The Significance of the Frontier in American History

Frederick Jackson Turner’s essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” critiques and analyzes prevailing ideologies at the time, offering the modern reader a means to understand concepts of American identity and democratic evolution in the 1890s. This time was a pivotal juncture in 19th-century US history, marked by the symbolic “closing” of the western frontier, as confirmed by the 1890 census. The 1890 census revealed that there were no major tracts of “unsettled” land in the west; the settler "frontier" no longer existed. The definition of the “frontier” and “unsettled” is now acknowledged to be deeply problematic as these lands were inhabited for millennia by the Indigenous population of North America. The census recorded settler populations, reflecting the contemporaneous presentation that unsettled land was synonymous with “uninhabited” and that Indigenous peoples were not “American.” The closing of the settler frontier resonated deeply in 1890s American society as frontier mythology had shaped narratives of American identity for centuries. This mythology can be seen in the idea of “Manifest Destiny,” first articulated by the newspaper columnist John L. O’Sullivan in 1845. This envisioned the nation’s destiny as stretching from coast to coast, ideas which not only fueled the movement toward the frontier but also ingrained a sense of divine entitlement and nationalistic duty among the settlers, rendering the expansion as an almost sacred mission.

Turner’s frontier thesis is clearly influenced by these prevalent ideas: It treats westward expansion as a central component of a distinct American identity, presenting the nation’s evolution in relation to a vast, uncharted territory. Turner perceives the frontier as a realm that fostered rugged individualism and he emphasizes his opinion that it was instrumental in shaping American democracy and institutions, even as industrialization and urbanization intensified, altering traditional socioeconomic dynamics. Turner’s thesis also contends that the frontier itself was crucial for American development, a perspective that dovetailed with broader contemporaneous debates over American exceptionalism. Although his essay followed on from, and responded to, traditional modes of thinking, Turner’s work was part of a trend toward the professionalization of history in the late 19th century, and his paper marks the rise of academic modernization in historical analysis. A major contribution of his paper is that, by positioning the frontier as the central force in America’s evolution, he underscored the role of the environment in shaping human history and society. His perspective was influenced by the incipient development of the social sciences, which apply scientific principles to social phenomena and which study humans as the product of their environment. He brought this new way of thinking to the nationalist school of historiography, focusing on the uniquely American phenomenon of the frontier. Turner’s essay began a key movement in academic research and political debate focusing on the role of the frontier in American history, which lasted for decades.

Over the course of the 20th and—especially—the 21st centuries, critiques have increasingly arisen that challenge Turner’s idealization of the frontier, especially the exclusion or diminution of the Indigenous American experience, including active displacement and settler violence, and the triumphant, supremacist paradigm of his worldview. Turner’s essay is a product of its time, in which “American” identity meant the white settled population, excluding North America’s Indigenous peoples and America’s Black population. The perspective of Turner’s work—and scholarship at the time—viewed the settlement of America wholly from the white settler perspective. As a result, its ideas and language are problematic to a modern audience as reflective of discriminatory attitudes and assumptions, especially to the extent that the essay’s success cemented, exacerbated, and prolonged these attitudes in popular and academic modes of thinking. Recent frontier studies, such as those by Patricia Nelson Limerick and Richard C. Wade, place Turner in his historical context and offer contemporary, nuanced analyses of the closing frontier’s significance in American culture, including complex social, environmental, and social impacts across the nation’s diverse communities.