Turner's frontier thesis had begun to lose some of its potency as early as the late 1940s, which saw the publication of Earl Pomeroy's The Territories and the United States, 1861-1890: Studies in Colonial Administration (1947). Considered the father of the federal school (historians who stress the role of the federal government in the development and administration of the American West, a primacy slighted by Turner's thesis), Pomeroy followed this up with his influential essay "Toward a Reorientation of Western History: Continuity and Environment" (Mississippi Valley Historical Review 41 (1955): 579-600), which began the arguments against the exceptionalism inherent in Turner's thesis.
Even books that used Turner's terms, such as Malcolm Rohrbough's The Trans-Appalachian Frontier: People, Societies, and Institutions, 1775-1850 (1968; 3rd Edition, depicted below, 2007) argued against Turner that "models from older societies" were important in the great migrations westward, as settlers generally sought security before stability and relied on "shared values and priorities" to establish same:
More books began to undermine bits and pieces of Turner's thesis. Julie Roy Jeffrey's Frontier Women: the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840-1880 (1979) reinforced Pomeroy's argument about the role of government in the settlement of the American West, pointing out, for example, that Wyoming's legislature had granted women's suffrage (the first in the nation to do so) precisely in order to attract "responsible" settlers. (This landmark title was extensively revised [to account for the contributions of Native American, Hispanic, Chinese, and African American women] and was most recently published as Frontier Women "Civilizing" the West?" 1840-1880, 1998):
Other cracks began to appear in the Turner thesis. John Unruh's 1979 publication of The Plains Across: the Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840-60 (most recently reprinted in 1993, the 150th anniversary of the opening of the Oregon Trail) also reinforced Pomeroy's argument about the primacy of government in development of the American West. Unruh argued that emigrant fears about hostile tribes along the trails not only led to far more Native Americans than emigrants being slaughtered, but also led to repeated demands for military protection along the trails, greatly increasing government's presence in those areas:
As J. Thomas Murphy observed in his excellent overview of "Westward Expansion" (Reader's Guide to American History, 1997), books also were being published that attacked Turner's thesis for failing to account for the importance of impacts generated by countries like Mexico (along the borderlands that emigrants were traversing), and for ignoring the ecological self-destructiveness of emigrants:
It was not, however, until 1987 that the revisionist stormclouds broke with full force....
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