One short essay on the frontier reshaped how Americans told their history
Frederick Jackson Turner published remarkably little, yet by his death in 1932 about 60 percent of major American history departments taught frontier courses in line with his ideas. His argument: the ever-moving western edge of settlement, until 1890, forged American democracy and character.
Turner was born in Portage, Wisconsin, in 1861. His father was a Republican activist, railroad investor and newspaper publisher; his mother taught school. He drew inspiration from Ralph Waldo Emerson's feeling for nature, from scientists such as Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, and from advances in mapmaking. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin in 1884, he earned a Johns Hopkins doctorate in 1890 under Herbert Baxter Adams, with a thesis on the fur trade with Native Americans in Wisconsin.
His essay The Significance of the Frontier in American History set out the frontier thesis: from colonial times until 1890, the shifting western boundary exerted a powerful pull on American democratic life. He later added a sectional hypothesis, treating regions as bundles of social forces such as ethnicity and landholding, which nudged historians towards social history. Historians still argue fiercely about his claims, but none dispute their enormous effect on scholarship.
Influence, for Turner, came through people and promotion rather than books. He had encyclopedic knowledge but wrote terse, interpretive articles, circulated copies to leading scholars and writers, reused favourite material in magazines, and found jobs for students such as Merle Curti and Marcus Lee Hansen. By 1910 few American historians carried more weight, and he wielded real power in the American Historical Association. His best-known book, The Frontier in American History of 1920, merely gathered older essays.
He taught at Wisconsin from 1890 until 1910, when, frustrated by regents who wanted more teaching and state service, he turned down California and went to Harvard. He never felt at home there. Retirement in 1922 took him to California and the Huntington Library, where files and index cards kept piling up while few monographs appeared. He died on 14 March 1932.
Source: Frederick Jackson Turner
