Preview

Frederick Jackson Turner

Satisfactory Essays
Open Document
Open Document
550 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Frederick Jackson Turner
Keren Wallace
Mr. Dement
US History
January 21, 2015
The Significance of the Frontier in American History

1. How does Frederick Jackson Turner define “frontier”? He gives a definition of the frontier: “it lies at the hither edge of free land”, meaning that he considers the Indian territory to be free land. According to him the frontier is the “meeting point between savagery and civilization”, “the most rapid and effective Americanization”.
2. What does Turner mean when he says that American development has “exhibited advanced along a single line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line”? “It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him, Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick; he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trials. Little by little he transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe.... The fact is, that here is a new product that is American.”
3. In what sense does the United States lie “like a huge page in the history of society”? Turner inscribed his version of history, marking out his concept of the West as the key to American development. He believed that the nation needed a coherent, integrated story of its beginnings and its development. “It begins with the Indian and the hunter; it goes on to tell of the disintegration of savagery by the entrance of the trader, the pathfinder of civilization”
4. How has the frontier

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Better Essays

    Cited: Colin Calloway, New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 150.…

    • 1277 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Shames points out how as land became sparse the concept of the American frontier evolved from the wide expanse of land to less tangible frontiers such as the exploration of space and the oceans which have each been referred to as the “Last Frontier”.…

    • 432 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The frontier has always represented a part of American culture. The idea of moving west fundamentally created the identity of the United States. America overcame the Proclamation of 1763, Manifest Destiny accelerated expansion, and finally the Homestead Act promoted the movement towards the Pacific. Frederick Turner’s Frontier Thesis stated that the expanse of land beyond the eastern cities would act as a safety net for the tensions affecting the crowded seaboard, and to a degree, Turner was correct.…

    • 532 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    1. First, we must ask ourselves what constitutes reading material as American Literature. Simply put, it is literature that assesses the copious literary history of the United States (the American experience). Therefore, the reading assignments such as Williams Bradford’s Of Plymouth’s Plantation, excerpts from the Journal of Christopher Columbus, “First Voyage”, Fourth Voyage”, and “Second Voyage”, and the “Story-Telling Stone” are perfect examples of American Literature. All of these stories depict life in America, whether written on paper, or communicated orally from generations to generations. However, the Native American Period, 1620–1840, refer to the period of Native American dominance in the New World. Native American literature consists…

    • 1142 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous frontier thesis argued that through the Westward expansion came the formation of the first “American” people. Turner’s essay, presented around 1893, strongly correlates with the upheaval 1890’s. The shaping of the new American nation through the westward settlement can be later linked to economic troubles, labor struggles, and a rise in democracy and big business.…

    • 650 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    He recounts the devastations that the Americas have faced, such as “the Spaniards” imposition of their Old World culture to the New World, and “the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.” When Spain colonized the New World, they brought with them their European culture that clashed with the Native Americans. With history as our evidence, the destruction is well known. The Dust Bowl was the fault of applying old traditions to new lands. Scientifically proven, readers can see that by migrating and bringing their own ways without adaptation results in disaster. Together, readers can logically conclude that the outcome of moving ended up in a…

    • 695 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    As a country full of diversity one can assume that we have learned cultural differences from other countries that we have interacted with. Frederick Jackson Turner discusses this idea in his excerpts from the “Turner Thesis” written on July 12, 1893. He touches on this idea when he speaks about how America adapted and learned from the cultures in which it conquered as the country moved in westward expansion. Such as when Americans learned from the Natives and began to use horseback for war tactics. This gave the Americans an advantage and allowed them to continue advancing forward. With each new opponent they faced, they would gather new ways to fight and this allowed them to evolve as the strongest military. By using these new ways, they also…

    • 305 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Western Frontier The romanticism of the west employed the frontier as the outer edge of the wave meeting “between savagery and civilization.” To historians, a frontier is “is not a lining of marking the start of an empty place but a zone of interaction where two or more societies vie for the use of land.’ In the “frontier thesis”, Frederick Turner describes the frontier as “gradually peopled.” However, the congress in 1862 funded the transcontinental railroad, the union pacific, and the Homestead Act.…

    • 518 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In Gordon Johnson’s collection of essays, Fast Cars and Frybread, he shows the evolution of Native American’s culture. What is more interesting is the blending of cultures that we know many years ago with the European Americans and the Native Americans. Johnson shows a lot of comparison between these two cultures. First, he emphasizes the feeling of these cultures to being “otherness” to the white colonists. For example, in his essay, A Hawk’s Cry, a Dusty Saddle, and Memories, he describes about his buddy Jimmy Balcone’s aunt as living with “no electricity, no refrigeration, no TV, not even a dog” (Johnson 11). It is implied how at first, the Native Americans generation back to Luther Standing Bear’s generation lives like this without technology;…

    • 320 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    After explaining the frontier of settlement in general and before discussing the influences on the East, Turner takes on the differences between the European and the American frontier. “The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization.” (415), is his statement. This includes the frontier running along the borders of free, uncultivated, uncivilized soil and having the best conditions to evolve into new cities and farm land. The clash of cultured Europeans and the undiscovered wilderness was fundamental for the change to an American civilization.…

    • 239 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    J M W Turner

    • 786 Words
    • 4 Pages

    J. M. W. Turner is one of Britain 's most popular artists who showed exceptional artistic talent from his early age and entered the Royal Academy at fourteen. His landscape paintings made him popular regardless of a darker side to his paintings that were made big issues by critiques. He became a well-celebrated artist despite of the difficulties he came across in life. Even being born in family of a Garden barber, he became very famous for his works such seascape and landscape. His success seems very exceptional while we consider that he did not have enough schooling, yet he brought revolution in the art. Although Turner was brought up in the 18th century academic culture, he became painter of romantic sublime.…

    • 786 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    However, a criticism of this novel would be that it is antiquated. Even from reading the title, ‘Nature’s Nation’, I got an indication that the text would be of little relevance in a contemporary sense, through its swift proposal that ‘Nature’ is the embodiment of America. Additionally, whilst Miller’s knowledge on Puritanism and American intellectual culture are unassailable, he draws criticism by claiming to have written about an idealistic America, failing to have mentioned the contributions of women, Native Americans and African Americans. Instead, this text is shaped upon on the interpretations of the Romanticists: Thoreau, Emerson and Melville, ignoring several other key variables. Another criticism of Nature’s Nation, was that Miller’s illumination of the Puritans failed to have much relevance within modern day America, a nation with a recent increase in a non-religious population. Additionally, Miller praises Thoreau’s philosophy behind ‘the Wilderness’ and the idea of it being “the preservation of the world” (pp.180), which is of little account within today’s First World. Therefore this can be an indication of the text being immaterial within contemporary America. Moreover, in similar ways to his earlier work, Miller attempts to provide an answer to what the American identity embodies. In actuality however, Miller proves the difficulty of locating an intelligible answer to what can be considered as America’s true…

    • 824 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Revenant

    • 521 Words
    • 3 Pages

    These people’s daily life seems not to have many things to do with the overall trend of history, but when it is added up, it is able to twist the path where the world will be going like the butterfly effect. In the early seventeenth century, a group of puritans departed from England sailing all the way to Plymouth on a cargo ship named “May Flower”. Two months of sailing had casted their hometown far away beneath the ocean level. Under their feet, it was the endless ground that had never been stepped on before. These puritans were taken as extreme religious heresy by people in their country. Possessing both devout for God and passion for adventure, they settled down with these two contradictories, which also became their root for centuries. As the wheel of history kept moving forward, an emerging country called the United States settled on the continent’s eastern coast, brought up the wild ambitions of adventurers for the vast land of Continental Midwest. Then it began the Trail of Tears, also known as Westward Movement. Conflicts between white soldiers and aboriginals came up in the form of the battle between revolvers and bows and…

    • 521 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Frontier Movement is a period in American history that refers to the westward movement of Americans toward the Pacific Ocean during the mid-1800s lasting until the early 1900’s. This movement was characterized by an expansionist zeal for opportunity and adventure, but was also heavily characterized by widespread social oppression and reform. It was during this time that both authors and reformists were inspired to write and share their ideas, many of which called attention to the often ignored social injustices of the time. These author’s ideas not only were inspired by the movement (the beginning of American Literature), but also heavily fueled and contributed to the movement in return. Authors Mark Twain and Susan B. Anthony, for example, played an important role in the frontier movement through their writings as they used these to convey the feelings they held toward America’s crooked social discrimination and socio-economic disparities.…

    • 621 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Frederick Winslow Taylor

    • 1654 Words
    • 7 Pages

    'Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915) was the first efficiency expert, the original time-and-motion man. To organised labour, he was a soulless slave driver, out to destroy the workingman`s health and rob him of his manhood. To the bosses, he was an eccentric and a radical, raising the wages of common labourers by a third, paying college boys to click stopwatches. To him and his friends, he was a misunderstood visionary possessor of the one best way that, under the banner of science, would confer prosperity on worker and boss alike, abolishing the ancient class hatreds.' (Kanigel,1997) So, why is this man essential when talking about work, organisation and society? The answer is quite simple: Taylor is the father of scientific management, the creator of a system that became known, inevitably enough, as Taylorism. This system has transformed the subculture of the manual working class in the nineteenth century, leaving its signature in the history of labour.(McMillan et al.,2007)…

    • 1654 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Better Essays