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The Significance of the Frontier in American History
This hugely influential work marked a turning point in US history and culture, arguing that the nation’s expansion into the Great West was directly linked to its unique spirit: a rugged individualism forged at the juncture between civilization and wilderness, which – for better or worse – lies at the heart of American identity today.
115 pages, paper
Published January 1, 2008
About the author
Frederick Jackson Turner
139 books30 followersFrederick Jackson Turner was an American historian in the early 20th century, based at the University of Wisconsin until 1910, and then at Harvard. He was primarily known for his “Frontier Thesis.” He trained many PhDs who came to occupy prominent places in the history profession. He promoted interdisciplinary and quantitative methods, often with a focus on the Midwest. He is best known for his essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American History", whose ideas formed the Frontier Thesis. He argued that the moving western frontier shaped American democracy and the American character from the colonial era until 1890. He is also known for his theories of geographical sectionalism. In recent years historians and academics have argued strenuously over Turner's work; all agree that the Frontier Thesis has had an enormous impact on historical scholarship and the American soul.
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April 7, 2021
I enjoyed this book and I feel it explains a lot about the country and the people.
Some words that I enjoyed:
"The striking and peculiar characteristic of American society is that it is not so much a democracy as a huge commercial company for the discovery, cultivation, and capitalisation of its enormous territory. The United States are primarily a commercial society, and only secondarily a nation."
"To the pioneer government was an evil."
"...we have the voice of the insurgent West, recently given utterance in the New Nationalism of ex-President Roosevelt, demanding increase of federal authority to curb the special interests, the powerful industrial organisations, and the monopolies for the sake of the conservation of our natural resources and the preservation of American democracy."
Some words that I enjoyed:
"The striking and peculiar characteristic of American society is that it is not so much a democracy as a huge commercial company for the discovery, cultivation, and capitalisation of its enormous territory. The United States are primarily a commercial society, and only secondarily a nation."
"To the pioneer government was an evil."
"...we have the voice of the insurgent West, recently given utterance in the New Nationalism of ex-President Roosevelt, demanding increase of federal authority to curb the special interests, the powerful industrial organisations, and the monopolies for the sake of the conservation of our natural resources and the preservation of American democracy."
November 12, 2017
These essays try to convey how the frontier drove American history and shaped it. Unfortunately, it starts with the premise that since Americans saw the West as "free land" to be occupied, you can imagine that not much thought was given to the Native peoples living there since they were savages and Americans were obviously civilized.
It only got worse from then on.
Chapters:
The Significance of the Frontier in American History
The Problem of the West
The Significance of the Mississippi Valley in American History
Social Forces in American History
It only got worse from then on.
Chapters:
The Significance of the Frontier in American History
The Problem of the West
The Significance of the Mississippi Valley in American History
Social Forces in American History
October 27, 2013
As history, Turner's work can be a bit thin, factually speaking. As a read, it is lively and interesting. As an idea, however, it's incredibly permeating: so that even as you acknowledge the past century of criticism against its prioritization of males or Euro-centrism, you can't help but begin to see the hand of the frontier everywhere in contemporary America. It becomes difficult to *not* read American culture in terms of the pioneer mythos that so shaped it through the first several hundred years of European habitation; and in this respect, Turner's thesis is perhaps most valuable as evidence, rather than explication, of the continued sway of the frontier.
August 18, 2026
Frederick Jackson Turner’s “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” first presented as a paper before the American Historical Association in Chicago in 1893, is among the most consequential essays in the development of American historiography. Although relatively short, the essay advanced a thesis of extraordinary scope: that the successive movement of the American frontier westward was one of the fundamental forces responsible for shaping American institutions, political culture, economic development, and national character. Turner thereby challenged interpretations that explained the United States primarily through its European inheritance and instead proposed that American distinctiveness emerged from the interaction between inherited institutions and the North American environment.
Turner begins from a deceptively straightforward historical observation: the frontier had been a persistent feature of American development. By the late nineteenth century, however, he believed that the frontier was approaching its end. The 1890 census had concluded that a continuously advancing frontier line could no longer readily be identified. Turner interpreted this development as an event of profound historical importance. If the frontier had been one of the principal mechanisms through which American society renewed itself, its disappearance raised the question of what would happen to the institutions and characteristics it had helped create.
The originality of Turner’s argument lies in his reversal of conventional historical causation. Rather than treating American society as the extension of European civilization into the New World, he argues that the American environment progressively transformed European institutions. The frontier was the principal arena of this transformation. Settlers repeatedly encountered unfamiliar economic, social, and geographical conditions and were therefore compelled to adapt inherited customs and institutions to new circumstances.
Turner consequently rejects a static understanding of American political development. Democracy was not simply imported from Europe and preserved intact. It developed through a continuing process of adaptation. The frontier encouraged political experimentation, individual initiative, local self-government, and resistance to established forms of hierarchy. American institutions became distinctive because they were repeatedly subjected to the pressures of frontier life.
One of the essay’s most important concepts is that of the frontier as a “point of contact” between supposedly different forms of society. Turner’s frontier is neither wholly wilderness nor wholly civilization. It is a transitional zone in which older institutions encounter conditions that challenge them. This process produces what Turner considers the characteristic American qualities of individualism, pragmatism, mobility, and democratic participation.
The frontier’s effect on individualism is central to Turner’s interpretation. In settled European societies, individuals operated within relatively dense networks of inherited class, social, and political relationships. The American frontier disrupted these relationships. The settler who moved westward entered an environment in which traditional authorities were weaker and material opportunities were greater. Survival and success depended upon initiative and adaptability. Turner therefore interprets frontier experience as a formative school of American individualism.
Yet Turner does not reduce frontier society to individualism alone. The creation of settlements required cooperation. Communities established schools, churches, courts, roads, political institutions, and systems of collective defense. The frontier therefore generated a distinctive combination of independence and cooperation. Individuals were expected to be self-reliant, but they also had to participate in local institutions. Turner sees this combination as one of the foundations of American democratic culture.
The frontier thesis also provides Turner with an explanation for the relative weakness of aristocratic traditions in the United States. As settlers repeatedly moved beyond established communities, social hierarchies had to be reconstructed under new conditions. The frontier made inherited status less useful and rewarded adaptability and practical competence. Consequently, the social order became comparatively fluid. Turner connects this process to the development of American egalitarianism.
Economic forces are similarly important. The availability of land encouraged migration and stimulated economic expansion. New territories generated demand for transportation, markets, financial institutions, and commercial infrastructure. The frontier thus functioned as an engine of economic growth. American capitalism was not simply an imported European system; it was reshaped by the opportunities and constraints created by continental expansion.
Turner’s argument is therefore remarkably synthetic. Political institutions, social character, economic development, and geographical expansion are not treated as independent historical variables. They form a single process. Migration changes the environment; environmental pressures transform institutions; transformed institutions alter political culture; and economic expansion encourages further migration. American history becomes a dynamic cycle of movement and adaptation.
The essay’s most provocative implication concerns American exceptionalism. Turner does not deny the importance of European inheritance, but he refuses to regard that inheritance as sufficient to explain the American political order. The United States became distinctive because European institutions were subjected to an environment radically different from that of Europe. The frontier therefore serves as the mechanism through which America became something other than simply an overseas extension of European society.
This interpretation had major historiographical consequences. Turner shifted attention away from political elites and formal constitutional structures toward population movement, geography, social organization, and economic development. The frontier became an explanatory category capable of connecting political history with social and economic history. In this respect, Turner anticipated later approaches that sought to understand history through broader social forces rather than through the actions of prominent political figures alone.
Nevertheless, the essay contains serious conceptual limitations. Most importantly, Turner’s frontier is constructed primarily from the perspective of white American settlement. Indigenous peoples are present within the historical narrative, but their societies and political agency are insufficiently incorporated into the theoretical framework. The “frontier” was not simply a boundary separating civilization from wilderness. It was a contested region inhabited by complex Indigenous nations with their own political institutions, economic systems, territorial claims, and diplomatic strategies.
This omission is especially significant because westward expansion depended upon Indigenous dispossession. Military conflict, treaties, forced removal, land legislation, and federal policy were fundamental to the transformation of the American West. Turner’s emphasis on the frontier as a mechanism of democratic development therefore risks turning conquest into an almost natural process of national maturation.
The racial assumptions underlying the essay also limit its explanatory power. Turner presents the American settler as the principal historical agent and consequently gives insufficient attention to African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, women, and other groups whose experiences of mobility and settlement differed substantially. The frontier did not produce a single national character in any straightforward sense. Different groups encountered radically unequal opportunities and forms of coercion.
Environmental history has likewise complicated Turner’s interpretation. His frontier appears largely as a reservoir of opportunity that settlers progressively transform. Modern scholarship has emphasized instead the ecological consequences of settlement: the transformation of landscapes, depletion of resources, displacement of Indigenous ecological systems, and creation of new relationships between human communities and the environment. Turner’s frontier is therefore less environmentally complex than the historical West itself.
Another limitation is the essay’s geographical determinism. Turner sometimes implies that frontier conditions necessarily produce particular social and political outcomes. Yet geography does not operate independently of institutions, culture, technology, markets, and political power. Similar frontier environments can generate different forms of political organization. The causal relationship between frontier experience and democracy is therefore more contingent than Turner’s formulation suggests.
Despite these weaknesses, the essay’s intellectual power is undeniable. Turner identified a genuine historical phenomenon: the enormous geographical mobility of the American population and its relationship to political and social development. The frontier did provide opportunities for migration, economic experimentation, social mobility, and institutional innovation. His error was not recognizing these processes but elevating them into an overly comprehensive theory of American history.
The timing of the essay also matters. Presented in 1893, it appeared at a moment when the United States was undergoing profound industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and corporate consolidation. Turner’s concern with the closing frontier can therefore be understood partly as a concern about the future. If the frontier had historically supplied opportunities for social mobility and individual advancement, what would happen when those opportunities diminished?
This question gives the essay a distinctly ambivalent character. Turner celebrates the frontier while simultaneously mourning its disappearance. The frontier had been a source of democratic energy precisely because it allowed Americans to escape older institutional constraints and begin again. Its closure therefore threatened to remove an important mechanism of social renewal. The essay is consequently not simply a celebration of westward expansion; it is also an early meditation on the consequences of modernization.
Turner’s influence was enormous. His thesis became a central framework through which generations of historians interpreted American development. It shaped scholarship on democracy, settlement, economic expansion, political institutions, regionalism, and national identity. Although later historians attacked the thesis for its racial exclusions, environmental assumptions, and excessive determinism, even its critics often remained engaged with the questions Turner had established.
Its greatest historiographical achievement was thus conceptual. Turner transformed the frontier from a setting into an explanatory force. Before Turner, the frontier could be treated as one geographical aspect of American history. After Turner, it became possible to ask systematically how continual movement into new territories affected the political and social character of an entire nation.
The essay’s enduring importance consequently lies less in the proposition that the frontier “caused” American democracy than in the broader methodological insight that political institutions must be understood in relation to geography, migration, economic opportunity, and social experience. Turner insisted that American democracy was historically produced rather than simply inherited. This remains a valuable proposition even when the particular mechanism he proposed requires substantial revision.
Ultimately, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” should be regarded as both a landmark of historical interpretation and a document of the intellectual world of the late nineteenth century. Its vision of the frontier as a democratic laboratory is too narrow to encompass the violence, exclusion, Indigenous resistance, racial hierarchy, and environmental transformation that accompanied American expansion. Yet its attempt to explain the distinctive character of the United States through the interaction of people, space, institutions, and historical change remains intellectually significant.
Turner’s frontier thesis therefore survives less as a definitive explanation than as a foundational question. How did the continual availability—and eventual disappearance—of new territory shape American political culture? How did mobility influence individualism and democracy? And what happens to a society when the geographical conditions that have historically sustained its institutions disappear? By posing these questions with unusual clarity and ambition, Turner changed the study of American history. His thesis may no longer command the authority it once possessed, but the intellectual problem he identified remains central to understanding the formation of modern America.
GPT
Turner begins from a deceptively straightforward historical observation: the frontier had been a persistent feature of American development. By the late nineteenth century, however, he believed that the frontier was approaching its end. The 1890 census had concluded that a continuously advancing frontier line could no longer readily be identified. Turner interpreted this development as an event of profound historical importance. If the frontier had been one of the principal mechanisms through which American society renewed itself, its disappearance raised the question of what would happen to the institutions and characteristics it had helped create.
The originality of Turner’s argument lies in his reversal of conventional historical causation. Rather than treating American society as the extension of European civilization into the New World, he argues that the American environment progressively transformed European institutions. The frontier was the principal arena of this transformation. Settlers repeatedly encountered unfamiliar economic, social, and geographical conditions and were therefore compelled to adapt inherited customs and institutions to new circumstances.
Turner consequently rejects a static understanding of American political development. Democracy was not simply imported from Europe and preserved intact. It developed through a continuing process of adaptation. The frontier encouraged political experimentation, individual initiative, local self-government, and resistance to established forms of hierarchy. American institutions became distinctive because they were repeatedly subjected to the pressures of frontier life.
One of the essay’s most important concepts is that of the frontier as a “point of contact” between supposedly different forms of society. Turner’s frontier is neither wholly wilderness nor wholly civilization. It is a transitional zone in which older institutions encounter conditions that challenge them. This process produces what Turner considers the characteristic American qualities of individualism, pragmatism, mobility, and democratic participation.
The frontier’s effect on individualism is central to Turner’s interpretation. In settled European societies, individuals operated within relatively dense networks of inherited class, social, and political relationships. The American frontier disrupted these relationships. The settler who moved westward entered an environment in which traditional authorities were weaker and material opportunities were greater. Survival and success depended upon initiative and adaptability. Turner therefore interprets frontier experience as a formative school of American individualism.
Yet Turner does not reduce frontier society to individualism alone. The creation of settlements required cooperation. Communities established schools, churches, courts, roads, political institutions, and systems of collective defense. The frontier therefore generated a distinctive combination of independence and cooperation. Individuals were expected to be self-reliant, but they also had to participate in local institutions. Turner sees this combination as one of the foundations of American democratic culture.
The frontier thesis also provides Turner with an explanation for the relative weakness of aristocratic traditions in the United States. As settlers repeatedly moved beyond established communities, social hierarchies had to be reconstructed under new conditions. The frontier made inherited status less useful and rewarded adaptability and practical competence. Consequently, the social order became comparatively fluid. Turner connects this process to the development of American egalitarianism.
Economic forces are similarly important. The availability of land encouraged migration and stimulated economic expansion. New territories generated demand for transportation, markets, financial institutions, and commercial infrastructure. The frontier thus functioned as an engine of economic growth. American capitalism was not simply an imported European system; it was reshaped by the opportunities and constraints created by continental expansion.
Turner’s argument is therefore remarkably synthetic. Political institutions, social character, economic development, and geographical expansion are not treated as independent historical variables. They form a single process. Migration changes the environment; environmental pressures transform institutions; transformed institutions alter political culture; and economic expansion encourages further migration. American history becomes a dynamic cycle of movement and adaptation.
The essay’s most provocative implication concerns American exceptionalism. Turner does not deny the importance of European inheritance, but he refuses to regard that inheritance as sufficient to explain the American political order. The United States became distinctive because European institutions were subjected to an environment radically different from that of Europe. The frontier therefore serves as the mechanism through which America became something other than simply an overseas extension of European society.
This interpretation had major historiographical consequences. Turner shifted attention away from political elites and formal constitutional structures toward population movement, geography, social organization, and economic development. The frontier became an explanatory category capable of connecting political history with social and economic history. In this respect, Turner anticipated later approaches that sought to understand history through broader social forces rather than through the actions of prominent political figures alone.
Nevertheless, the essay contains serious conceptual limitations. Most importantly, Turner’s frontier is constructed primarily from the perspective of white American settlement. Indigenous peoples are present within the historical narrative, but their societies and political agency are insufficiently incorporated into the theoretical framework. The “frontier” was not simply a boundary separating civilization from wilderness. It was a contested region inhabited by complex Indigenous nations with their own political institutions, economic systems, territorial claims, and diplomatic strategies.
This omission is especially significant because westward expansion depended upon Indigenous dispossession. Military conflict, treaties, forced removal, land legislation, and federal policy were fundamental to the transformation of the American West. Turner’s emphasis on the frontier as a mechanism of democratic development therefore risks turning conquest into an almost natural process of national maturation.
The racial assumptions underlying the essay also limit its explanatory power. Turner presents the American settler as the principal historical agent and consequently gives insufficient attention to African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, women, and other groups whose experiences of mobility and settlement differed substantially. The frontier did not produce a single national character in any straightforward sense. Different groups encountered radically unequal opportunities and forms of coercion.
Environmental history has likewise complicated Turner’s interpretation. His frontier appears largely as a reservoir of opportunity that settlers progressively transform. Modern scholarship has emphasized instead the ecological consequences of settlement: the transformation of landscapes, depletion of resources, displacement of Indigenous ecological systems, and creation of new relationships between human communities and the environment. Turner’s frontier is therefore less environmentally complex than the historical West itself.
Another limitation is the essay’s geographical determinism. Turner sometimes implies that frontier conditions necessarily produce particular social and political outcomes. Yet geography does not operate independently of institutions, culture, technology, markets, and political power. Similar frontier environments can generate different forms of political organization. The causal relationship between frontier experience and democracy is therefore more contingent than Turner’s formulation suggests.
Despite these weaknesses, the essay’s intellectual power is undeniable. Turner identified a genuine historical phenomenon: the enormous geographical mobility of the American population and its relationship to political and social development. The frontier did provide opportunities for migration, economic experimentation, social mobility, and institutional innovation. His error was not recognizing these processes but elevating them into an overly comprehensive theory of American history.
The timing of the essay also matters. Presented in 1893, it appeared at a moment when the United States was undergoing profound industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and corporate consolidation. Turner’s concern with the closing frontier can therefore be understood partly as a concern about the future. If the frontier had historically supplied opportunities for social mobility and individual advancement, what would happen when those opportunities diminished?
This question gives the essay a distinctly ambivalent character. Turner celebrates the frontier while simultaneously mourning its disappearance. The frontier had been a source of democratic energy precisely because it allowed Americans to escape older institutional constraints and begin again. Its closure therefore threatened to remove an important mechanism of social renewal. The essay is consequently not simply a celebration of westward expansion; it is also an early meditation on the consequences of modernization.
Turner’s influence was enormous. His thesis became a central framework through which generations of historians interpreted American development. It shaped scholarship on democracy, settlement, economic expansion, political institutions, regionalism, and national identity. Although later historians attacked the thesis for its racial exclusions, environmental assumptions, and excessive determinism, even its critics often remained engaged with the questions Turner had established.
Its greatest historiographical achievement was thus conceptual. Turner transformed the frontier from a setting into an explanatory force. Before Turner, the frontier could be treated as one geographical aspect of American history. After Turner, it became possible to ask systematically how continual movement into new territories affected the political and social character of an entire nation.
The essay’s enduring importance consequently lies less in the proposition that the frontier “caused” American democracy than in the broader methodological insight that political institutions must be understood in relation to geography, migration, economic opportunity, and social experience. Turner insisted that American democracy was historically produced rather than simply inherited. This remains a valuable proposition even when the particular mechanism he proposed requires substantial revision.
Ultimately, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” should be regarded as both a landmark of historical interpretation and a document of the intellectual world of the late nineteenth century. Its vision of the frontier as a democratic laboratory is too narrow to encompass the violence, exclusion, Indigenous resistance, racial hierarchy, and environmental transformation that accompanied American expansion. Yet its attempt to explain the distinctive character of the United States through the interaction of people, space, institutions, and historical change remains intellectually significant.
Turner’s frontier thesis therefore survives less as a definitive explanation than as a foundational question. How did the continual availability—and eventual disappearance—of new territory shape American political culture? How did mobility influence individualism and democracy? And what happens to a society when the geographical conditions that have historically sustained its institutions disappear? By posing these questions with unusual clarity and ambition, Turner changed the study of American history. His thesis may no longer command the authority it once possessed, but the intellectual problem he identified remains central to understanding the formation of modern America.
GPT
April 19, 2009
This essay was assigned for AP American History at Maine Twp. H.S. South and was used, along with essays by other authors pro and con, to begin a discussion about the American character and what is popularly known as the Turner Thesis.
July 14, 2014
I really enjoyed this essay, particularly as I had just finished The Crisis by Winston Churchill (not that one). The idea of the impact of living in a partially "civilized" environment (I use the term advisedly, as I'm aware of its implications re civilization vs. "savagery" and the normative implications inherent therein--nonetheless, it's the terminology of the author and the dominant paradigm through which most Americans, I think, see the history of westward expansion in US history.) on the broader development of "Americanness" is, I'm sure, not a new one. After all, the essay was written over 100 years ago.
But it did have several insights that struck me as novel and important, namely the advance of different levels of development at different rates--hunters, traders, adventurers, ranchers, farmers, etc., and the various levels of social order that each necessitated and developed. I would have liked to see the author put more flesh on many of the ideas alluded to in this short piece, including the backward influence of the frontier institutions on the more established parts of the country and especially on Europe.
I also would like to read more about the relationship between territorial expansion of the United States and religious missionary activity. Could this be a reason for the relatively more expansionist/millennarian tendencies in American, as opposed to Old World, Christianity? Just a conjecture.
At any rate, a paper that gets you thinking about all kinds of interesting connections, this feels like it could have been published in a sociology journal within the past ten years. Says the guy who definitely does not read sociology journals. But it does sound remarkably contemporary to my ear. I enjoyed it a great deal.
But it did have several insights that struck me as novel and important, namely the advance of different levels of development at different rates--hunters, traders, adventurers, ranchers, farmers, etc., and the various levels of social order that each necessitated and developed. I would have liked to see the author put more flesh on many of the ideas alluded to in this short piece, including the backward influence of the frontier institutions on the more established parts of the country and especially on Europe.
I also would like to read more about the relationship between territorial expansion of the United States and religious missionary activity. Could this be a reason for the relatively more expansionist/millennarian tendencies in American, as opposed to Old World, Christianity? Just a conjecture.
At any rate, a paper that gets you thinking about all kinds of interesting connections, this feels like it could have been published in a sociology journal within the past ten years. Says the guy who definitely does not read sociology journals. But it does sound remarkably contemporary to my ear. I enjoyed it a great deal.
Read
October 19, 2023Not only is this text precisely as farsically sensationalist as it claims not to be, but literally from start to finish it is stuffed with quotes that are so offensively entitled that it's hard to wrap one's head around. Reread for context for my dissertation. In order to sort out footnotes and citations, I got this for a few pounds off eBay. To my knowledge it's not currently being distributed by Penguin in print format, only eBook. It has a genuinely crazy cover, which I'm shocked was approved by the publishing house – why put a heinously reductionalist and offensive quote on its front page, when being distributed under the umbrella of 'Great Ideas'? Ugh. Anyway I'm using this to advance my idea that Octavia Butler's novels work to re-present to their readers the American colonial project through a process of science fictional and utopic estrangement. This text is as helpful for what I'm saying as it is uncomfortable to read. Blegh!!!!!!! Am now looking through and rereading Gracie May Bradley and Luke de Noronha's great 'Against Borders' which suggests quite an oppositional thesis to this, and is also much lovelier to revisit.
June 30, 2020
From the first tentative footholds on the east coast until the frontier was officially declared closed by the Census bureau in 1890, the generally westward movement of settlers largely defined the United States. Neither climate, terrain nor the opposition of the inhabitants could stop it. If you couldn’t make it in society for whatever reason, there was always the option to leave and establish yourself on unoccupied (by the whites) land. It was a compelling lure, even for people that were living in Europe.
This book by Turner is considered a milestone in history as he sets down the principles of what the frontier was and how it evolved from the first whites to stop and build until the structures of civilization such as schools and civil buildings were functioning. In 31 pages, the reader is given a primer on one of the foundational principles of what made the United States what it is. It should be read by all high school students.
This book by Turner is considered a milestone in history as he sets down the principles of what the frontier was and how it evolved from the first whites to stop and build until the structures of civilization such as schools and civil buildings were functioning. In 31 pages, the reader is given a primer on one of the foundational principles of what made the United States what it is. It should be read by all high school students.
September 20, 2021
While I understand that it was a big step to consider the frontier and its expansion as an important step in the development of what makes an American, Turner straight up ignored the fact that the expansion of the frontier caused the suffering of Native Americans. I don't care if it's "a product of it's time", I'll criticize it just the same.
June 28, 2019
I always have a major problem with nonfiction books from that time that claim that America was 'free' land just waiting for the settlers.
July 24, 2019
Maybe someday I'll revisit Frederick Turner. Or maybe I read too little of the history; I did not "feel" much about this classics.
Read
October 25, 2024Fucking boring, man.
It does not even deserve a star. Also, let me just say this: the audacity and hypocrisy.
It does not even deserve a star. Also, let me just say this: the audacity and hypocrisy.
October 21, 2025
Turner’s thesis is deeply limited and wrong in crucial respects, as people have been saying for a century. He is surely correct that the environment played a role in the development of American civilization and mores, but he assigns too much value to it and his scope is tellingly narrow. Most obviously, his frontier is concerned only with white male Americans, making the essential American character he defines extremely limited. He further discounts any value to even European-American’s intellectual heritage, to say nothing of the impacts of other peoples on America. Maybe most damning, his whole thesis - that the frontier created a rugged, individualistic American character which served as the wellspring for American democracy - fails to account for the existence of “frontiers” throughout the Americas which nonetheless produced a diversity of state forms and political cultures. Why does Argentina look so different from the United States, if both have undergone the same “Americanizing” process? Environment alone cannot account for this diversity.
So, Turner’s essay is a woefully inadequate explanation. It’s also one of the most influential essays in American historical writing - it’s hard to review it on its own terms, 130 years into the world it made. Thankfully, the prose is moving and Turner’s Romanticism gets the blood pumping. Right or wrong, it is required reading.
So, Turner’s essay is a woefully inadequate explanation. It’s also one of the most influential essays in American historical writing - it’s hard to review it on its own terms, 130 years into the world it made. Thankfully, the prose is moving and Turner’s Romanticism gets the blood pumping. Right or wrong, it is required reading.
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February 7, 2026In the back of my mind, I remember coming across this essay in a Borders when I was in college and paging through it. Whether I bought it and read it, I can’t remember, but the central idea that America “lost something” when imperialists (my term in this context) finally settled continuously from coast-to-coast was interesting. In a sense, the age of exploration was closed. There were no “new frontiers” on land, and the American psyche suffered because of it.
Having now read it, the essay itself is dated. Unsurprisingly, it really embraces Manifest Destiny, disregarding indigenous people and downplays the role of slavery in political disputes over territory. I suspect the author believes what he says, but it’s also very convenient for his argument.
I’d like to see this reworked with a 21st century lens about the role of capitalism and in light of WWI and WWII, but I think this is so dated it’s just theory that has been absorbed over time.
June 3, 2024
3.5 stars. i'm still not sure why i read this but mr frederick jackson turner ate with this one. not a ahistory person at all but the apush references had me giggling kicking my feet and all. its nice to view america in a way that makes me forget that i live in america although i doubt that was his intention. like i am not living in a country where at one point intellect was.. "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 buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom.." overall takeaway s that the frontier is indeed significant in ush!
January 30, 2025
"Individualism in America has allowed a laxity in regard to governmental affairs which has rendered possible the spoils system and all the manifest evils that follow from the lack of a highly developed civic spirit."
Okay, Marx.
Enlightening essay, significant ideas. I think it is important to read this within its historical context regarding some of the attitudes it presents, but its contribution towards the Frontier Thesis (or, more aptly, the Turner Thesis) is paramount.
Okay, Marx.
Enlightening essay, significant ideas. I think it is important to read this within its historical context regarding some of the attitudes it presents, but its contribution towards the Frontier Thesis (or, more aptly, the Turner Thesis) is paramount.
May 15, 2023
Dense and informative despite its short length, Frederick Jackson Turner's The Significance of the Frontier in American History is an important essay to understand the American democracy, its citizens and their psychology.
June 28, 2023
Great writing style and thesis. A must read American book.
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February 23, 2024Not rating because it’s a classic historical essay that uses clearly outdated concepts and my purpose in reading it was more as primary source/foundational material.
May 4, 2025
Many are quick to judge Turner and point out his faults through the lens of today. In the process, they miss some very strong points.
July 24, 2012
Four Classic Essays By a Noted Historian
Collection published by Penguin Classics in 2008.
The Significance of the Frontier in American History is a collection of four essays written by noted historian Frederick Jackson Turner from 1893 to 1910. Penguin Classics has re-issued these essays as part of its Great Ideas series.
Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932) is featured in just about every U.S. History textbook for his essay The Significance of the Frontier in American History, written in 1893. I am embarrassed note that I had never read this classic essay until I read this collection, although I was familiar with its basic thesis. In this essay Turner notes that the 1890 census determined that as of 1890 there was no longer a definable "frontier." He asserts that this is the beginning of something new for the United States as it has always been defined by its (usually) westward boundary.
Turner notes that the Western settlers came from all parts of the eastern seaboard but created a new culture, and in some ways the definitive American culture, when these diverse groups of settlers brought their old ways of doing and thinking and mingled them with one another to make something new. These settlers are known for their rugged individualism, a more egalitarian mindset (the frontier states were the first ones to lift property requirements to vote and, later, to let women vote) and a demand for government intervention in curtailing the power of corporations (at the time of the essay the Granger movement was quite active). Turner is quite clear that the presence of "free" land waiting for settlement was a major reason for the "self-made" man of the frontier and openly wondered about opportunities for economic advancement in a future with no frontier.
The second essay is The Problem of the West, written in 1896. It describes...
Read more at: http://dwdsreviews.blogspot.com/2012/...
Collection published by Penguin Classics in 2008.
The Significance of the Frontier in American History is a collection of four essays written by noted historian Frederick Jackson Turner from 1893 to 1910. Penguin Classics has re-issued these essays as part of its Great Ideas series.
Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932) is featured in just about every U.S. History textbook for his essay The Significance of the Frontier in American History, written in 1893. I am embarrassed note that I had never read this classic essay until I read this collection, although I was familiar with its basic thesis. In this essay Turner notes that the 1890 census determined that as of 1890 there was no longer a definable "frontier." He asserts that this is the beginning of something new for the United States as it has always been defined by its (usually) westward boundary.
Turner notes that the Western settlers came from all parts of the eastern seaboard but created a new culture, and in some ways the definitive American culture, when these diverse groups of settlers brought their old ways of doing and thinking and mingled them with one another to make something new. These settlers are known for their rugged individualism, a more egalitarian mindset (the frontier states were the first ones to lift property requirements to vote and, later, to let women vote) and a demand for government intervention in curtailing the power of corporations (at the time of the essay the Granger movement was quite active). Turner is quite clear that the presence of "free" land waiting for settlement was a major reason for the "self-made" man of the frontier and openly wondered about opportunities for economic advancement in a future with no frontier.
The second essay is The Problem of the West, written in 1896. It describes...
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April 2, 2018
It's easy to see why this is a classic. It deals with the importance of geography in American history.
To all those politically correct reviewers, the American continent was basically empty. The American settlers were people of the iron age going up against people of the stone age. Who do you think is going to win? And who do you think is more civilized? Ridiculous what they teach these days.
To all those politically correct reviewers, the American continent was basically empty. The American settlers were people of the iron age going up against people of the stone age. Who do you think is going to win? And who do you think is more civilized? Ridiculous what they teach these days.
July 25, 2011
If you are like me and have built up your knowledge of the American frontier and its development as the nation grew by watching spaghetti westerns, then this book will add a little genuine knowledge without too much effort.
February 11, 2018
Читала в українському перекладі в Україні Модерній. Написана очевидцем подій, розкриває цікаву перспективу на перші хвилі американських іммігрантів, які захоплювали нові землі Заходу і яким чином це вплинуло на американську ідентичність - через теми торгівлі, управління, ментальностей...
April 29, 2021
I guess the reason why this book is important isn't because Turner's writings are right, but they're an illustration of how Americans have always had amnesia when it comes to their own violent colonialism, and how the Frontier (and all it sweeps under a historical carpet) is romanticised to hell.
February 22, 2022
I'm not sure how to rate this, because I largely disagree with it. However, I do recognize the value and influence that it had on the way we view history as Americans. I enjoyed the process of reading it and learned from it, despite not entirely agreeing.
September 21, 2011
I don't know what I thought this book was going to be about, but I was disappointed & bored with its dry historical tone.
February 7, 2021
Classic American History!!!!
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December 6, 2021ugh
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