The Significance of the Frontier in the American History

"The Significance of the Frontier in American History" is a seminal essay by the American historian Frederick Jackson Turner. The thesis describes his views on how the idea of the frontier shaped the American being and their characteristics. He talks about how the frontier drove American history and that is why America is how it is today. Turner reflects on the past to prove his point by noting human fascination with the frontier and how expansion to the American West changed peoples' views on their culture. It is a thesis that has been respected in the historical circle for many years.

Definition of "frontier": Turner wrote the frontier is "the outer wave of expansion, the meeting point between savagery and civilization." When people left settled territory, when people went into often unexplored areas, the weight of society bore less heavily upon them. They went into areas where they had no settled established governments, no institutions like churches, courts of law, and the like. People, in a sense, left civilization behind. They had to find new ways of adjusting, new ways of peaceful coexistence at this "meeting point between savage and civilization."

The most important effect of the frontier in American history has been the promotion of democracy. The frontier, Turner wrote, has been "productive of individualism." In entering into areas without established social structures, each person was pretty much on a basis of equality with each other person. People had to learn democratic means of social cooperation. Democracy, Turner wrote, therefore, was born of free land, and of free, self-reliant individuals moving out on to that land learning how to get along with one another. But Turner believed that the frontier had come to an end in 1890. Thus, according to Turner, a period of American development had come to an end. Turner inferred that with the end of the frontier, we could no longer count upon democracy to continue to flourish.

Turner offered his...