On 12 July 1893, at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois, noted historian Frederick Jackson Turner delivered an address to a meeting of the American Historical Association in which he suggested that
to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom-these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier.
Turner went on to observe that
now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.
Though not seen as particularly important at the time he delivered it (Turner's own parents, in town for the exposition, did not even bother to attend the meeting), the address was published later that year in Proceedings of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. It has been reprinted many times since, and is now widely held to be the single most influential essay ever published on the topic. It is, in fact, the cornerstone of any private library purporting to concern itself with The Wild West.
The Proceedings..., like most early periodicals, is rarely available in the marketplace, rarer still in anything approaching Fine condition (where one may reasonably expect to part with four figures for the privilege of ownership). Most book collectors add the essay to their private library via one of the many available reprints, the most enticing of which likely is Turner's own The Frontier in American History (1921), where the essay is reprinted as Chapter 1. Like the Proceedings..., though, this is a rara avis, so most collectors settle for a later reprint:
As Jeffrey Flagg has pointed out, it took a few years for Turner's frontier thesis to take hold:
Turner claimed that traits and characteristics which developed during the Nineteenth-Century push from East to West -- individualism, nationalism, mobility, egalitarianism -- not only deviated from the perceived standard American cultural attitudes which prevailed at the time, but eventually came to dominate the formation of the American character. With his announcement of the "closing" of the frontier, moreover, Turner implied that the nation would be forced to undergo a painful transition, from a perception of America as a land of endless boundaries, to one which required Americans to accept that their nation was finally a closed-space world, replete with the limitations inherent therein.
Turner's thesis was not especially well received initially; on the contrary, many of his contemporaries could not let go of the reified idea that America's various political and social institutions germinated in pre-colonial England and, before that, in medieval Germany. According to this view, American society was little more than an extension of European culture. Turner's thesis, then, struck many historians as heretical by arguing that the United States had evolved into a unique society.
Turner's thesis eventually prevailed, however, helped along by other scholars who would take his thesis and embellish it. Among the most significant of these was historian Ray Allen Billington (president of the Organization of American Historians, 1962-1963), who tirelessly advocated Turner's thesis in books like Westward Expansion, a History of the American Frontier (1949) and The Far Western Frontier, 1830-1860 (1956):
Westward Expansion... was in its fifth edition by 1982 (no doubt helped along by its extensive bibliography), but revisionist stormclouds were on the horizon, stormclouds that soon would break and inundate Turner's frontier thesis with a deluge of criticism....
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