11. what was the turner thesis

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Why was the Turner Thesis abandoned by historians

Fredrick Jackson Turner’s thesis of the American frontier defined the study of the American West during the 20th century. In 1893, Turner argued that “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.” ( The Frontier in American History , Turner, p. 1.) Jackson believed that westward expansion allowed America to move away from the influence of Europe and gain “independence on American lines.” (Turner, p. 4.) The conquest of the frontier forced Americans to become smart, resourceful, and democratic. By focusing his analysis on people in the periphery, Turner de-emphasized the importance of everyone else. Additionally, many people who lived on the “frontier” were not part of his thesis because they did not fit his model of the democratizing American. The closing of the frontier in 1890 by the Superintendent of the census prompted Turner’s thesis.

Despite its faults, his thesis proved powerful because it succinctly summed up the concerns of Turner and his contemporaries. More importantly, it created an appealing grand narrative for American history. Many Americans were concerned that American freedom would be diminished by the end of colonization of the West. Not only did his thesis give voice to these Americans’ concerns, but it also represented how Americans wanted to see themselves. Unfortunately, the history of the American West became the history of westward expansion and the history of the region of the American West was disregarded. The grand tapestry of western history was essentially ignored. During the mid-twentieth century, most people lost interest in the history of the American West.

While appealing, the Turner thesis stultified scholarship on the West. In 1984, colonial historian James Henretta even stated, “[f]or, in our role as scholars, we must recognize that the subject of westward expansion in itself longer engages the attention of many perhaps most, historians of the United States.” ( Legacy of Conquest , Patricia Limerick, p. 21.) Turner’s thesis had effectively shaped popular opinion and historical scholarship of the American West, but the thesis slowed continued academic interest in the field.

Reassessment of Western History

In the last half of the twentieth century, a new wave of western historians rebelled against the Turner thesis and defined themselves by their opposition to it. Historians began to approach the field from different perspectives and investigated the lives of Women, miners, Chicanos, Indians, Asians, and African Americans. Additionally, historians studied regions that would not have been relevant to Turner. In 1987, Patricia Limerick tried to redefine the study of the American West for a new generation of western scholars. In Legacy of Conquest, she attempted to synthesize the scholarship on the West to that point and provide a new approach for re-examining the West. First, she asked historians to think of the America West as a place and not as a movement. Second, she emphasized that the history of the American West was defined by conquest; “[c]onquest forms the historical bedrock of the whole nation, and the American West is a preeminent case study in conquest and its consequences.” (Limerick, p. 22.)

Finally, she asked historians to eliminate the stereotypes from Western history and try to understand the complex relations between the people of the West. Even before Limerick’s manifesto, scholars were re-evaluating the west and its people, and its pace has only quickened. Whether or not scholars agree with Limerick, they have explored new depths of Western American history. While these new works are not easy to categorize, they do fit into some loose categories: gender ( Relations of Rescue by Peggy Pascoe), ethnicity ( The Roots of Dependency by Richard White, and Lewis and Clark Among the Indians by James P. Rhonda), immigration (Impossible Subjects by Ming Ngai), and environmental (Nature’s Metropolis by William Cronon, Rivers of Empire by Donald Worster) history. These are just a few of the topics that have been examined by American West scholars. This paper will examine how these new histories of the American West resemble or diverge from Limerick’s outline.

Defining America or a Threat to America's Moral Standing

Peggy Pascoe’s Relations of Rescue described the creation and operation of Rescue Homes in Salt Lake City, the Sioux Reservation, Denver and San Francisco by missionary women for abused, neglected and exploited women. By focusing on the missionaries and the tenants of these homes, Pascoe depicted not just relations between women, but provided examples of how missionaries responded to issues which they believed were unique in the West. Issues that not only challenged the Victorian moral authority but threatened America’s moral standing. Unlike Turner, the missionary women did not believe that the West was an engine for democracy; instead, they envisioned a place where immoral practice such as polygamy, prostitution, premarital pregnancy, and religious superstition thrived and threatened women’s moral authority. Instead of attempting to portray a prototypical frontier or missionary woman, Pascoe reveals complicated women who defy easy categorization. Instead of re-enforcing stereotypes that women civilized (a dubious term at best) the American West, she instead focused on three aspects of the search for female moral authority: “its benefits and liabilities for women’s empowerment; its relationship to systems of social control; and its implication for intercultural relations among women.” (Pascoe, p. xvii.) Pascoe used a study of intercultural relations between women to better understand each of the sub-cultures (missionaries, unmarried mothers, Chinese prostitutes, Mormon women, and Sioux women) and their relations with governmental authorities and men.

Unlike Limerick, Pascoe did not find it necessary to define the west or the frontier. She did not have to because the Protestant missionaries in her story defined it for her. While Turner may have believed that the West was no longer the frontier in 1890, the missionaries certainly would have disagreed. In fact, the rescue missions were placed in the communities that the Victorian Protestant missionary judged to be the least “civilized” parts of America (Lakota Territory, San Francisco’s Chinatown, rough and tumble Denver and Salt Lake City.) Instead of being a story of conquest by Victorian or western morality, it was a story of how that morality was often challenged and its terms were negotiated by culturally different communities. Pascoe’s primary goal in this work was not only to eliminate stereotypes but to challenge the notion that white women civilized the west. While conquest may be a component of other histories, no one group in Pascoe’s story successfully dominated any other.

Changing the Narrative of Native Americans in the West

Two books were written before Legacy was published, Lewis and Clark Among the Indians (James Rhonda) and The Roots of Dependency (Richard White) both provide a window into the world of Native Americans. Both books took new approaches to Native American histories. Rhonda’s book looked at the familiar Lewis and Clark expedition but from an entirely different angle. Rhonda described the interactions between the expedition and the various Native American tribes they encountered. White’s book also sought to describe the interactions between the United States and the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos, but he sought to explain why the economies of these tribes broke down after contact. Each of these books covers new ground by addressing the impact of these interactions between the United States and the Native Americans.

Whether or not Rhonda’s work is an example of the New Western History is debatable, but he sought to eliminate racial stereotypes of Native Americans and describe the first governmental attempt to conquer the western landscape by traversing it. Rhonda described the interactions between the expedition and the various Indians who encountered it. While Rhonda’s book may resemble a classic Lewis and Clark history, it provides a much more nuanced examination of the limitations and effectiveness of the diplomatic aspects of the Lewis and Clark expedition. He took a great of time to describe each of the interactions with the Indian tribes in detail. Rhonda recognized that the interactions between the expedition and the various tribes were nuanced and complex. Rhonda’s work clarified that Native Americans had differing views of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Any stereotypes the reader may have regarding the Native Americans with would have shattered. Additionally, Rhonda described how the expedition persevered despite its clumsy attempts at diplomacy.

Instead of describing the initial interactions of the United States government with the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos, White explained how the self-sufficient economies of these people were destroyed. White described how the United States government turned these successful native people into wards of the American state. His story explained how the United States conquered these tribes without firing a shot. The consequence of this conquest was the creation of weak, dependent nations that could not survive without handouts from the federal government. Like Rhonda, White also sought to shatter long-standing stereotypes and myths regarding Native Americans. White verified that each of these tribes had self-sufficient economies which permitted prosperous lifestyles for their people before the devastating interactions with the United States government occurred. The United States in each case fundamentally altered the tribes’ economies and environments. These alterations threatened the survival of the tribes. In some cases, the United States sought to trade with these tribes in an effort put the tribes in debt. After the tribes were in debt, the United States then forced the tribes to sell their land. In other situations, the government damaged the tribes’ economies even when they sought to help them.

Even though White book was published a few years before Legacy, The Roots of Dependency certainly satisfies some of Limerick’s stated goals. Conquest and its consequences are at the heart of White’s story. White details the problems these societies developed after they became dependant on American trade goods and handouts. White also dissuaded anyone from believing that the Native American economies were inefficient. The Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos economies were successful. The Choctaws and Pawnees had thriving economies and their food supplies were more than sufficient. While the Navajos were not as successful as the other two tribes, their story was remarkable because they learned how to survive in some of the most inhospitable lands in the American West. These stories exploded the myths that the Native Americans subsistence economies were somehow insufficient.

The Impact of Immigrants to the West

The American West was both a borderland and a destination for a multitude of immigrants. Native Americans, Spaniards, Mexicans, Anglos, and Asians have all immigrated into the American West. The American West has seen waves of immigration. These immigrants have constantly changed the complexion of its people. Starting with the Native Americans who first moved into the region and the most recent tide of undocumented Mexican immigrants, the West has always been a place where immigrants seeking their fortunes. The California gold rush brought in a number of immigrants who did not fit their American ideal. When non-whites started immigrating to California, the United States was faced with a new problem, the introduction of people who could not become citizens. Chinese immigrants troubled the Anglo majority because they could not be easily assimilated into American society. Additionally, many Americans were perplexed by their substantially different appearances, clothing, religions, and cultures. Anglos became concerned that the new immigrants differed too much from them. In 1924, after 150 years of unregulated immigration, the United States Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act, the most restrictionist immigration law in US history. The Johnson-Reed Act was specifically designed to keep the most undesirable races out of America, but immigrants continued to arrive in America without documents. Ming Ngai’s Impossible Subjects addresses this new class of immigrants: illegal immigrants. Illegal immigrants began to flow into the United States soon after the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act.

While illegal immigration is not an issue isolated to the history of the American West, the immigrants moved predominantly into California, Texas and the American Southwest. Like Anglo settlers who were attracted to the West for the potential for new life in the nineteenth century, illegal immigrants continued to move in during the twentieth. The illegal immigrants were welcomed, despite their status, because California’s large commercial farms needed inexpensive labor to harvest their crops. Impossible Subjects describes four groups of illegal immigrants (Filipinos, Japanese, Chinese and Mexican braceros) who were created by the United States immigration policy. Ngai specifically examines the role that the government played in defining, controlling and disciplining these groups for their allegedly illegal misconduct.

Impossible Subjects is not a book on the American West, but it is a book that is very much about the American West. While Ngai’s story primarily takes place in the American West she does not appear to have any interest in defining the West because her story has national implications. The American West is relevant to her study only because it was where most of the illegal immigrants described in her story lived and worked. Additionally, it is not a story of conquest and its consequences, but it introduced the American public and scholars to members of the American society that are silent. Limerick even stated that while “Indians, Hispanics, Asians, blacks, Anglos, businesspeople, workers, politicians, bureaucrats, natives and newcomers” all shared the same region, they still needed to be introduced to one another. In addition to being a sophisticated policy debate on immigration law, Ngai’s work introduced Americans to these people. (Limerick, p. 349.)

The Rise of Western Environmental History

Environmental history has become an increasingly important component of the history of the American West. Originally, the American West was seen as an untamed wilderness, but over time that description has changed. Two conceptually different, but nonetheless important books on environmental history discussed the American West and its importance in America. Nature’s Metropolis by William Cronon and Rivers of Empire by Donald Worster each explored the environment and the economy of the American West. Cronon examined the formation of Chicago and the importance of its commodities market for the development of the American West. Alternatively, Worster focuses on the creation of an extensive network of government subsidized dams in the early twentieth century. Rivers of Empire describes that despite the aridity of the natural landscape the American West became home to massive commercial farms and enormous swaths of urban sprawl.

In Nature’s Metropolis , Cronon, used the central place theory to analyze the economic and ecological development of Chicago. Johann Heinrich von Thunen developed the central place theory to explain the development of cities. Essentially, geographically different economic zones form in concentric circles the farther you went from the city. These different zones form because of the time it takes to get the different types of goods to market. Closest to the city and then moving away you would have the following zones: first, intensive agriculture, second, extensive agriculture, third, livestock raising, fourth, trading, hunting and Indian trade and finally, you would have the wilderness. While the landscape of the Mid-West was more complicated than this, Cronon posits that the “city and country are inextricably connected and that market relations profoundly mediate between them.” (Cronon, p. 52.) By emphasizing the connection between the city of Chicago and the rural lands that surrounded it, Cronon was able to explain how the land, including the West, developed. Cronon argued that the development of Chicago had a profound influence on the development and appearance of the Great West. Essentially Cronon used the creation of the Chicago commodities and trading markets to explain how different parts of the Mid-West and West produced different types of resources and fundamentally altered their ecology.

According to Donald Worster’s Rivers of Empire, economics played an equally important role in the economic and environmental development of the Rocky Mountain and Pacific Slope states. Worster argued that the United States wanted to continue creating family farms for Americans in the West. Unfortunately, the aridity of the west made that impossible. The land in the West simply could not be farmed without water. Instead of adapting to the natural environment, the United States government embarked on the largest dam building project in human history. The government built thousands of dams to irrigate millions of acres of land. Unfortunately, the cost of these numerous irrigation projects was enormous. The federal government passed the cost on to the buyers of the land which prevented family farmers from buying it. Therefore, instead of family farms, massive commercial farms were created. The only people who could afford to buy the land were wealthy citizens. The massive irrigation also permitted the creation of cities which never would have been possible without it. Worster argues that the ensuing ecological damage to the West has been extraordinary. The natural environment throughout the region was dramatically altered. The west is now the home of oversized commercial farms, artificial reservoirs which stretch for hundreds of miles, rivers that run only on command and sprawling cities which depend on irrigation.

Both Cronon and Worster described how commercial interests shaped the landscape and ecology of the American West, but their approaches were very different. Still, each work fits comfortably into the new western history. Both Cronon and Worster see the West as a place and not as a movement of westward expansion. Cronon re-orders the typical understanding of the sequence of westward expansion. Instead of describing the steady growth of rural communities which transformed into cities, he argued that cities and rural areas formed at the same time. Often the cities developed first and that only after markets were created could land be converted profitable into farms. This development fits westward development much more closely than paradigms that emphasized the creation of family farms. Worster defines the West by its aridity. While these definitions differ from Limerick’s, they reflect new approaches. Conquest plays a critical role in each of these books. Instead of conquering people, the authors describe efforts to conquer western lands. In Cronon, westerners forever altered the landscape of the west. Agricultural activities dominated the zones closest to Chicago, cattle production took over lands previously occupied by the buffalo, and even the wilderness was changed by people to satisfy the markets in Chicago. The extensive damming of the West’s rivers described by Worster required the United States government to conquer, control and discipline nature. While this conquest was somewhat illusory, the United States government was committed to reshaping the West and ecology to fit its vision.

Each of these books demonstrates that the Turner thesis no longer holds a predominant position in the scholarship of the American West. The history of the American West has been revitalized by its demise. While westward expansion plays an important role in the history of the United States, it did not define the west. Turner’s thesis was fundamentally undermined because it did not provide an accurate description of how the West was peopled. The nineteenth century of the west is not composed primarily of family farmers. Instead, it is a story of a region peopled by a diverse group of people: Native Americans, Asians, Chicanos, Anglos, African Americans, women, merchants, immigrants, prostitutes, swindlers, doctors, lawyers, farmers are just a few of the characters who inhabit western history.

Suggested Readings

• Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History
• Patricia Limerick, Legacy of Conquest
• Peggy Pascoe, Relations of Rescue
• Richard White, The Roots of Dependency
• Nature's Metropolis, William Cronon
• Rivers of Empire, Donald Worster
• Historiography
• Book Review
• This page was last edited on 5 October 2021, at 01:36.
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How the Myth of the American Frontier Got Its Start

Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis informed decades of scholarship and culture. Then he realized he was wrong

Colin Woodard

On the evening of   July 12, 1893, in the hall of a massive new Beaux-Arts building that would soon house the Art Institute of Chicago, a young professor named Frederick Jackson Turner rose to present what would become the most influential essay in the study of U.S. history.

It was getting late. The lecture hall was stifling from a day of blazing sun, which had tormented the throngs visiting the nearby Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, a carnival of never-before-seen wonders, like a fully illuminated electric city and George Ferris’ 264-foot-tall rotating observation wheel. Many of the hundred or so historians attending the conference, a meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA), were dazed and dusty from an afternoon spent watching Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show at a stadium near the fairground’s gates. They had already sat through three other speeches. Some may have been dozing off as the thin, 31-year-old associate professor from the University of Wisconsin in nearby Madison began his remarks.

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Turner told them the force that had forged Americans into one people was the frontier of the Midwest and Far West. In this virgin world, settlers had finally been relieved of the European baggage of feudalism that their ancestors had brought across the Atlantic, freeing them to find their true selves: self-sufficient, pragmatic, egalitarian and civic-minded. “The frontier promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people,” he told the audience. “In the crucible of the frontier, the immigrants were Americanized, liberated and fused into a mixed race, English in neither nationality nor characteristics.”

The audience was unmoved.

In their dispatches the following morning, most of the newspaper reporters covering the conference didn’t even mention Turner’s talk. Nor did the official account of the proceedings prepared by the librarian William F. Poole for The Dial , an influential literary journal. Turner’s own father, writing to relatives a few days later, praised Turner’s skills as the family’s guide at the fair, but he said nothing at all about the speech that had brought them there.

Yet in less than a decade, Turner would be the most influential living historian in the United States, and his Frontier Thesis would become the dominant lens through which Americans understood their character, origins and destiny. Soon, Jackson’s theme was prevalent in political speech, in the way high schools taught history, in patriotic paintings—in short, everywhere. Perfectly timed to meet the needs of a country experiencing dramatic and destabilizing change, Turner’s thesis was swiftly embraced by academic and political institutions, just as railroads, manufacturing machines and telegraph systems were rapidly reshaping American life.

By that time, Turner himself had realized that his theory was almost entirely wrong.

American historians had long believed that Providence had chosen their people to spread Anglo-Saxon freedom across the continent. As an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, Turner was introduced to a different argument by his mentor, the classical scholar William Francis Allen. Extrapolating from Darwinism, Allen believed societies evolved like organisms, adapting themselves to the environments they encountered. Scientific laws, not divine will, he advised his mentee, guided the course of nations. After graduating, Turner pursued a doctorate at Johns Hopkins University, where he impressed the history program’s leader, Herbert Baxter Adams, and formed a lifelong friendship with one of his teachers, an ambitious young professor named Woodrow Wilson. The connections were useful: When Allen died in 1889, Adams and Wilson aided Turner in his quest to take Allen’s place as head of Wisconsin’s history department. And on the strength of Turner’s early work, Adams invited him to present a paper at the 1893 meeting of the AHA, to be held in conjunction with the World’s Congress Auxiliary of the World’s Columbian Exposition.

The resulting essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” offered a vivid evocation of life in the American West. Stripped of “the garments of civilization,” settlers between the 1780s and the 1830s found themselves “in the birch canoe” wearing “the hunting shirt and the moccasin.” Soon, they were “planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick” and even shouting war cries. Faced with Native American resistance—Turner largely overlooked what the ethnic cleansing campaign that created all that “free land” might say about the American character—the settlers looked to the federal government for protection from Native enemies and foreign empires, including during the War of 1812, thus fostering a loyalty to the nation rather than to their half-forgotten nations of origin.

He warned that with the disappearance of the force that had shaped them—in 1890, the head of the Census Bureau concluded there was no longer a frontier line between areas that had been settled by European Americans and those that had not—Americans would no longer be able to flee west for an easy escape from responsibility, failure or oppression. “Each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past,” Turner concluded. “Now … the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.”

When he left the podium on that sweltering night, he could not have known how fervently the nation would embrace his thesis.

Like so many young scholars, Turner worked hard to bring attention to his thesis. He incorporated it into the graduate seminars he taught, lectured about it across the Midwest and wrote the entry for “Frontier” in the widely read Johnson’s Universal Cyclopædia. He arranged to have the thesis reprinted in the journal of the Wisconsin Historical Society and in the AHA’s 1893 annual report. Wilson championed it in his own writings, and the essay was read by hundreds of schoolteachers who found it reprinted in the popular pedagogical journal of the Herbart Society, a group devoted to the scientific study of teaching. Turner’s big break came when the Atlantic Monthly ’s editors asked him to use his novel viewpoint to explain the sudden rise of populists in the rural Midwest, and how they had managed to seize control of the Democratic Party to make their candidate, William Jennings Bryan, its nominee for president. Turner’s 1896 Atlantic Monthly essay , which tied the populists’ agitation to the social pressures allegedly caused by the closing of the frontier—soil depletion, debt, rising land prices—was promptly picked up by newspapers and popular journals across the country.

Meanwhile, Turner’s graduate students became tenured professors and disseminated his ideas to the up-and-coming generation of academics. The thrust of the thesis appeared in political speeches, dime-store western novels and even the new popular medium of film, where it fueled the work of a young director named John Ford who would become the master of the Hollywood western. In 1911, Columbia University’s David Muzzey incorporated it into a textbook—initially titled History of the American People —that would be used by most of the nation’s secondary schools for half a century.

Americans embraced Turner’s argument because it provided a fresh and credible explanation for the nation’s exceptionalism—the notion that the U.S. follows a path soaring above those of other countries—one that relied not on earlier Calvinist notions of being “the elect,” but rather on the scientific (and fashionable) observations of Charles Darwin. In a rapidly diversifying country, the Frontier Thesis denied a special role to the Eastern colonies’ British heritage; we were instead a “composite nation,” birthed in the Mississippi watershed. Turner’s emphasis on mobility, progress and individualism echoed the values of the Gilded Age—when readers devoured Horatio Alger’s rags-to-riches stories—and lent them credibility for the generations to follow.

But as a researcher, Turner himself turned away from the Frontier Thesis in the years after the 1890s. He never wrote it down in book form or even in academic articles. He declined invitations to defend it, and before long he himself lost faith in it.

For one thing, he had been relying too narrowly on the experiences in his own region of the Upper Midwest, which had been colonized by a settlement stream originating in New England. In fact, he found, the values he had ascribed to the frontier’s environmental conditioning were actually those of this Greater New England settlement culture, one his family and most of his fellow citizens in Portage, Wisconsin, remained part of, with their commitment to strong village and town governments, taxpayer-financed public schools and the direct democracy of the town meeting. He saw that other parts of the frontier had been colonized by other settlement streams anchored in Scots-Irish Appalachia or in the slave plantations of the Southern lowlands, and he noted that their populations continued to behave completely differently from one another, both politically and culturally, even when they lived in similar physical environments. Somehow settlers moving west from these distinct regional cultures were resisting the Darwinian environmental and cultural forces that had supposedly forged, as Turner’s biographer, Ray Allen Billington, put it, “a new political species” of human, the American. Instead, they were stubbornly remaining themselves. “Men are not absolutely dictated to by climate, geography, soils or economic interests,” Turner wrote in 1922. “The influence of the stock from which they sprang, the inherited ideals, the spiritual factors, often triumph over the material interests.”

Turner spent the last decades of his life working on what he intended to be his magnum opus, a book not about American unity but rather about the abiding differences between its regions, or “sections,” as he called them. “In respect to problems of common action, we are like what a United States of Europe would be,” he wrote in 1922, at the age of 60. For example, the Scots-Irish and German small farmers and herders who settled the uplands of the southeastern states had long clashed with nearby English enslavers over education spending, tax policy and political representation. Turner saw the whole history of the country as a wrestling match between these smaller quasi-nations, albeit a largely peaceful one guided by rules, laws and shared American ideals: “When we think of the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, as steps in the marking off of spheres of influence and the assignment of mandates [between nations] … we see a resemblance to what has gone on in the Old World,” Turner explained. He hoped shared ideals—and federal institutions—would prove cohesive for a nation suddenly coming of age, its frontier closed, its people having to steward their lands rather than striking out for someplace new.

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Colin Woodard is a journalist and historian, and the author of six books including Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood . He lives in Maine.

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Frontier Thesis

Article by D.R. Owram

Published Online February 7, 2006

Last Edited December 16, 2013

The Frontier thesis was formulated 1893, when American historian Frederick Jackson Turner theorized that the availability of unsettled land throughout much of American history was the most important factor determining national development. Frontier experiences and new opportunities forced old traditions to change, institutions to adapt and society to become more democratic as class distinctions collapsed. The result was a unique American society, distinct from the European societies from which it originated. In Canada the frontier thesis was popular between the world wars with historians such as A.R.M. LOWER and Frank UNDERHILL and sociologist S.D. CLARK , partly because of a new sense of Canada's North American character.

Since WWII the frontier thesis has declined in popularity because of recognition of important social and cultural distinctions between Canada and the US. In its place a "metropolitan school" has developed, emphasizing Canada's much closer historical ties with Europe. Moreover, centres such as Montréal, Toronto and Ottawa had a profound influence on the settlement of the Canadian frontier. Whichever argument is emphasized, however, any realistic conclusion cannot deny that both the frontier and the ties to established centres were formative in Canada's development.

See also METROPOLITAN-HINTERLAND THESIS .

Recommended

Laurentian thesis, metropolitan-hinterland thesis.

Conquering the West

The west as history: the turner thesis.

In 1893, the American Historical Association met during that year’s World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The young Wisconsin historian Frederick Jackson Turner presented his “frontier thesis,” one of the most influential theories of American history, in his essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.”

Turner looked back at the historical changes in the West and saw, instead of a tsunami of war and plunder and industry, waves of “civilization” that washed across the continent. A frontier line “between savagery and civilization” had moved west from the earliest English settlements in Massachusetts and Virginia across the Appalachians to the Mississippi and finally across the Plains to California and Oregon. Turner invited his audience to “stand at Cumberland Gap [the famous pass through the Appalachian Mountains], and watch the procession of civilization, marching single file—the buffalo following the trail to the salt springs, the Indian, the fur trader and hunter, the cattle-raiser, the pioneer farmer—and the frontier has passed by.”

Americans, Turner said, had been forced by necessity to build a rough-hewn civilization out of the frontier, giving the nation its exceptional hustle and its democratic spirit and distinguishing North America from the stale monarchies of Europe. Moreover, the style of history Turner called for was democratic as well, arguing that the work of ordinary people (in this case, pioneers) deserved the same study as that of great statesmen. Such was a novel approach in 1893.

But Turner looked ominously to the future. The Census Bureau in 1890 had declared the frontier closed. There was no longer a discernible line running north to south that, Turner said, any longer divided civilization from savagery. Turner worried for the United States’ future: what would become of the nation without the safety valve of the frontier? It was a common sentiment. Theodore Roosevelt wrote to Turner that his essay “put into shape a good deal of thought that has been floating around rather loosely.”

The history of the West was many-sided and it was made by many persons and peoples. Turner’s thesis was rife with faults, not only its bald Anglo Saxon chauvinism—in which non-whites fell before the march of “civilization” and Chinese and Mexican immigrants were invisible—but in its utter inability to appreciate the impact of technology and government subsidies and large-scale economic enterprises alongside the work of hardy pioneers. Still, Turner’s thesis held an almost canonical position among historians for much of the twentieth century and, more importantly, captured Americans’ enduring romanticization of the West and the simplification of a long and complicated story into a march of progress.

This chapter was edited by Lauren Brand, with content contributions by Lauren Brand, Carole Butcher, Josh Garrett-Davis, Tracey Hanshew, Nick Roland, David Schley, Emma Teitelman, and Alyce Vigil.

• American Yawp. Located at : http://www.americanyawp.com/index.html . Project : American Yawp. License : CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike

Frontier Thesis

"The emergence of western history as an important field of scholarship can best be traced to the famous paper Frederick Jackson Turner delivered at a meeting of the American Historical Association in 1893. It was entitled "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." The "Turner thesis" or "frontier thesis," as his argument quickly became known, shaped both popular and scholarly views of the West (and of much else) for two generations. Turner stated his thesis simply. The settlement of the West by white people - "the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward" - was the central story of American history. The process of westward expansion had transformed a desolate and savage land into modem civilization. It had also continually renewed American ideas of democracy and individualism and had, therefore, shaped not just the West but the nation as a whole. "What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bonds of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States." The Turner thesis shaped the writing of American history for a generation, and it shaped the writing of western American history for even longer. " (quoted from "Where Historians Disagree: The 'Frontier' and the West" in Alan Brinkley, American History: A Survey, Chapter 16)

• Turner thesis text
• Turner biography from The West by PBS

http://www.ndsu.nodak.edu/instruct/isern/103/turner.htm

Turner's thesis can be considered:

• as a reflection of the 1890s,
• as a statement of American expansionism,
• as an idea in American thought,
• as an historical philosophy, and
• as the site of debate over the meaning of the "frontier" in American culture.  

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2 The Making of a National Identity: The Frontier Thesis

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Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis became a significant force in shaping the national identity of the U.S. The ideologies incorporated into Turner's frontier thesis were not only meant to provide a historical interpretation of how the U.S. came into being but also satisfied the national need for a “usable past.” This frontier thesis was able to transmit a series of symbols that became imbedded in the nation's self‐perception and self‐understanding: Virgin land, wilderness, land and democracy, Manifest Destiny, chosen race. Race must be understood as an important piece of this developing national identity because the idea of “purity” of race was used as a rationalization to colonize, exclude, devalue, and even exterminate the native borderlands people.

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2.9: The West as History- the Turner Thesis

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In 1893, the American Historical Association met during that year’s World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The young Wisconsin historian Frederick Jackson Turner presented his “frontier thesis,” one of the most influential theories of American history, in his essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.”

Turner looked back at the historical changes in the West and saw, instead of a tsunami of war and plunder and industry, waves of “civilization” that washed across the continent. A frontier line “between savagery and civilization” had moved west from the earliest English settlements in Massachusetts and Virginia across the Appalachians to the Mississippi and finally across the Plains to California and Oregon. Turner invited his audience to “stand at Cumberland Gap [the famous pass through the Appalachian Mountains], and watch the procession of civilization, marching single file—the buffalo following the trail to the salt springs, the Indian, the fur trader and hunter, the cattle-raiser, the pioneer farmer—and the frontier has passed by.” 26

Americans, Turner said, had been forced by necessity to build a rough-hewn civilization out of the frontier, giving the nation its exceptional hustle and its democratic spirit and distinguishing North America from the stale monarchies of Europe. Moreover, the style of history Turner called for was democratic as well, arguing that the work of ordinary people (in this case, pioneers) deserved the same study as that of great statesmen. Such was a novel approach in 1893.

But Turner looked ominously to the future. The Census Bureau in 1890 had declared the frontier closed. There was no longer a discernible line running north to south that, Turner said, any longer divided civilization from savagery. Turner worried for the United States’ future: what would become of the nation without the safety valve of the frontier? It was a common sentiment. Theodore Roosevelt wrote to Turner that his essay “put into shape a good deal of thought that has been floating around rather loosely.” 27

The history of the West was many-sided and it was made by many persons and peoples. Turner’s thesis was rife with faults, not only in its bald Anglo-Saxon chauvinism—in which nonwhites fell before the march of “civilization” and Chinese and Mexican immigrants were invisible—but in its utter inability to appreciate the impact of technology and government subsidies and large-scale economic enterprises alongside the work of hardy pioneers. Still, Turner’s thesis held an almost canonical position among historians for much of the twentieth century and, more importantly, captured Americans’ enduring romanticization of the West and the simplification of a long and complicated story into a march of progress.

Tina Turner, trailblazing 'Queen of Rock 'n' Roll' who dazzled audiences worldwide, dies at 83

Tina Turner, the exuberant, heel-stomping, wild-haired rock goddess who sold out stadiums, earned a dozen Grammy Awards and won the adoration of fans around the world in an electrifying music career spanning five decades, died Wednesday at her home near Zurich after a long illness, according to her publicist.

She was 83.

"With her, the world loses a music legend and a role model," Turner's publicist, Bernard Doherty, said in a statement. Doherty added that there will be a private funeral ceremony for close friends and family members. He did not specify a cause of death.

The arc of Turner’s high-flying but tumultuous life was music industry legend — as well as the basis for a hit 1986 autobiography (“I, Tina”), a Hollywood biopic (“What’s Love Got to Do With It”) and a Broadway jukebox show (“Tina: The Tina Turner Musical”).

She ascended from rural roots to the heights of national stardom, blasting into public consciousness as one half of the sensational rhythm-and-blues duo Ike & Tina Turner and later establishing herself as one of the most popular Black female solo artists in the world.

She was the first woman and the first Black artist to appear on the cover of Rolling Stone — in just its second issue — and her massively successful solo career broke barriers for future generations of Black women in music.

But along the way, Turner experienced personal upheavals and private traumas. She alleged that Ike Turner, her ex-husband and artistic collaborator, subjected her to years of horrific physical abuse and tried to take control of virtually all aspects of her life.

“It was my relationship with Ike that made me most unhappy. At first, I had really been in love with him. Look what he’d done for me. But he was totally unpredictable,” Turner wrote in “I, Tina,” a memoir co-authored by music critic and MTV News correspondent Kurt Loder.

In the late 1970s, Turner managed to extricate herself from her husband and set out on her own. In the ’80s, Turner pulled off one of the most triumphant comebacks in modern rock music, reinventing herself as a gleefully liberated hit-maker who topped the Billboard charts.

Turner, a supremely talented vocalist who belted out songs with abandon, recorded one chart-topping song after another in the ’80s, but one track in particular made her a superstar: “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” a show-stopping anthem off the 1984 album “Private Dancer.”

Turner’s other big hits from the era included “Better Be Good to Me,” “We Don’t Need Another Hero (Thunderdome),” “Typical Male,” “The Best” and “I Don't Wanna Fight.” 

In the decades that followed, she toured around the world, racked up awards, occasionally acted in films and remained one of the signature musical personalities of the late 20th century. She decided to retire in 2009 after having wrapped up her 50th anniversary tour.

“I’ve done enough,” Turner announced to a crowd of 75,000 people at Letzigrund Stadium in Zurich that year. “I’ve been performing for 44 years. I really should hang up my dancing shoes.”

Turner earned eight competitive Grammy Awards, three Grammy Hall of Fame prizes and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement trophy. She was a two-time inductee into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame — first with Ike Turner (1991), then as a solo artist (2021). 

Humble beginnings

Anna Mae Bullock was born on Nov. 26, 1939, in rural Brownsville, Tennessee, to a family of sharecroppers. She loved to sing as a young girl. When the family moved to St. Louis, Missouri, she threw herself into the city’s R&B community.

In the mid-1950s, she met Ike Turner at a gig by his band, the Kings of Rhythm. Soon enough, she was part of the group, performing under the alliterative name he chose for her — Tina Turner.

The Ike and Tina Turner Revue, as the ensemble was known at the time, drew attention for lively performances. Ike was a talented musician in his own right, but Tina was clearly the main attraction, wowing audiences with her vocal chops, spirited dancing and raw verve.

The group struggled to find success in the recording booth until 1960, when “A Fool in Love” climbed up the pop charts and raised the revue’s national profile. Two years later, Ike and Tina tied the knot, and the duo went on to record several popular singles.

“Tina Turner is an incredible chick,” Rolling Stone co-founder Jann Wenner wrote in 1967 . “She comes in this very short miniskirt, way above her knees, with zillions of silver sequins and sparklers pasted on it. Her dancing is completely unrestrained.

“Unlike the polite hand-clapping Motown groups, she and the Ikettes scream, wail and do some fantastic boogaloo,” the reporter added. “No matter what you may think of the music, Tina Turner is worth sitting down and paying close attention to.”

But behind the scenes, the Turners’ marriage was deeply troubled. Ike, who struggled with addiction and psychological issues, frequently lashed out at his wife physically and emotionally. He also pursued affairs with other women. 

The years of mistreatment took a severe toll — and one day, she decided enough was enough. She left Ike after they got into a fight en route to the Dallas Statler Hilton on July 1, 1976, heading out on her own with just 36 cents and a Mobil credit card in her pocket.

She filed for divorce later that month, citing irreconcilable differences, and the legal split was finalized in 1978. (Ike, during the couple’s 1977 divorce proceedings, claimed the two were never legally married as he was still wedded to another woman at the time of the ceremony.)

Turner spent the next few years trying to find her footing. She toured to pay off debts, opened for the Rolling Stones in 1981 and earned income wherever she could, such as in guest appearances on television shows like “The Hollywood Squares.”

In those days, Turner was considered a “nostalgia act” — a talented but not exactly culturally vital relic from ’60s pop. But in 1984, everything changed: Turner released “Private Dancer,” a commercial and critical smash.

The album sold upwards of 20 million copies around the world and won three Grammy Awards, including record of the year and best female vocal performance, for “What’s Love Got to Do With It.” Turner also introduced a new look — big hair, high heels — that emphasized her sex appeal.

Turner thrived in the ’80s, lighting up concert venues with her joyful theatricality, dynamic vocals and commanding stage presence. She was a symbol of female empowerment and Black success, reaching new creative heights even as racist record executives tried to stand in her way.

Pain and survival

In the HBO documentary “Tina” (2021), she recalled that many journalists seemed narrowly interested in her past experiences with abuse, forgetting — or outright ignoring — her second act as a megawatt solo artist and inspiration to women worldwide.

In the film, she also spoke about her own journey to acceptance and even forgiveness: “In not forgiving, you suffer,” she told the documentarians. “I had an abusive life. … That’s what you got … so you have to accept it.”

Turner’s painful experiences with Ike were dramatized in the 1993 biopic “What’s Love Got to Do With It.” Angela Bassett played Tina, and Laurence Fishburne played Ike; they were both nominated for Oscars at the 66th Academy Awards.

In a statement Wednesday, Bassett said in part: "How do we say farewell to a woman who owned her pain and trauma and used it as a means to help change the world?"

"Through her courage in telling her story, her commitment to stay the course in her life, no matter the sacrifice, and her determination to carve out a space in rock and roll for herself and for others who look like her, Tina Turner showed others who lived in fear what a beautiful future filled with love, compassion, and freedom should look like," Bassett said.

The real-life Turner eventually found love with German record executive Erwin Bach, who she started dating in 1986 and married in a civil ceremony in Switzerland in 2013, after a 27-year romantic partnership. (Bach was one of the executive producers of the HBO documentary.)

Turner’s musical success was accompanied by roles in movies, including “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome,” released in 1985. She went on to release popular albums across the late ’80s and the ’90s, including “Break Every Rule,” “Foreign Affair” and “Wildest Dreams.”

“All the Best,” a greatest-hits album, debuted in 2004. Five years later, Turner decided to scale back public appearances and retire from the demands of the music business. 

She received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018. In 2021, she sold her music rights to BMG Rights Management for $50 million; later the same month, she was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as a solo act, accepting the prize via satellite from her home in Zurich.

“If they’re still giving me awards at 81, I must’ve done something right,” Turner said with a smile in her acceptance speech.

Daniel Arkin is a national reporter at NBC News.

The Golden Bachelorette Joan Vassos' Massive Age Gap With Gerry Turner Recreates What Ruined The Original Bachelor Shows

• The Golden Bachelorette star Joan Vassos is 61 years old, which is 11 years younger than The Golden Bachelor lead Gerry Turner.
• Joan's Golden Bachelorette contestants might be significantly younger than those of The Golden Bachelor.
• The Golden Bachelorette must maintain its original premise of older people finding love.

The Golden Bachelorette star Joan Vassos, a 61 year-old private school administrator from Rockville, Maryland, is 11 years younger than The Golden Bachelor lead Gerry Turner, a 72-year-old retired restaurateur from Hudson, Indiana , which might mean that the "Golden" series could already be headed down the path that ruined the original shows. Joan made her Bachelor Nation debut on Gerry's season, during which they formed a deep connection. However, Joan left The Golden Bachelor early to return home to her daughter who had postpartum depression.

Now Joan is ready to find love again on The Golden Bachelorette season 1 , but, at 61 years old, she's more than a decade younger than Gerry was when he starred in his season. The age range of Gerry's contestants was 60-75 years old. However, Joan's contestants might be considerably younger, considering that she's 61 . This could completely change the show, and recreate what ruined the original Bachelor franchise shows.

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The Bachelor Franchise Casts Are Very Young

The shows have featured contestants in their early 20s.

The goal of The Bachelor, The Bachelorette, and Bachelor in Paradise is for the couples to get engaged. However, the producers often cast people who are very young, and who truly aren't ready for that level of commitment . The Bachelor season 1, starring 31-year-old Alex Michel, featured 25 women, 22 of whom were in their 20s, and 8 of whom were younger than 25. Just three of the women were 30 or older, despite Alex being 31. Amanda Marsh, whom Alex ultimately chose, but didn't get engaged to, was 23 years old.

Similarly, The Bachelorette season 1, starring 30-year-old Trista Rehn, included 25 men, 15 of whom were in their 20s . At the end of the season, Trista got engaged to 28-year-old Ryan Sutter. They had a televised wedding, and they're still married today.

The youngest Bachelor star was Jesse Palmer at age 25, while the youngest Bachelorette lead was Hannah Brown at age 24. While it's true that the producers cast Clare Crawley as the Bachelorette at age 39 , a lot of the buzz surrounding her season was about her being the oldest lead in history, including an insulting promotional poster that depicted her as Mrs. Robinson from The Graduate. Although Clare was almost 40, ten out of her 32 contestants were in their 20s . The latest Bachelor season, which starred 28-year-old Joey Graziadei, featured 32 women in the cast, but only four of them were 30 or older. Six of them were under the age of 25.

While age doesn't always equate to marriage readiness or maturity, it does seem to be the case that the youngest Bachelor Nation contestants are more interested in drama than actually finding love. Contestants such as The Bachelor season 28's Lea Cayanan, 23, and Jess Edwards, 24, and The Bachelorette season 20's Brayden Bowers, 24, were involved in a lot of chaos. It often feels as though the youngest cast members aren't there to find love with the lead, but rather to audition for Bachelor in Paradise . This ruins the integrity of the show because it's obvious that they're not real contenders to get engaged to the lead in the end.

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The Golden Bachelorette Cast Might Be Significantly Younger Than The Golden Bachelor Women

Joan vassos' younger age means the men could be in their 40s or 50s.

The Golden Bachelor women were ages 60 to 75 , which was the perfect range for a "Golden" series. However, because Joan is 11 years younger than Gerry, it's possible that her age range could be 49 to 64 . The "Golden" series is new, so, although people in their 40s aren't considered to be of senior age, the producers could justify casting them by saying that the Bachelorette is "golden," but no one said that the contestants have to be.

Joan was open to dating Gerry, a man in his 70s, so there will most likely be men who are significantly older than her on the show. However, it's worth noting that the oldest contestants on Gerry's season were 75, just three years older than him. The Golden Bachelor didn't cast any women in their 80s. If Gerry had dated a woman 11 years older than him like when Joan dated him, that woman would be 83. This age disparity is directly related to the different ways that older men are perceived versus older women in society .

If Joan did date a man in his late 40s or early 50s, it would most likely be received differently than when Gerry did the same. Many people raise their eyebrows at older women dating younger men. However, it would only be fair for the show to give Joan a group of men with a wide range of ages, just as Gerry had. Perhaps The Golden Bachelorette should make the lower age limit 55 , so at least the men would all be considered seniors. Joan deserves to date men of whatever ages she wants, but the show has to maintain its original premise of being "golden."

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The Magic Of The Golden Series Is Watching Older People Fall In Love

The essence of the "golden" series could change.

The Golden Bachelor was inspiring because it showed that people could find love at an older age, and it gave people hope. It was a refreshing change from the other Bachelor franchise shows, which had begun to focus more on the drama among the young contestants than the love stories. If Joan's season casts men who are too young, the magic of the series will be lost .

It's interesting to think about how different The Golden Bachelorette would've been if some of the older women who were possibilities were cast instead of Joan . The Golden Bachelor contestants Sandra Mason, 75, Ellen Goltzer, 72, and Kathy Swarts, 71 are as vivacious as ever. They're at least a decade older than Joan, and in line with Gerry's age. Even Susan Noles, 67, is six years older than Joan, which would've been a big difference. In addition, celebrities who were suggested as possible Golden Bachelorette leads, Susan Lucci, 77 , and Kathie Lee Gifford, 70, were of more of a "golden" age than Joan.

Joan was the perfect choice for The Golden Bachelorette as far as her personality is concerned . She's calm, kind, and dignified. She's ready to find love again after her husband, John, passed away due to pancreatic cancer in 2021. However, as far as age is concerned, Joan being 11 years younger than the original "Golden" series star Gerry, might change the essence of the show, especially if the contestants are significantly younger too. After all, there are very big differences between people in their 50s, 60s, and 70s.

Everything will become clear when Joan's Golden Bachelorette suitors are finally revealed, but for now there's the hope that the cast won't skew younger. If The Golden Bachelorette loses what makes it "golden," then it will turn out to be just another dull reality dating series. Hopefully, Joan will have the chance to shine with truly "golden" men on The Golden Bachelorette .

The Golden Bachelorette premieres in the fall of 2024 on ABC.

Source: ABC/Instagram

The Golden Bachelorette

Following up on the success of The Golden Bachelor, The Golden Bachelorette is a new dating reality series created for ABC that sees an older woman looking for love out of a group of several eligible bachelors.