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 its connections to the covered material.
- Include an examination of the document’s purpose and intended audience.
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.
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.
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.
(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!!)
Here is the document given :
Frederick Jackson Turner
“The Significance of the Frontier in American History”
A paper read at the meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago, 12 July 1893, during the
World Columbian Exposition.
Excerpts:
In a recent bulletin of the Superintendent of the Census for 1890 appear these significant words:
…Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has
been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In
the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it cannot, therefore, any longer have a place in
the census reports…
This brief official statement marks the closing of a great historic movement. Up to our own day American
history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an
area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain
American development.
Behind institutions, behind constitutional forms and modifications, lie the vital forces that call these
organs into life and shape them to meet changing conditions. The peculiarity of American institutions is,
the fact that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people; to the
changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and in developing at each area of this
progress out of the primitive economic and political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city
life.
Said Calhoun (US House Representative from South Carolina, John C. Calhoun) in 1817:
“We are great, and rapidly—I was about to say fearfully—growing!”
So, saying, he touched the distinguishing feature of American life. All peoples show development; the
germ theory of politics has been sufficiently emphasized. In the case of most nations, however, the
development has occurred in a limited area; and if the nation has expanded, it has met other growing
peoples whom it has conquered. But in the case of the United States, we have a different phenomenon.
Limiting our attention to the Atlantic coast, we have the familiar phenomenon of the evolution of
institutions in a limited area, such as the rise of representative government; the differentiation of simple
colonial governments into complex organs; the progress from primitive industrial society, without
division of labor, up to manufacturing civilization. But we have in addition to this a recurrence of the
process of evolution in each western area reached in the process of expansion.
Thus, American development has exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a return to
primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area.
American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial
rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous
touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character.
The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is the Great West. Even the
slavery struggle, which is made so exclusive an object of attention by writers like Professor von Holst,
occupies its important place in American history because of its relation to westward expansion.
In this advance, the frontier is the outer edge of the wave—the meeting point between savagery and
civilization. Much has been written about the frontier from the point of view of border warfare and the
chase, but as a field for the serious study of the economist and the historian it has been neglected.
The American frontier is sharply distinguished from the European frontier—a fortified boundary line
running through dense populations. The most significant thing about the American frontier is, that it lies
at the hither edge of free land. In the census reports it is treated as the margin of that settlement which has
a density of two or more to the square mile. The term is an elastic one, and for our purposes does not need
sharp definition. We shall consider the whole frontier belt, including the Indian country and the outer
margin of the “settled area” of the census reports. This paper will make no attempt to treat the subject
exhaustively; its aim is simply to call attention to the frontier as a fertile field for investigation, and to
suggest some of the problems which arise in connection with it.
In the settlement of America, we have to observe how European life entered the continent, and how
America modified and developed that life and reacted on Europe. Our early history is the study of
European germs developing in an American environment. Too exclusive attention has been paid by
institutional students to the Germanic origins, too little to the American factors.
The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist.
It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the
railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the
hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an
Indian palisade around him. Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp
stick, he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, at the frontier the
environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish,
and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails.
Little by little he transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe, not simply the
development of Germanic germs, any more than the first phenomenon was a case of reversion to the
Germanic mark. The fact is, that here is a new product that is American.
At first, the frontier was the Atlantic coast. It was the frontier of Europe in a very real sense. Moving
westward, the frontier became more and more American. As successive terminal moraines result from
successive glaciations, so each frontier leaves its traces behind it, and when it becomes a settled area, the
region still partakes of the frontier characteristics. Thus, the advance of the frontier has meant a steady
movement away from the influence of Europe, a steady growth of independence on American lines. And
to study this advance, the men who grew up under these conditions, and the political, economic, and
social results of it, is to study the really American part of our history. . .
The rising steam navigation on western waters, the opening of the Erie Canal, and the westward extension
of cotton culture added five frontier states to the Union in this period. Francis J. Grund, writing in 1836,
declares:
. . . It appears then that the universal disposition of Americans to emigrate to the western wilderness, in
order to enlarge their dominion over inanimate nature, is the actual result of an expansive power which is
inherent in them, and which by continually agitating all classes of society is constantly throwing a large
portion of the whole population on the extreme confines of the State, in order to gain space for its
development. Hardly is a new State or Territory formed before the same principle manifests itself again
and gives rise to a further emigration; and so is it destined to go on until a physical barrier must finally
obstruct its progress. . .
Railroads, fostered by land grants, sent an increasing tide of immigrants into the Far West. The United
States Army fought a series of Indian wars in Minnesota, Dakota, and the Indian Territory. By 1880 the
settled area had been pushed into northern Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, along Dakota rivers, and
in the Black Hills region, and was ascending the rivers of Kansas and Nebraska.
The development of mines in Colorado had drawn isolated frontier settlements into that region, and
Montana and Idaho were receiving settlers. The frontier was found in these mining camps and the ranches
of the Great Plains. The superintendent of the census for 1890 reports, as previously stated, that the
settlements of the West lie so scattered over the region that there can no longer be said to be a frontier
line.
The fall line marked the frontier of the seventeenth century; the Alleghanies that of the eighteenth; the
Mississippi that of the first quarter of the nineteenth; the Missouri that of the middle of this century
(omitting the California movement); and the belt of the Rocky Mountains and the arid tract, the present
frontier. Each was won by a series of Indian wars.
At the Atlantic frontier one can study the germs of processes repeated at each successive frontier. We have
the complex European life sharply precipitated by the wilderness into the simplicity of primitive
conditions. The first frontier had to meet its Indian question, its question of the disposition of the public
domain, of the means of intercourse with older settlements, of the extension of political organization, of
religious and educational activity. And the settlement of these and similar questions for one frontier
served as a guide for the next. . .
But with all these similarities there are essential differences, due to the place element and the time
element. It is evident that the farming frontier of the Mississippi Valley presents different conditions from
the mining frontier of the Rocky Mountains. The frontier reached by the Pacific Railroad, surveyed into
rectangles, guarded by the United States Army, and recruited by the daily immigrant ship, moves forward
at a swifter pace and in a different way than the frontier reached by the birch canoe or the pack horse. The
geologist traces patiently the shores of ancient seas, maps their areas, and compares the older and the
newer. . .
Thus, civilization in America has followed the arteries made by geology, pouring an ever-richer tide
through them, until at last the slender paths of aboriginal intercourse have been broadened and interwoven
into the complex mazes of modern commercial lines; the wilderness has been interpenetrated by lines of
civilization growing ever more numerous. It is like the steady growth of a complex nervous system for the
originally simple, inert continent. If one would understand why we are today one nation, rather than a
collection of isolated states, he must study this economic and social consolidation of the country. In this
progress from savage conditions lie topics for the evolutionist. . .
https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/gilded/empire/text1/turner.pdf