the acquisition of Oregon and the Southwest in the late 1840s. Perhaps with the statutory end of homesteading in the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934. Her “preferred entry in the ‘closing competition’ is the popularization of tourism and the quaintness of the folk: when Indian war dances became tourist spectacles, when the formerly scorned customs of the Chinese drew tourists to Chinatown….” Then the “frontier” could be considered over with. [6]

The Turner thesis seemed to ratify and resurrect, in academic language, the old idea of Manifest Destiny.

So what next? Limerick argued that “the idea of the frontier is obviously worth studying” but it “is an unstable concept,” which “required that the observer stand in the East and look to the West.” [7] There were other perspectives. In fact—while Turner thought of the frontier as a repeating process, why not instead think of the West, or the many Wests, as places? Thus, “In rethinking Western history, we gain the freedom to think of the West as a place—as many complicated environments occupied by natives who considered their homelands to be the center, not the edge…. Deemphasize the frontier and its supposed end, conceive of the West as a place and not a process, and Western American history has a new look.” [8]

Indeed it did. Prior to Legacy, historians of the West had already broken out of the Turnerian confines with books and articles on aspects of Native American, Latino/a, Asian and European immigrant, and women’s history. Legacy, however, which Limerick always insisted was a book of synthesis rather than of fresh research, provided a new framework for such endeavors. The victory of the new framework was not sudden or complete, as was revealed in a survey I conducted of about three hundred Western historians and fiction writers in early 1991, about four years after Limerick’s book appeared. I asked three questions: where do you think the West is? Where do you personally have to go to enter it (if you’re outside) or exit it (if you’re inside)? and what sets “the West” apart? The historians who responded showed lingering signs of Turnerian loyalties or training, i.e. a view of the West looking at it from the East. The eastern edge was most commonly said to be the north-south line along the Red-Missouri-and Sabine rivers, i.e. the eastern boundaries of the Great Plains states. Nearly as many responders chose the Mississippi, thus making the region the “trans-Mississippi West” of traditional college courses. A smaller cluster chose the 98th or 100th meridians. For the majority, the western boundary was the Pacific, though a good number excluded the coastal areas west of the Cascades and Sierras as not really “Western” despite geography. About one-eighth of the historians, but almost half of the fiction writers, refused to give any actual geographical limits, but claimed the “the West” was a myth, or a state of mind; and after all, that is what Western fiction is largely about.

Thus there remained in 1991 a residue, or even loyalty, to the Turnerian viewpoint. But two collections of essays, all in the New Western History camp, were already in the works. Limerick co-authored one with Clyde A. Milner II and Charles E. Rankin: Trails: Toward a New Western History, which included a dozen essays by various historians on historiography. A then-all-Yale team of William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin produced Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past, which included another fifteen essays with a similar non-Turnerian thrust. [9]

At the University of Indiana in 1963, history students could take Oscar Winther’s “History of the Far West,” or Chase Mooney’s “History of the South,” or John Barnhart’s “History of the Middle West.” By 1970 all three of these senior colleagues had died or retired. They were not replaced.

To return now to our original question, does the Turner thesis still live? Are there still any Turnerians? Or has the New Western History obliterated it and them? I have not conducted another survey like the one I did in 1991, so the following report on the status of the field is impressionistic and hardly random. But it may be indicative. First let me quote a biographical item. For the program of the 2013 AHA meeting, Stanford University’s Richard White wrote a short biography of the new Association president, William Cronon. Both were outstanding, well-published historians of the American West and were also leaders in the related field of environmental history. [10] Cronon also happened to hold the Frederick Jackson Turner chair at the University of Wisconsin. Recapitulating Cronon’s career, White pointed out that Cronon had been a student at Yale of Howard R. Lamar’s—as were Limerick, John Faragher, and others who became leaders in the new Western history. That history “gestated at Yale,” White wrote, “and those outside the field as well as the popular press sometimes lumped Yale, the New Western History, and a rejection of Turner’s frontier thesis into one homogenous lump.” But that missed the mark. “Turner and the Frontier Thesis had long ago lost influence among American historians,” White continued, “although Turner retained, at least indirectly, a great hold on the American popular imagination [more on this in a moment]. Patty Limerick certainly was explicitly and wittily anti-Turnerian, but her target was his hold over popular culture and popular history.”

Perhaps another survey like the one I conducted thirty-odd years ago would end up completely obliterating the Turner thesis. Perhaps not. In lieu of a full-blown survey, I contacted a handful of friends in the profession who have all achieved considerable eminence. I asked them about their views on the thesis today, at its 125th anniversary. Their responses—with one exception—pretty well confirmed White’s epitaph.

How to fit the twentieth century within Turner’s framework? Often, it didn’t work.

Anne F. Hyde reported that she had just met with graduate students who “were complaining about western historians still feeling obligated to use Turner as a straw man.” [11] She agreed with one of them “who said it is fine if you take Turner seriously as part of a cultural moment” or if regionalism is taken seriously. But she doesn’t require students to “use Turner himself.”

Nor does Steve Aron. [12] He wrote that he “stopped assigning ‘The Significance of the Frontier’ in my American West course about ten years ago. I still briefly summarize its argument and its impact in my opening lecture and come back to it in a lecture about intellectual and political currents at the end of the nineteenth century, but no longer make students read it…. It’s clear that very few have encountered it before though a slightly larger number have heard of Turner.” In short, Aron finds that “[T]he idea that the ‘settlement’ of the frontier/West shaped American history/character/culture has great popular resonance, though much less than it did decades ago.”

William F. Deverell, finds that “Turner and his thesis have wandered largely out of my courses on the West, either as topics or as organizing principle…. [H]e and the thesis have begun to appear more in my US survey and environmental history courses as a moment in time in post-Civil War intellectual history.” He also lectures about “what motivated the thesis” and notes Turner’s blind spots—lots of nature, few indigenous peoples.” [13]

Virginia Scharff writes, “I guess I’d say that Turner lives in pop culture and politics, most assuredly…. At the same time, I don’t see Turner resonating much in the most exciting scholarship. Some of the best stuff goes right at him, for example, Honor Sachs’ brilliant Home Rule (Yale, 2015) explores the way in which the settlement of Kentucky was premised not on valiant men taming the wilderness, but the establishment of other exploitative and violent households where the labor of women and children was crucial.” [14]

Even as the Western story triumphed on all fronts it was increasingly burdened with a melancholy nostalgia. The West was won—now what? Enter Turner and his 1893 “Significance” essay.

These historians, then, agree (within their own nuances) that Turner and the thesis are no longer the engines of new scholarship or of historical pedagogy. Yet they believe that versions of the frontier idea) still command much respect in American popular culture. Paul Andrew Hutton takes a quite different position. [15] “I not only still teach Turner but I still firmly believe that he was correct,” he writes. Hutton attached to his e-mail to me a piece he wrote for True West magazine in the November 2018 issue called “When the West Was True.” I cannot do justice to it here, but I encourage reading it. Turner appears, favorably, toward the conclusion. “Got a great response from that readership,” Hutton writes. He adds that by the 1880s-1890s and just beyond, besides Turner there appeared Buffalo Bill Cody’s show, Theodore Roosevelt’s “magnificent” four-volume The Winning of the West, Owen Wister’s 1902 novel The Virginian, and works by the artists Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell. All of them had “made the story of the West into America’s story.” But not without a shadow, according to Hutton. “[E]ven as the Western story triumphed on all fronts it was increasingly burdened with a melancholy nostalgia. The West was won—now what? Enter Turner and his 1893 “Significance” essay. Hutton believes that it “revolutionized the teaching of American history [and made Turner] the godfather of the academic field of Western history.” No doubt about that. Thus he concludes, “There is a powerful truth in the story of the American frontier that is far too valuable to our country to ever be cast aside.” [16]

Turner wondered himself about “now what”? In correspondence late in his life (he died in 1932), he lamented that the frontier, the force that shaped America and Americans’ character, was over. What would come next? He did not know and did not predict. He also realized that the frontier thesis was not perfect, and that some of its critics were correct. The criticisms, of course, broadened and deepened as the New Western History developed in the 1980s and onward. Yet it was still a fair statement in 1998, as Allan G. Bogue wrote in his biography of Turner, that “of American historians only Francis Parkman and Henry Adams left an imprint upon American history comparable to that of Turner, and theirs were less varied than his.” [17] Penetrating assessments of Turner’s understandings of American democracy and nationalism appear in the final chapter of the other major biography, by Ray Allen Billington. [18]

To many Americans, this country is not just different, it is exceptional—something Turner affirmed in 1893. “Make America Great Again” is a manifestation of that. And it has been not only from the Right; Barack Obama clearly repeated the exceptional idea.

The hegemony of the Turner thesis, so all-encompassing among professional historians and history teachers and so resonating and echoing among the general public, began to erode about a decade before it reached its centennial. Some reasons for that have already been mentioned—the near-disappearance of anything like the frontier homestead, the steady increase of the country’s metropolitan population and the thinning of rural and small-town population, the mass media and social media and the fading away of TV and movie Westerns. Important too was the rise, overall, of a very different national agenda dating from the 1970’s, not to say from the early twentieth century or 1893, the year of Turner’s epochal essay.

Yet aspects and remnants of the frontier idea do linger on. To many Americans, this country is not just different, it is exceptional—something Turner affirmed in 1893. “Make America Great Again” is a manifestation of that. And it has been not only from the Right; Barack Obama clearly repeated the exceptional idea. Whether “exceptional” means just “different,” or something unique and privileged, is another discussion. Despite the fact that Americans shoved aside the indigenous peoples of North America and practiced their own form of settler colonialism, as various European nations did elsewhere in the world since 1500, they have not wavered—in their popular culture—from believing that they have been exceptional, a people guided and motivated by lofty, humane ideals. We are unique, we are the best, and we have been destined by God—so say many Americans.

So is Turner’s frontier thesis dead or is it alive? To academic historians, it’s pretty dead. Yet it is very much alive to fans of the History Channel and other consumers and conveyors of popular culture. They may not think much about free land, its recession westward, and the line between savagery and civilization, but in a real sense, they are Turnerians still.

[1] Billington was referring to the Turnvereine , or Turner Clubs, a popular and widespread social and athletic organization of that time among German-Americans.

[2] Ray Allen Billington, Frederick Jackson Turner: Historian, Scholar, Teacher (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 330.

[3] Allan G. Bogue, Frederick Jackson Turner: Strange Roads Going Down (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), xiii.

[4] New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

[5] Legacy of Conquest, 20.

[6] Ibid., 25.

[7] Ibid., 25-26.

[8] Ibid., 26-27 .

[9] Limerick, Milner, and Rankin, eds., Trails: Toward a New Western History (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991), and Cronon, Miles, and Gitlin, eds., Under an Open Aky: Rethinking America’s Western Past (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992).

[10] White had been president of the Western History Association and of the Organization of American Historians, and author of many books on Western and environmental history.

[11] Hyde is professor of history at the University of Oklahoma, editor of the Western Historical Quarterly, and author (among other things) of the prize-winning Empires, Nations, and Families: A History of the North American West, 1800-1860

[12] Professor and chair of history at UCLA and former director of the Institute for the Study of the American West at the Autry Center of the American West in Los Angeles.

[13] Professor of history at the University of Southern California and director of the Huntington Library-USC Institute on California and the West.

[14] Distinguished professor emerita at the University of New Mexico, past president of the Western History Association, and author of several successful novels as well as histories.

[15] Distinguished professor at the University of New Mexico, longtime executive director (1990-2006) of the Western History Association, past president of the Western Writers of America and winner of many of its Spur writing awards.

[16] Hutton’s communication, and those from Anne Hyde, William Deverell, Stephen Aron, and Virginia Scharff are e-mails I received from them in late November 2018.

[17] Bogue, Frederick Jackson Turner, 451.

[18] “XVIII: The Persistence of a Theory: the Frontier and Sectional Hypotheses,” in Billington, Frederick Jackson Turner.

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Sony’s out: won’t return to mix during paramount’s 45-day “go shop” window, david ellison says tom cruise supports skydance-paramount merger, calls outreach from hollywood “remarkable and humbling”.

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Skydance CEO David Ellison said Tom Cruise of Paramount ’s Mission Impossible and Top Gun franchises “is supportive of the planned merger and that the “outreach that we have received from the entertainment community has been pretty remarkable and humbling.”

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Skydance has made nine movies with Cruise, he said, calling the actor “one of the greatest, most talented artists in the world.”

Ellison also offered a peek into his family’s investment philosophy and how it informed the deal on his end, telling the network, “We’re really comfortable with businesses in transition.”

“I think if you look at the technological prowess we have on the family side, and the transition that Oracle just went through, that was a time period where … we bought more stock and emerged in that transition stronger than ever. Remember similar conversations around Tesla when we made that bet, obviously, as a family. And what we believe in here [with Paramount] is the ability to transition this business, to double down on our core competencies and invest in technology and actually create that media company of the future where art and technology can work hand in hand. And believe that when we come out of this, Paramount will definitively be winner.”

Ellison’s father is billionaire Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison , who is a backer of Skydance and its planned acquisition of and merger with Paramount in a two-step transaction.

Pressed on that, he said there are some things “in this interim period I can’t speak to” and noted how Skydance and Oracle had partnered to create “studio in the could” — a cloud-based animation studio.

“It’s been an incredible privilege of being able to learn from him, and learn from other mentors like Steve Jobs and David Geffen.”

 “What I really want to say is when you go back to Skydance 15 years ago, the core thesis of the founding, of the foundation of Skydance, was that this bridge was going to get built between Silicon Valley and Hollywood, and that that was going to create a tremendous amount of disruption. And Skydance is very much a pure play content engine that was the tip of the spear for that disruption, that believes in where entertainment is heading. And really, Paramount is a business that needs to follow suit and make that transformation and be able to meet this particular moment in time.”

Skydance and Shari Redstone , Paramount’s controlling shareholder, danced around a deal for months before coming to terms and announcing a proposed transaction Sunday night. That started the clock ticking on a 45-day “go shop” period for any other interested bidder to make a move. Otherwise, the deal is expected to fly past regulators and might close sooner than the nine months anticipated earlier this week.

“There could be a pathway here for this to be a lot tighter and quicker in the review process, but it’s not in our control,” said Gerry Cardinale of RedBird Capital , Skydance’s partner and investor in the deal, who appeared with Ellison on CNBC.

The deal calls for Skydance and backers including Larry Ellison and RedBird to acquire Shari Redstone’s family holding company National Amusements, which controls Paramount. The Skydance group will invest $1.5 billion in Paramount and merge with the storied company. Paramount is publicly traded and Skydance is offering to buy out all Class A voting shares for $23 each, and a chunk of non-voting Class B shares for $15.

Hollywood is happy that the historic backlot will be preserved, that private equity, which has been known to destroy value, won’t have free rein, and that Par’s new owner is passionate about the business. Paramount staff may be more apprehensive as Ellison outlined an unspecified but whopping $2 billion in cost savings, vs the $500 million in cuts identified this spring by the outgoing trio of CEOs — which is included in the total. Industry insiders have noted over the past year that Paramount’s already been cut pretty close to the bone over the years.

What’s mainly known of the merged company management-wise so far is that Ellison will be CEO and Jeff Shell president.

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