{"id":32801,"date":"2023-08-31T16:45:53","date_gmt":"2023-08-31T16:45:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.goodacademic.com\/blog\/questions\/the-significance-of-the-frontier-in-american-history-by-frederick-jackson-turner\/"},"modified":"2023-08-31T16:45:53","modified_gmt":"2023-08-31T16:45:53","slug":"the-significance-of-the-frontier-in-american-history-by-frederick-jackson-turner","status":"publish","type":"questions","link":"https:\/\/www.goodacademic.com\/blog\/questions\/the-significance-of-the-frontier-in-american-history-by-frederick-jackson-turner\/","title":{"rendered":"The Significance of the Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner"},"content":{"rendered":"

 Your essay must do the following:<\/strong><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Place the document within its relevant historical context using the textbook, lecture notes, and course videos as your guide. <\/li>\n
  2. Identify and examine specific themes and topics from the covered material that are represented in the document.<\/li>\n
  3. Have a clear thesis that reflects a critical examination of the document, and its connections to the covered material.<\/li>\n
  4. Include an examination of the document’s purpose and intended audience.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    No outside sources are allowed. You do not need to include a work cited page, but you do need to provide clear citations throughout your essay. You can utilize any citation format you like; don’t overcomplicate it.  <\/p>\n

    The document is a primary source. Treat it the same way you would any contemporary source you come across. We do not take news stories, personal accounts, YouTube videos, political speeches, etc. at face value. This document needs the same kind of investigation and evaluation. <\/p>\n

    The essay must be a minimum of two complete double-spaced pages in length, with 12-point, Times New Roman font. It should be written in a comprehensive format with an introduction, thesis statement, specific examples (this does not mean large quotes from the text), basic citations, and a conclusion.<\/p>\n

    <\/p>\n

    <\/p>\n

    (I couldn’t figure out how to attach the lecture video but it talked about the rise of agribusiness, mining the frontier, “the indian problem”, the great sioux war, segregation, plessy v ferguson, black asperations and white backlash, and race as a national issue. Thank You!!)<\/b><\/p>\n

    <\/p>\n

    <\/p>\n

    Here is the document given : <\/p>\n

      Frederick Jackson Turner
    \n\u201cThe Significance of the Frontier in American History\u201d
    \nA paper read at the meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago, 12 July 1893, during the
    \nWorld Columbian Exposition.
    \nExcerpts:
    \nIn a recent bulletin of the Superintendent of the Census for 1890 appear these significant words:
    \n\u2026Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has
    \nbeen so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In
    \nthe discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it cannot, therefore, any longer have a place in
    \nthe census reports\u2026
    \nThis brief official statement marks the closing of a great historic movement. Up to our own day American
    \nhistory has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an
    \narea of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain
    \nAmerican development.
    \nBehind institutions, behind constitutional forms and modifications, lie the vital forces that call these
    \norgans into life and shape them to meet changing conditions. The peculiarity of American institutions is,
    \nthe fact that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people; to the
    \nchanges involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and in developing at each area of this
    \nprogress out of the primitive economic and political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city
    \nlife.
    \nSaid Calhoun (US House Representative from South Carolina, John C. Calhoun) in 1817:
    \n\u201cWe are great, and rapidly\u2014I was about to say fearfully\u2014growing!\u201d
    \nSo, saying, he touched the distinguishing feature of American life. All peoples show development; the
    \ngerm theory of politics has been sufficiently emphasized. In the case of most nations, however, the
    \ndevelopment has occurred in a limited area; and if the nation has expanded, it has met other growing
    \npeoples whom it has conquered. But in the case of the United States, we have a different phenomenon.
    \nLimiting our attention to the Atlantic coast, we have the familiar phenomenon of the evolution of
    \ninstitutions in a limited area, such as the rise of representative government; the differentiation of simple
    \ncolonial governments into complex organs; the progress from primitive industrial society, without
    \ndivision of labor, up to manufacturing civilization. But we have in addition to this a recurrence of the
    \nprocess of evolution in each western area reached in the process of expansion.
    \nThus, American development has exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a return to
    \nprimitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area.
    \nAmerican social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial
    \nrebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous
    \ntouch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character.
    \nThe true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is the Great West. Even the
    \nslavery struggle, which is made so exclusive an object of attention by writers like Professor von Holst,
    \noccupies its important place in American history because of its relation to westward expansion.
    \nIn this advance, the frontier is the outer edge of the wave\u2014the meeting point between savagery and
    \ncivilization. Much has been written about the frontier from the point of view of border warfare and the
    \nchase, but as a field for the serious study of the economist and the historian it has been neglected.
    \nThe American frontier is sharply distinguished from the European frontier\u2014a fortified boundary line
    \nrunning through dense populations. The most significant thing about the American frontier is, that it lies
    \nat the hither edge of free land. In the census reports it is treated as the margin of that settlement which has
    \na density of two or more to the square mile. The term is an elastic one, and for our purposes does not need
    \nsharp definition. We shall consider the whole frontier belt, including the Indian country and the outer
    \nmargin of the \u201csettled area\u201d of the census reports. This paper will make no attempt to treat the subject
    \nexhaustively; its aim is simply to call attention to the frontier as a fertile field for investigation, and to
    \nsuggest some of the problems which arise in connection with it.
    \nIn the settlement of America, we have to observe how European life entered the continent, and how
    \nAmerica modified and developed that life and reacted on Europe. Our early history is the study of
    \nEuropean germs developing in an American environment. Too exclusive attention has been paid by
    \ninstitutional students to the Germanic origins, too little to the American factors.
    \nThe frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist.
    \nIt finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the
    \nrailroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the
    \nhunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an
    \nIndian palisade around him. Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp
    \nstick, he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, at the frontier the
    \nenvironment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish,
    \nand so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails.
    \nLittle by little he transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe, not simply the
    \ndevelopment of Germanic germs, any more than the first phenomenon was a case of reversion to the
    \nGermanic mark. The fact is, that here is a new product that is American.
    \nAt first, the frontier was the Atlantic coast. It was the frontier of Europe in a very real sense. Moving
    \nwestward, the frontier became more and more American. As successive terminal moraines result from
    \nsuccessive glaciations, so each frontier leaves its traces behind it, and when it becomes a settled area, the
    \nregion still partakes of the frontier characteristics. Thus, the advance of the frontier has meant a steady
    \nmovement away from the influence of Europe, a steady growth of independence on American lines. And
    \nto study this advance, the men who grew up under these conditions, and the political, economic, and
    \nsocial results of it, is to study the really American part of our history. . .
    \nThe rising steam navigation on western waters, the opening of the Erie Canal, and the westward extension
    \nof cotton culture added five frontier states to the Union in this period. Francis J. Grund, writing in 1836,
    \ndeclares:
    \n. . . It appears then that the universal disposition of Americans to emigrate to the western wilderness, in
    \norder to enlarge their dominion over inanimate nature, is the actual result of an expansive power which is
    \ninherent in them, and which by continually agitating all classes of society is constantly throwing a large
    \nportion of the whole population on the extreme confines of the State, in order to gain space for its
    \ndevelopment. Hardly is a new State or Territory formed before the same principle manifests itself again
    \nand gives rise to a further emigration; and so is it destined to go on until a physical barrier must finally
    \nobstruct its progress. . .
    \nRailroads, fostered by land grants, sent an increasing tide of immigrants into the Far West. The United
    \nStates Army fought a series of Indian wars in Minnesota, Dakota, and the Indian Territory. By 1880 the
    \nsettled area had been pushed into northern Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, along Dakota rivers, and
    \nin the Black Hills region, and was ascending the rivers of Kansas and Nebraska.
    \nThe development of mines in Colorado had drawn isolated frontier settlements into that region, and
    \nMontana and Idaho were receiving settlers. The frontier was found in these mining camps and the ranches
    \nof the Great Plains. The superintendent of the census for 1890 reports, as previously stated, that the
    \nsettlements of the West lie so scattered over the region that there can no longer be said to be a frontier
    \nline.
    \nThe fall line marked the frontier of the seventeenth century; the Alleghanies that of the eighteenth; the
    \nMississippi that of the first quarter of the nineteenth; the Missouri that of the middle of this century
    \n(omitting the California movement); and the belt of the Rocky Mountains and the arid tract, the present
    \nfrontier. Each was won by a series of Indian wars.
    \nAt the Atlantic frontier one can study the germs of processes repeated at each successive frontier. We have
    \nthe complex European life sharply precipitated by the wilderness into the simplicity of primitive
    \nconditions. The first frontier had to meet its Indian question, its question of the disposition of the public
    \ndomain, of the means of intercourse with older settlements, of the extension of political organization, of
    \nreligious and educational activity. And the settlement of these and similar questions for one frontier
    \nserved as a guide for the next. . .
    \nBut with all these similarities there are essential differences, due to the place element and the time
    \nelement. It is evident that the farming frontier of the Mississippi Valley presents different conditions from
    \nthe mining frontier of the Rocky Mountains. The frontier reached by the Pacific Railroad, surveyed into
    \nrectangles, guarded by the United States Army, and recruited by the daily immigrant ship, moves forward
    \nat a swifter pace and in a different way than the frontier reached by the birch canoe or the pack horse. The
    \ngeologist traces patiently the shores of ancient seas, maps their areas, and compares the older and the
    \nnewer. . .
    \nThus, civilization in America has followed the arteries made by geology, pouring an ever-richer tide
    \nthrough them, until at last the slender paths of aboriginal intercourse have been broadened and interwoven
    \ninto the complex mazes of modern commercial lines; the wilderness has been interpenetrated by lines of
    \ncivilization growing ever more numerous. It is like the steady growth of a complex nervous system for the
    \noriginally simple, inert continent. If one would understand why we are today one nation, rather than a
    \ncollection of isolated states, he must study this economic and social consolidation of the country. In this
    \nprogress from savage conditions lie topics for the evolutionist. . .<\/p>\n

     https:\/\/nationalhumanitiescenter.org\/pds\/gilded\/empire\/text1\/turner.pdf  <\/p>\n

    <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

     Your essay must do the following: Place the document within its relevant historical context using the textbook, lecture notes, and course videos as your guide.  Identify and examine specific themes and topics from the covered material that are represented in the document. Have a clear thesis that reflects a critical examination of the document, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"disciplines":[524],"paper_types":[],"tagged":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goodacademic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/questions\/32801"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goodacademic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/questions"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goodacademic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/questions"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goodacademic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goodacademic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32801"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.goodacademic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/questions\/32801\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goodacademic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"disciplines","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goodacademic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/disciplines?post=32801"},{"taxonomy":"paper_types","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goodacademic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/paper_types?post=32801"},{"taxonomy":"tagged","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goodacademic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tagged?post=32801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}