What was frontier thesis

Then, complete the comparison questions that follow. Note that the arguments in this essay are not the personal views of the scholars but are illustrative of larger historical debates. Every nation has a creation myth, a simple yet satisfying story that inspires pride in its people.

The United States is no exception, but our creation myth is all about exceptionalism. Very much a man of his times, Turner filtered his interpretation of history through the lens of racial nationalism.

The people who counted in his thesis, literally and figuratively, were those with European ancestry—and especially those of Anglo-Saxon origins.

His definition of the frontier, following that of the U. Census, was wherever population density fell below two people per square mile. Likewise, Mexican Americans in the Southwest saw their land base and economic status whittled away after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that nominally made them citizens of the United States.

Chinese immigrants, defined as perpetual aliens under federal law, could not obtain free land through the Homestead Act. For all these groups, Euro-American expansion and opportunity meant the contraction or denial of their own ability to achieve individual advancement and communal stability. Turner also exaggerated the degree of social mobility open to white contemporaries, not to mention their level of commitment to an ideology of rugged individualism.

Although plenty of Euro-Americans used the homestead laws to get their piece of free land, they often struggled to make that land pay and to keep it in the family. During the late nineteenth century, the commoditization and industrialization of American agriculture caught southern and western farmers in a crushing cost-price squeeze that left many wrecked by debt. Perhaps it was, but not in the sense he understood. Populists railed against the excess of individualism that bred corruption and inequality in Gilded Age America.

Even cowboys, a pillar of the frontier myth, occasionally tried to organize unions to improve their wages and working conditions. The big cattlemen of the Wyoming Stockgrowers Association had no intention of sharing the range with pesky sodbusters and former cowboys they accused of rustling. Their brand of individualism had no place for small producers who might become competitors.

Turner took such troubles as a sign that his prediction had come true. With the closing of the frontier, he said, the United States would begin to see greater class conflict in the form of strikes and radical politics. There was lots of free land left in , though; in fact, approximately 1 million people filed homestead claims between and , compared with 1. All these ideas were contained in the essay, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," which Turner presented as a lecture at the Columbian Exposition in Turner's point of departure for the essay was that in the published report of the federal census, it was reported that the United States no longer had a discernible frontier--a line of demarcation dividing, as they said then, "civilization" from "savagery.

There are two good reasons for us to give serious attention to Turner's ideas. Accessed 13 November In The Canadian Encyclopedia. Historica Canada. Article published February 07, ; Last Edited December 16, The Canadian Encyclopedia , s.

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