Most Significant Thing About The American Frontier example essay topic

In 1893, historian Frederick Jackson Turner made an historic speech at the Columbian Exhibition. In his address, he spoke on, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History". Turner's hypothesis was that the frontier was the single most important influence on the development of the United States and its values. He spoke of the frontier's important influence on America for the first time shortly after the census of 1890, when a report from the Census Bureau proclaimed, "the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line... it can not, therefore any longer have a place in the census reports". Thus, the frontier officially ceased to exist. Turner quickly began to assess the importance of the frontier to America's past and to question the impact that such a change would have on the country in the future.

The American frontier is sharply distinguished from the European frontier -- a fortified boundary line running through dense populations. The most significant thing about the American frontier is, that it lies at the edge of free land. One of the most intriguing components of Turner's theory is his description of the Frontier as a "safety valve", or to use his phrase, a "gateway of escape". One of the major functions served by the frontier was that it provided a place of refuge for the people who could not function in the crowded, settled eastern lands. When one no longer felt a part of "civilization", the free, abundant lands of the West provided a ready haven for them, a place to start over. The West produced the world's first authentically free man.

Turner developed the thesis that the American West created and reinforced the American ideals of: equality, democracy, opportunity, and individualism. Frederick Jackson Turner used numerous examples from different eras of US history and from various regions to illustrate his basic tenets about the importance of the frontier. In his "Contributions of the West to American democracy", he said, "The paths of the pioneers have widened into broad highways. The forest clearing has expanded into affluent commonwealths.

Let us see to it that the ideals of the pioneer in his log cabin shall enlarge into the spiritual life of a democracy where civic power shall dominate and utilize individual achievement for the common good". I agree with Frederick Turner's Thesis, I believe that all aspects of American character have been shaped be the frontier. This is what differentiates Americans from their European ancestors. Other historians have faulted the thesis, successive rounds of criticism left Western history without a center.

The frontier concept excluded more than it covered through failing to do justice to diverse Western activities. Yale historian Howard Lamar believed the frontier thesis emphasized a discontinuity between a rural past and an urban-industrial future that may not have reflected reality. Thus, it was unsuitable as a guide to the present or future. Some scholars also discounted the safety-value proposition. It may have applied to antebellum America, when many did "go West", but failed to hold after the Civil War as the prospect of out-migration was put beyond the reach of urban slum-dwellers and others because of a lack of funds for farming and transportation. In fact, most later settlers, sons of farmers, arrived from existing settlements.

Moreover, the United States government gave away more homestead land in the forty years following the Turner thesis than in the years leading up to it. Scholars have begun to apply Turner's frontier theory to the Internet within the last five years. Beth S cannell investigated the development of virtual reality communities on the Internet as a new manifestation of the frontier mentality in her thesis "Life on the Border: Cyberspace and the Avatar in Historical Perspective". Rod Carve th and J. Metz proposed a number of theories about the impact of the Internet on American Democracy based on their analysis of Turner's theories about the effects of the frontier on the development of American democratic principles in their article, "Frederick Jackson Turner and the Democratization of the Electronic Frontier".

And the exploration of yet another aspect of Turner's thesis: his concept of the frontier as a "gateway of escape", a "safety valve.".