Jackson turner age 7

Railroads, fostered by land grants, sent an increasing tide of immigrants into the Far West. The development of mines in Colorado had drawn isolated frontier settlements into that region, and Montana and Idaho were receiving settlers. The frontier was found in these mining camps and the ranches of the Great Plains. The superintendent of the census for reports, as previously stated, that the settlements of the West lie so scattered over the region that there can no longer be said to be a frontier line.

The fall line marked the frontier of the seventeenth century; the Alleghanies that of the eighteenth; the Mississippi that of the first quarter of the nineteenth; the Missouri that of the middle of this century omitting the California movement ; and the belt of the Rocky Mountains and the arid tract, the present frontier. Each was won by a series of Indian wars.

We have the complex European life sharply precipitated by the wilderness into the simplicity of primitive conditions. The first frontier had to meet its Indian question, its question of the disposition of the public domain, of the means of intercourse with older settlements, of the extension of political organization, of religious and educational activity.

And the settlement of these and similar questions for one frontier served as a guide for the next. Excepting the fisherman, each type of industry was on the march toward the West, impelled by an irresistible attraction. Each passed in successive waves across the continent. Stand at Cumberland Gap 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.

Stand at South Pass in the Rockies a century later and see the same procession with wider intervals between. The unequal rate of advance compels us to distinguish the frontier into the trader's frontier, the rancher's frontier, or the miner's frontier, and the farmer's frontier. When the mines and the cow pens were still near the fall line the traders' pack trains were tinkling across the Alleghanies, and the French on the Great Lakes were fortifying their posts, alarmed by the British trader's birch canoe.

When the trappers scaled the Rockies, the farmer was still near the mouth of the Missouri. Steadily the trader passed westward, utilizing the older lines of French trade. The Ohio, the Great Lakes, the Mississippi, the Missouri, and the Platte, the lines of western advance, were ascended by traders. The explanation of the rapidity of this advance is connected with the effects of the trader on the Indian.

The trading post left the unarmed tribes at the mercy of those that had purchased fire-arms--a truth which the Iroquois Indians wrote in blood, and so the remote and unvisited tribes gave eager welcome to the trader. Thus the disintegrating forces of civilization entered the wilderness. Every river valley and Indian trail became a fissure in Indian society, and so that society became honeycombed.

Long before the pioneer farmer appeared on the scene, primitive Indian life had passed away. The farmers met Indians armed with guns. The buffalo trail became the Indian trail, and this became the trader's "trace;" the trails widened into roads, and the roads into turnpikes, and these in turn were transformed into railroads. The same origin can be shown for the railroads of the South, the Far West, and the Dominion of Canada.

Louis, Council Bluffs, and Kansas City. Thus civilization in America has followed the arteries made by geology, pouring an ever richer tide through them, until at last the slender paths of aboriginal intercourse have been broadened and interwoven into the complex mazes of modern commercial lines; the wilderness has been interpenetrated by lines of civilization growing ever more numerous.

It is like the steady growth of a complex nervous system for the originally simple, inert continent. If one would understand why we are to-day one nation, rather than a collection of isolated states, he must study this economic and social consolidation of the country. In this progress from savage conditions lie topics for the evolutionist.

From the close of the seventeenth century various intercolonial congresses have been called to treat with Indians and establish common measures of defense. Particularism was strongest in colonies with no Indian frontier. This frontier stretched along the western border like a cord of union. The Indian was a common danger, demanding united action.

In this connection may be mentioned the importance of the frontier, from that day to this, as a military training school, keeping alive the power of resistance to aggression, and developing the stalwart and rugged qualities of the frontiersman. A rapid enumeration of some of the more noteworthy effects is all that I have time for. The coast was preponderantly English, but the later tides of continental immigration flowed across to the free lands.

In the crucible of the frontier the immigrants were Americanized, liberated, and fused into a mixed race, English in neither nationality nor characteristics. The process has gone on from the early days to our own. The coast, particularly of the South, lacked diversified industries, and was dependent on England for the bulk of its supplies. In the South there was even a dependence on the Northern colonies for articles of food.

Before long the frontier created a demand for merchants. As it retreated from the coast it became less and less possible for England to bring her supplies directly to the consumer's wharfs, and carry away staple crops, and staple crops began to give way to diversified agriculture for a time. The effect of this phase of the frontier action upon the northern section is perceived when we realize how the advance of the frontier aroused seaboard cities like Boston, New York, and Baltimore, to engage in rivalry for what Washington called "the extensive and valuable trade of a rising empire.

The disposition of the public lands was a third important subject of national legislation influenced by the frontier. The effects of the struggle of the landed and the landless States, and of the Ordinance of , need no discussion. The purchase of Louisiana was perhaps the constitutional turning point in the history of the Republic, inasmuch as it afforded both a new area for national legislation and the occasion of the downfall of the policy of strict construction.

But the purchase of Louisiana was called out by frontier needs and demands. As frontier States accrued to the Union the national power grew. In a speech on the dedication of the Calhoun monument Mr. Lamar explained: "In the States were the creators of the Federal Government; in the Federal Government was the creator of a large majority of the States.

The policy of the United States in dealing with its lands is in sharp contrast with the European system of scientific administration. Efforts to make this domain a source of revenue, and to withhold it from emigrants in order that settlement might be compact, were in vain. The jealousy and the fears of the East were powerless in the face of the demands of the frontiersmen.

The reason is obvious; a system of administration was not what the West demanded; it wanted land. Most Read Most Recent Dungannon LIVE: Police hunting weapon in Dungannon town centre as man arrested A taxi driver reported that a man armed with what was described as a handgun, had pointed the weapon at his vehicle and then drove off. Ulster Rugby.

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William Appleman Williams led the "Wisconsin School" of diplomatic historians by arguing that the frontier thesis encouraged American overseas expansion, especially in Asia, during the 20th century. Williams viewed the frontier concept as a tool to promote democracy through both world wars, to endorse spending on foreign aid, and motivate action against totalitarianism.

Other historians, who wanted to focus scholarship on minorities, especially Native Americans and Hispanics, started in the s to criticize the frontier thesis because it did not attempt to explain the evolution of those groups. Turner never published a major book on the frontier for which he did 40 years of research. Mode in , argued that churches adapted to the characteristics of the frontier, creating new denominations such as the Mormons , the Church of Christ , the Disciples of Christ , and the Cumberland Presbyterians.

The frontier, they argued, shaped uniquely American institutions such as revivals, camp meetings, and itinerant preaching. This view dominated religious historiography for decades. Micheaux promoted the West as a place where blacks could experience less institutionalized forms of racism and earn economic success through hard work and perseverance.

Slatta argues that the widespread popularization of Turner's frontier thesis influenced popular histories, motion pictures, and novels, which characterize the West in terms of individualism, frontier violence, and rough justice. Disneyland 's Frontierland of the mid to late 20th century reflected the myth of rugged individualism that celebrated what was perceived to be the American heritage.

The public has ignored academic historians' anti-Turnerian models, largely because they conflict with and often destroy the icons of Western heritage. However, the work of historians during the s—s, some of whom sought to bury Turner's conception of the frontier, and others who sought to spare the concept but with nuance, have done much to place Western myths in context.

A modern interpretation describes it as appropriating Indigenous land by means of "American ingenuity", in the process creating a unique cultural identity different from their European ancestors. A study in Econometrica found empirical support for the frontier thesis, showing that frontier experience had a causal impact on individualism.

Though Turner's work was massively popular in its time and for decades after, it received significant intellectual pushback in the midst of World War II. American democracy was born of no theorist's dream; it was not carried in the Susan Constant to Virginia, nor in the Mayflower to Plymouth. It came out of the American forest, and it gained new strength each time it touched a new frontier.

Not the constitution but free land and an abundance of natural resources open to a fit people, made the democratic type of society in America for three centuries while it occupied its empire. This assertion's racial overtones concerned historians as Adolf Hitler and the Blood and soil ideology, stoking racial and destructive enthusiasm, rose to power in Germany.

He asked why the Turnerian American character was limited to the Thirteen Colonies that went on to form the United States, why the frontier did not produce that same character among pre-Columbian Native Americans and Spaniards in the New World. Indeed, his influence was felt in American classrooms until the s and 80s. The Frontier Thesis has met scrutiny in the time since publication.

Criticisms of the Thesis include the lack of information regarding how the thesis applies to indigenous Americans, African Americans, and Women. It has been argued that Frontier Thesis is Eurocentric and offers nothing to non-whites. David J Weber's article, utilizing the Bolton Thesis, has argued that the Turner Thesis is not applicable to the Mexican Frontier and that cultures have just as much to do with political development than environment, and that isolation from the metropolis can foster despotism as much as foster liberty.

Obstacles to Turnerian development in Mexican Frontier history include Geographic isolation promoting caudillismo and disunion, inarable desert and jungle, and rebellious independent indigenous peoples who were at odds with and fought Mexican people. The idea of the frontier thesis has been traded in by certain Historians for a Boltonian outlook that postulates that the culture of the colonizing people shapes the environment rather than the environment shaping the people.

Other scholars and contemporary individuals postulate that the equality, unity and liberty promoted by western expansion was illusory and does not account for the Chinese Exclusion Act, or the expansion of poverty and during the Gilded Age, or the spread of slavery westward and disenfranchisement of Mexican-Americans as a result of the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

Subsequent critics, historians, and politicians have suggested that other 'frontiers,' such as scientific innovation, could serve similar functions in American development. Historians have noted that John F. Kennedy in the early s explicitly called upon the ideas of the frontier.

Jackson turner age 7

My call is to the young in heart, regardless of age—to the stout in spirit, regardless of party. Limerick points out that Kennedy assumed that "the campaigns of the Old Frontier had been successful, and morally justified. Adrienne Kolb and Lillian Hoddeson argue that during the heyday of Kennedy's "New Frontier," the physicists who built Fermilab explicitly sought to recapture the excitement of the old frontier.

They argue that, "Frontier imagery motivates Fermilab physicists, and a rhetoric remarkably similar to that of Turner helped them secure support for their research. A small herd of American bison was started at the lab's founding to symbolize Fermilab's presence on the frontier of physics and its connection to the American prairie. This herd, known as the Fermilab bison herd , still lives on the grounds of Fermilab.

Instead Fermilab's planners sought to return to Turnerian themes. They emphasized the values of individualism, empiricism, simplicity, equality, courage, discovery, independence, and naturalism in the service of democratic access, human rights, ecological balance, and the resolution of social, economic, and political issues. Milton Stanley Livingston, the lab's associate director, said in , "The frontier of high energy and the infinitesimally small is a challenge to the mind of man.

If we can reach and cross this frontier, our generations will have furnished a significant milestone in human history. John Perry Barlow , along with Mitch Kapor , promoted the idea of cyberspace the realm of telecommunication as an "electronic frontier" beyond the borders of any physically based government, in which freedom and self-determination could be fully realized.

Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikidata item. Argument by historian Frederick Jackson Turner. Summary [ edit ]. Intellectual context [ edit ]. Germanic germ theory [ edit ]. Racial warfare [ edit ]. Evolution [ edit ]. Closed frontier [ edit ].

Comparative frontiers [ edit ]. Impact and influence [ edit ]. Early anti-Turnerian thought [ edit ]. Criticisms [ edit ]. New frontiers [ edit ]. Further information: New Frontier. Fermilab [ edit ]. Electronic frontier [ edit ]. People referenced by Turner [ edit ]. See also [ edit ]. Wikisource has original text related to this article: Works by Frederick Jackson Turner.

References [ edit ]. The Frontier in American History. Agricultural History. JSTOR Essays and Miscellany 1st ed.