Significance Of The Frontier In American History Analysis

The contextualisation for the expansion of America was the main reason Frederick Jackson Turner undertook his hugely influential text ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’. It described it as a monumental event in American history as America sought to find and establish its exact culture in the modern world. They were distinctly different from their colonial past but where exactly along the way did they morph into their present day state. Turner stated that it was the press westwards that had transformed settlers into Americans. Their conquering of the wilderness firmly established civilisation and allowed America to grow. The manifestation of a civilisation born out of wilderness came in the cowboy. A masculine, white and brave character that …show more content…
Turner melded a number of basic concepts such as the free land hypothesis and the suggestion of closure of opportunity, conveyed initially by the declaration that the disappearance of a continuous frontier line from the census population maps marked the end of an important historical period, an idea reiterated in the final sentence of his essay that declared 'the first period in American history' had ended. These themes Turner set within a frame work of social recapitulation beginning with imported institutional germs, developing through a series of stages that brought areas from a state of wilderness and savagery to that of advanced civilisation . His thesis proposes that an ongoing frontier process was the catalyst for the American experience and as such, this peripherally situated phenomenon was the unique factor in the evolution of a distinctly American style culture. Thus the character of the people as well as the nature of frontier institutions were shaped in their most important aspects by influences spawned on the