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Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier" http://newark.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/frontier.html
1 of 27 2003-10-09 09:04
The Significance of the Frontier in
American History1
By Frederick Jackson Turner
Electronic edition prepared by Jack Lynch,
Rutgers University — Newark
The text and notes come from chapter 1 of The Frontier in
American History (New York: Henry Holt, 1921). Paragraph
numbers are my own.
[1] 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 can not, 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.
[2] 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
in 1817, "We are great, and rapidly — I was about to say fearfully —
growing!",2 So saying, he touched the distinguishing feature of American life.
All peoples show development; the germ theory of politics has been...