The American Frontier In The 1900's

In 1893, a man by the name of Frederick Jackson Turner created a thesis that tried to envelop the idea of the American Frontier. Turner’s thesis became wildly popular as it told of an American history that had not yet been researched or even known. Through Turner’s thesis, the American Frontier became the beginning and hope of a new period in American history. However, although Turner’s thesis was able to grasp the American Frontier, it was incapable of fully capturing the core essence of the American Frontier itself in several ways, such as how it ignored the viewpoint of other countries, cultures, and people affected by the frontier, such as the opinions of minorities or the Native Americans, it failed to recognize the government’s influence …show more content…
In the 1900’s, America was full of many types of people, races and cultures such as the Native Americans or African Americans, and the individualism of every American citizen was what made America what it was. The different cultures that developed throughout the United States left a huge impact on American history such as how the Native American tribes would often help or hinder pioneers in the West, even the great explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark who forged a path to the West could not have survived without the help of the Native Americans and Sacagawea, yet the Frontier thesis provided by Frederick Jackson Turner briefly describes the Native Americans as primitive and ignores their viewpoint of what the American Frontier was. The Native Americans, with all their influence on the creation of America, had their perspective glossed over, if not entirely left out, in Turner’s thesis. For the perspective of such an …show more content…
Turner’s thesis, written on the American frontier however, was something that was suppose to describe the frontier to everyone in the United States and give people an understanding of a topic unknown to all but who settled there. The Turner thesis described a land of opportunity that was to be found in settling the West, and yet, it seems to be closely related to the romanticism found in myths such as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. For a thesis to be viable it has to represent the truth and facts about the topic, and set aside personal opinions to find the best way to describe the topic itself, but Turner’s thesis seemed to have had a large correlation to the popular myths created by personal opinions of the people in the East. Turner’s thesis seemed to be influenced more by the personal opinions about the West by Turner himself, rather than the actual truth and facts found in the West. Thus, due to the fact that Turner’s thesis was influenced more by the personal opinions of the nation rather than the actual facts it couldn’t be considered to be a viable thesis of the American