what was frederick jackson turner's thesis

• History & Society
• Science & Tech
• Biographies
• Animals & Nature
• Geography & Travel
• Arts & Culture
• Games & Quizzes
• On This Day
• One Good Fact
• New Articles
• Lifestyles & Social Issues
• Philosophy & Religion
• Politics, Law & Government
• World History
• Health & Medicine
• Browse Biographies
• Birds, Reptiles & Other Vertebrates
• Bugs, Mollusks & Other Invertebrates
• Environment
• Fossils & Geologic Time
• Entertainment & Pop Culture
• Sports & Recreation
• Visual Arts
• Demystified
• Image Galleries
• Infographics
• Top Questions
• Britannica Kids
• Saving Earth
• Space Next 50
• Student Center

Frederick Jackson Turner

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

• Wisconsin Life - Frederick Jackson Turner and the History of the American West
• Weber State University - Biography of Frederick Jackson Turner
• National Humanities Center - The Significance of the Frontier in American History 1893
• Frederick Jackson Turner - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)

Frederick Jackson Turner (born November 14, 1861, Portage , Wisconsin , U.S.—died March 14, 1932, San Marino , California) was an American historian best known for the “ frontier thesis.” The single most influential interpretation of the American past, it proposed that the distinctiveness of the United States was attributable to its long history of “westering.” Despite the fame of this monocausal interpretation, as the teacher and mentor of dozens of young historians, Turner insisted on a multicausal model of history , with a recognition of the interaction of politics, economics , culture , and geography. Turner’s penetrating analyses of American history and culture were powerfully influential and changed the direction of much American historical writing.

Born in frontier Wisconsin and educated at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Turner did graduate work at Johns Hopkins University under Herbert Baxter Adams . Awarded a doctorate in 1891, Turner was one of the first historians professionally trained in the United States rather than in Europe. He began his teaching career at the University of Wisconsin in 1889. He began to make his mark with his first professional paper, “ The Significance of History” (1891), which contains the famous line “Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time.” The controversial notion that there was no fixed historical truth, and that all historical interpretation should be shaped by present concerns, would become the hallmark of the so-called “New History,” a movement that called for studies illuminating the historical development of the political and cultural controversies of the day. Turner should be counted among the “progressive historians,” though, with the political temperament of a small-town Midwesterner, his progressivism was rather timid. Nevertheless, he made it clear that his historical writing was shaped by a contemporary agenda.

Turner first detailed his own interpretation of American history in his justly famous paper, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” delivered at a meeting of historians in Chicago in 1893 and published many times thereafter. Adams, his mentor at Johns Hopkins , had argued that all significant American institutions derived from German and English antecedents . Rebelling against this view, Turner argued instead that Europeans had been transformed by the process of settling the American continent and that what was unique about the United States was its frontier history . (Ironically, Turner passed up an opportunity to attend Buffalo Bill ’s Wild West show so that he could complete “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” on the morning that he presented it.) He traced the social evolution of frontier life as it continually developed across the continent from the primitive conditions experienced by the explorer, trapper, and trader, through maturing agricultural stages, finally reaching the complexity of city and factory. Turner held that the American character was decisively shaped by conditions on the frontier, in particular the abundance of free land, the settling of which engendered such traits as self-reliance, individualism , inventiveness, restless energy, mobility, materialism, and optimism. Turner’s “frontier thesis” rose to become the dominant interpretation of American history for the next half-century and longer. In the words of historian William Appleman Williams, it “rolled through the universities and into popular literature like a tidal wave.” While today’s professional historians tend to reject such sweeping theories, emphasizing instead a variety of factors in their interpretations of the past, Turner’s frontier thesis remains the most popular explanation of American development among the literate public.

For a scholar of such wide influence, Turner wrote relatively few books. His Rise of the New West, 1819–1829 (1906) was published as a volume in The American Nation series, which included contributions from the nation’s leading historians. The follow-up to that study, The United States, 1830–1850: The Nation and Its Sections (1935), would not be published until after his death. Turner may have had difficulty writing books, but he was a brilliant master of the historical essay. The winner of an oratorical medal as an undergraduate, he also was a gifted and active public speaker. His deep, melodious voice commanded attention whether he was addressing a teachers group, an audience of alumni, or a branch of the Chautauqua movement . His writing, too, bore the stamp of oratory; indeed, he reworked his lectures into articles that appeared in the nation’s most influential popular and scholarly journals.

Many of Turner’s best essays were collected in The Frontier in American History (1920) and The Significance of Sections in American History (1932), for which he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1933. In these writings Turner promoted new methods in historical research, including the techniques of the newly founded social sciences , and urged his colleagues to study new topics such as immigration , urbanization , economic development , and social and cultural history . He also commented directly on the connections he saw between the past and the present.

The end of the frontier era of continental expansion, Turner reasoned, had thrown the nation “back upon itself.” Writing that “imperious will and force” had to be replaced by social reorganization, he called for an expanded system of educational opportunity that would supplant the geographic mobility of the frontier. “The test tube and the microscope are needed rather than ax and rifle,” he wrote; “in place of old frontiers of wilderness, there are new frontiers of unwon fields of science.” Pioneer ideals were to be maintained by American universities through the training of new leaders who would strive “to reconcile popular government and culture with the huge industrial society of the modern world.”

Whereas in his 1893 essay he celebrated the pioneers for the spirit of individualism that spurred migration westward, 25 years later Turner castigated “these slashers of the forest, these self-sufficing pioneers, raising the corn and livestock for their own need, living scattered and apart.” For Turner the national problem was “no longer how to cut and burn away the vast screen of the dense and daunting forest” but “how to save and wisely use the remaining timber.” At the end of his career, he stressed the vital role that regionalism would play in counteracting the atomization brought about by the frontier experience. Turner hoped that stability would replace mobility as a defining factor in the development of American society and that communities would become stronger as a result. What the world needed now, he argued, was “a highly organized provincial life to serve as a check upon mob psychology on a national scale, and to furnish that variety which is essential to vital growth and originality.” Turner never ceased to treat history as contemporary knowledge, seeking to explore the ways that the nation might rechannel its expansionist impulses into the development of community life.

Turner taught at the University of Wisconsin until 1910, when he accepted an appointment to a distinguished chair of history at Harvard University . At these two institutions he helped build two of the great university history departments of the 20th century and trained many distinguished historians, including Carl Becker , Merle Curti, Herbert Bolton , and Frederick Merk, who became Turner’s successor at Harvard. He was an early leader of the American Historical Association , serving as its president in 1910 and on the editorial board of the association’s American Historical Review from 1910 to 1915. Poor health forced his early retirement from Harvard in 1924. Turner moved to the Huntington Library in San Marino, California , where he remained as senior research associate until his death.

How the Myth of the American Frontier Got Its Start

Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis informed decades of scholarship and culture. Then he realized he was wrong

Colin Woodard

On the evening of   July 12, 1893, in the hall of a massive new Beaux-Arts building that would soon house the Art Institute of Chicago, a young professor named Frederick Jackson Turner rose to present what would become the most influential essay in the study of U.S. history.

It was getting late. The lecture hall was stifling from a day of blazing sun, which had tormented the throngs visiting the nearby Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, a carnival of never-before-seen wonders, like a fully illuminated electric city and George Ferris’ 264-foot-tall rotating observation wheel. Many of the hundred or so historians attending the conference, a meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA), were dazed and dusty from an afternoon spent watching Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show at a stadium near the fairground’s gates. They had already sat through three other speeches. Some may have been dozing off as the thin, 31-year-old associate professor from the University of Wisconsin in nearby Madison began his remarks.

Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $19.99

This article is a selection from the January/February 2023 issue of Smithsonian magazine

Turner told them the force that had forged Americans into one people was the frontier of the Midwest and Far West. In this virgin world, settlers had finally been relieved of the European baggage of feudalism that their ancestors had brought across the Atlantic, freeing them to find their true selves: self-sufficient, pragmatic, egalitarian and civic-minded. “The frontier promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people,” he told the audience. “In the crucible of the frontier, the immigrants were Americanized, liberated and fused into a mixed race, English in neither nationality nor characteristics.”

The audience was unmoved.

In their dispatches the following morning, most of the newspaper reporters covering the conference didn’t even mention Turner’s talk. Nor did the official account of the proceedings prepared by the librarian William F. Poole for The Dial , an influential literary journal. Turner’s own father, writing to relatives a few days later, praised Turner’s skills as the family’s guide at the fair, but he said nothing at all about the speech that had brought them there.

Yet in less than a decade, Turner would be the most influential living historian in the United States, and his Frontier Thesis would become the dominant lens through which Americans understood their character, origins and destiny. Soon, Jackson’s theme was prevalent in political speech, in the way high schools taught history, in patriotic paintings—in short, everywhere. Perfectly timed to meet the needs of a country experiencing dramatic and destabilizing change, Turner’s thesis was swiftly embraced by academic and political institutions, just as railroads, manufacturing machines and telegraph systems were rapidly reshaping American life.

By that time, Turner himself had realized that his theory was almost entirely wrong.

American historians had long believed that Providence had chosen their people to spread Anglo-Saxon freedom across the continent. As an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, Turner was introduced to a different argument by his mentor, the classical scholar William Francis Allen. Extrapolating from Darwinism, Allen believed societies evolved like organisms, adapting themselves to the environments they encountered. Scientific laws, not divine will, he advised his mentee, guided the course of nations. After graduating, Turner pursued a doctorate at Johns Hopkins University, where he impressed the history program’s leader, Herbert Baxter Adams, and formed a lifelong friendship with one of his teachers, an ambitious young professor named Woodrow Wilson. The connections were useful: When Allen died in 1889, Adams and Wilson aided Turner in his quest to take Allen’s place as head of Wisconsin’s history department. And on the strength of Turner’s early work, Adams invited him to present a paper at the 1893 meeting of the AHA, to be held in conjunction with the World’s Congress Auxiliary of the World’s Columbian Exposition.

The resulting essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” offered a vivid evocation of life in the American West. Stripped of “the garments of civilization,” settlers between the 1780s and the 1830s found themselves “in the birch canoe” wearing “the hunting shirt and the moccasin.” Soon, they were “planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick” and even shouting war cries. Faced with Native American resistance—Turner largely overlooked what the ethnic cleansing campaign that created all that “free land” might say about the American character—the settlers looked to the federal government for protection from Native enemies and foreign empires, including during the War of 1812, thus fostering a loyalty to the nation rather than to their half-forgotten nations of origin.

He warned that with the disappearance of the force that had shaped them—in 1890, the head of the Census Bureau concluded there was no longer a frontier line between areas that had been settled by European Americans and those that had not—Americans would no longer be able to flee west for an easy escape from responsibility, failure or oppression. “Each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past,” Turner concluded. “Now … the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.”

When he left the podium on that sweltering night, he could not have known how fervently the nation would embrace his thesis.

Like so many young scholars, Turner worked hard to bring attention to his thesis. He incorporated it into the graduate seminars he taught, lectured about it across the Midwest and wrote the entry for “Frontier” in the widely read Johnson’s Universal Cyclopædia. He arranged to have the thesis reprinted in the journal of the Wisconsin Historical Society and in the AHA’s 1893 annual report. Wilson championed it in his own writings, and the essay was read by hundreds of schoolteachers who found it reprinted in the popular pedagogical journal of the Herbart Society, a group devoted to the scientific study of teaching. Turner’s big break came when the Atlantic Monthly ’s editors asked him to use his novel viewpoint to explain the sudden rise of populists in the rural Midwest, and how they had managed to seize control of the Democratic Party to make their candidate, William Jennings Bryan, its nominee for president. Turner’s 1896 Atlantic Monthly essay , which tied the populists’ agitation to the social pressures allegedly caused by the closing of the frontier—soil depletion, debt, rising land prices—was promptly picked up by newspapers and popular journals across the country.

Meanwhile, Turner’s graduate students became tenured professors and disseminated his ideas to the up-and-coming generation of academics. The thrust of the thesis appeared in political speeches, dime-store western novels and even the new popular medium of film, where it fueled the work of a young director named John Ford who would become the master of the Hollywood western. In 1911, Columbia University’s David Muzzey incorporated it into a textbook—initially titled History of the American People —that would be used by most of the nation’s secondary schools for half a century.

Americans embraced Turner’s argument because it provided a fresh and credible explanation for the nation’s exceptionalism—the notion that the U.S. follows a path soaring above those of other countries—one that relied not on earlier Calvinist notions of being “the elect,” but rather on the scientific (and fashionable) observations of Charles Darwin. In a rapidly diversifying country, the Frontier Thesis denied a special role to the Eastern colonies’ British heritage; we were instead a “composite nation,” birthed in the Mississippi watershed. Turner’s emphasis on mobility, progress and individualism echoed the values of the Gilded Age—when readers devoured Horatio Alger’s rags-to-riches stories—and lent them credibility for the generations to follow.

But as a researcher, Turner himself turned away from the Frontier Thesis in the years after the 1890s. He never wrote it down in book form or even in academic articles. He declined invitations to defend it, and before long he himself lost faith in it.

For one thing, he had been relying too narrowly on the experiences in his own region of the Upper Midwest, which had been colonized by a settlement stream originating in New England. In fact, he found, the values he had ascribed to the frontier’s environmental conditioning were actually those of this Greater New England settlement culture, one his family and most of his fellow citizens in Portage, Wisconsin, remained part of, with their commitment to strong village and town governments, taxpayer-financed public schools and the direct democracy of the town meeting. He saw that other parts of the frontier had been colonized by other settlement streams anchored in Scots-Irish Appalachia or in the slave plantations of the Southern lowlands, and he noted that their populations continued to behave completely differently from one another, both politically and culturally, even when they lived in similar physical environments. Somehow settlers moving west from these distinct regional cultures were resisting the Darwinian environmental and cultural forces that had supposedly forged, as Turner’s biographer, Ray Allen Billington, put it, “a new political species” of human, the American. Instead, they were stubbornly remaining themselves. “Men are not absolutely dictated to by climate, geography, soils or economic interests,” Turner wrote in 1922. “The influence of the stock from which they sprang, the inherited ideals, the spiritual factors, often triumph over the material interests.”

Turner spent the last decades of his life working on what he intended to be his magnum opus, a book not about American unity but rather about the abiding differences between its regions, or “sections,” as he called them. “In respect to problems of common action, we are like what a United States of Europe would be,” he wrote in 1922, at the age of 60. For example, the Scots-Irish and German small farmers and herders who settled the uplands of the southeastern states had long clashed with nearby English enslavers over education spending, tax policy and political representation. Turner saw the whole history of the country as a wrestling match between these smaller quasi-nations, albeit a largely peaceful one guided by rules, laws and shared American ideals: “When we think of the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, as steps in the marking off of spheres of influence and the assignment of mandates [between nations] … we see a resemblance to what has gone on in the Old World,” Turner explained. He hoped shared ideals—and federal institutions—would prove cohesive for a nation suddenly coming of age, its frontier closed, its people having to steward their lands rather than striking out for someplace new.

Get the latest History stories in your inbox?

Click to visit our Privacy Statement .

Colin Woodard | | READ MORE

Colin Woodard is a journalist and historian, and the author of six books including Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood . He lives in Maine.

The American Yawp Reader

Frederick jackson turner, “significance of the frontier in american history” (1893).

Perhaps the most influential essay by an American historian, Frederick Jackson Turner’s address to the American Historical Association on “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” defined for many Americans the relationship between the frontier and American culture and contemplated what might follow “the closing of the frontier.”

In a recent bulletin of the Superintendent of the Census for 1890 appear these significant words: “Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports.” This brief official statement marks the closing of a great historic movement. Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.

Behind institutions, behind constitutional forms and modifications, lie the vital forces that call these organs into life and shape them to meet changing conditions. The peculiarity of American institutions is, the fact that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people—to the changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and in developing at each area of this progress out of the primitive economic and political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life. Said Calhoun in 1817, “We are great, and rapidly—I was about to say fearfully—growing!” So saying, he touched the distinguishing feature of American life. All peoples show development; the germ theory of politics has been sufficiently emphasized. In the case of most nations, however, the development has occurred in a limited area; and if the nation has expanded, it has met other growing peoples whom it has conquered. But in the case of the United States we have a different phenomenon. Limiting our attention to the Atlantic coast, we have the familiar phenomenon of the evolution of institutions in a limited area, such as the rise of representative government; the differentiation of simple colonial governments into complex organs; the progress from primitive industrial society, without division of labor, up to manufacturing civilization. But we have in addition to this a recurrence of the process of evolution in each western area reached in the process of expansion. Thus American development has exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area. American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character. The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is the Great West. …

In this advance, the frontier is the outer edge of the wave—the meeting point between savagery and civilization. Much has been written about the frontier from the point of view of border warfare and the chase, but as a field for the serious study of the economist and the historian it has been neglected.

From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of profound importance. The works of travelers along each frontier from colonial days onward describe certain common traits, and these traits have, while softening down, still persisted as survivals in the place of their origin, even when a higher social organization succeeded. The result is 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. Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them. He would be a rash prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life has now entirely ceased. Movement has been its dominant fact, and, unless this training has no effect upon a people, the American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise. But never again will such gifts of free land offer themselves. For a moment, at the frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant. There is not  tabula rasa . The stubborn American environment is there with its imperious summons to accept its conditions; the inherited ways of doing things are also there; and yet, in spite of environment, and in spite of custom, each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifference to its lessons, have accompanied the frontier. What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the nations of Europe more remotely. And 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.

Source: Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History, 1919.

Why was the Turner Thesis abandoned by historians

Fredrick Jackson Turner’s thesis of the American frontier defined the study of the American West during the 20th century. In 1893, Turner argued that “American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development.” ( The Frontier in American History , Turner, p. 1.) Jackson believed that westward expansion allowed America to move away from the influence of Europe and gain “independence on American lines.” (Turner, p. 4.) The conquest of the frontier forced Americans to become smart, resourceful, and democratic. By focusing his analysis on people in the periphery, Turner de-emphasized the importance of everyone else. Additionally, many people who lived on the “frontier” were not part of his thesis because they did not fit his model of the democratizing American. The closing of the frontier in 1890 by the Superintendent of the census prompted Turner’s thesis.

While appealing, the Turner thesis stultified scholarship on the West. In 1984, colonial historian James Henretta even stated, “[f]or, in our role as scholars, we must recognize that the subject of westward expansion in itself longer engages the attention of many perhaps most, historians of the United States.” ( Legacy of Conquest , Patricia Limerick, p. 21.) Turner’s thesis had effectively shaped popular opinion and historical scholarship of the American West, but the thesis slowed continued academic interest in the field.

Reassessment of Western History

Finally, she asked historians to eliminate the stereotypes from Western history and try to understand the complex relations between the people of the West. Even before Limerick’s manifesto, scholars were re-evaluating the west and its people, and its pace has only quickened. Whether or not scholars agree with Limerick, they have explored new depths of Western American history. While these new works are not easy to categorize, they do fit into some loose categories: gender ( Relations of Rescue by Peggy Pascoe), ethnicity ( The Roots of Dependency by Richard White, and Lewis and Clark Among the Indians by James P. Rhonda), immigration (Impossible Subjects by Ming Ngai), and environmental (Nature’s Metropolis by William Cronon, Rivers of Empire by Donald Worster) history. These are just a few of the topics that have been examined by American West scholars. This paper will examine how these new histories of the American West resemble or diverge from Limerick’s outline.

Defining America or a Threat to America's Moral Standing

Unlike Limerick, Pascoe did not find it necessary to define the west or the frontier. She did not have to because the Protestant missionaries in her story defined it for her. While Turner may have believed that the West was no longer the frontier in 1890, the missionaries certainly would have disagreed. In fact, the rescue missions were placed in the communities that the Victorian Protestant missionary judged to be the least “civilized” parts of America (Lakota Territory, San Francisco’s Chinatown, rough and tumble Denver and Salt Lake City.) Instead of being a story of conquest by Victorian or western morality, it was a story of how that morality was often challenged and its terms were negotiated by culturally different communities. Pascoe’s primary goal in this work was not only to eliminate stereotypes but to challenge the notion that white women civilized the west. While conquest may be a component of other histories, no one group in Pascoe’s story successfully dominated any other.

Changing the Narrative of Native Americans in the West

Two books were written before Legacy was published, Lewis and Clark Among the Indians (James Rhonda) and The Roots of Dependency (Richard White) both provide a window into the world of Native Americans. Both books took new approaches to Native American histories. Rhonda’s book looked at the familiar Lewis and Clark expedition but from an entirely different angle. Rhonda described the interactions between the expedition and the various Native American tribes they encountered. White’s book also sought to describe the interactions between the United States and the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos, but he sought to explain why the economies of these tribes broke down after contact. Each of these books covers new ground by addressing the impact of these interactions between the United States and the Native Americans.

Instead of describing the initial interactions of the United States government with the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos, White explained how the self-sufficient economies of these people were destroyed. White described how the United States government turned these successful native people into wards of the American state. His story explained how the United States conquered these tribes without firing a shot. The consequence of this conquest was the creation of weak, dependent nations that could not survive without handouts from the federal government. Like Rhonda, White also sought to shatter long-standing stereotypes and myths regarding Native Americans. White verified that each of these tribes had self-sufficient economies which permitted prosperous lifestyles for their people before the devastating interactions with the United States government occurred. The United States in each case fundamentally altered the tribes’ economies and environments. These alterations threatened the survival of the tribes. In some cases, the United States sought to trade with these tribes in an effort put the tribes in debt. After the tribes were in debt, the United States then forced the tribes to sell their land. In other situations, the government damaged the tribes’ economies even when they sought to help them.

The Impact of Immigrants to the West

While illegal immigration is not an issue isolated to the history of the American West, the immigrants moved predominantly into California, Texas and the American Southwest. Like Anglo settlers who were attracted to the West for the potential for new life in the nineteenth century, illegal immigrants continued to move in during the twentieth. The illegal immigrants were welcomed, despite their status, because California’s large commercial farms needed inexpensive labor to harvest their crops. Impossible Subjects describes four groups of illegal immigrants (Filipinos, Japanese, Chinese and Mexican braceros) who were created by the United States immigration policy. Ngai specifically examines the role that the government played in defining, controlling and disciplining these groups for their allegedly illegal misconduct.

The Rise of Western Environmental History

Environmental history has become an increasingly important component of the history of the American West. Originally, the American West was seen as an untamed wilderness, but over time that description has changed. Two conceptually different, but nonetheless important books on environmental history discussed the American West and its importance in America. Nature’s Metropolis by William Cronon and Rivers of Empire by Donald Worster each explored the environment and the economy of the American West. Cronon examined the formation of Chicago and the importance of its commodities market for the development of the American West. Alternatively, Worster focuses on the creation of an extensive network of government subsidized dams in the early twentieth century. Rivers of Empire describes that despite the aridity of the natural landscape the American West became home to massive commercial farms and enormous swaths of urban sprawl.

In Nature’s Metropolis , Cronon, used the central place theory to analyze the economic and ecological development of Chicago. Johann Heinrich von Thunen developed the central place theory to explain the development of cities. Essentially, geographically different economic zones form in concentric circles the farther you went from the city. These different zones form because of the time it takes to get the different types of goods to market. Closest to the city and then moving away you would have the following zones: first, intensive agriculture, second, extensive agriculture, third, livestock raising, fourth, trading, hunting and Indian trade and finally, you would have the wilderness. While the landscape of the Mid-West was more complicated than this, Cronon posits that the “city and country are inextricably connected and that market relations profoundly mediate between them.” (Cronon, p. 52.) By emphasizing the connection between the city of Chicago and the rural lands that surrounded it, Cronon was able to explain how the land, including the West, developed. Cronon argued that the development of Chicago had a profound influence on the development and appearance of the Great West. Essentially Cronon used the creation of the Chicago commodities and trading markets to explain how different parts of the Mid-West and West produced different types of resources and fundamentally altered their ecology.

Both Cronon and Worster described how commercial interests shaped the landscape and ecology of the American West, but their approaches were very different. Still, each work fits comfortably into the new western history. Both Cronon and Worster see the West as a place and not as a movement of westward expansion. Cronon re-orders the typical understanding of the sequence of westward expansion. Instead of describing the steady growth of rural communities which transformed into cities, he argued that cities and rural areas formed at the same time. Often the cities developed first and that only after markets were created could land be converted profitable into farms. This development fits westward development much more closely than paradigms that emphasized the creation of family farms. Worster defines the West by its aridity. While these definitions differ from Limerick’s, they reflect new approaches. Conquest plays a critical role in each of these books. Instead of conquering people, the authors describe efforts to conquer western lands. In Cronon, westerners forever altered the landscape of the west. Agricultural activities dominated the zones closest to Chicago, cattle production took over lands previously occupied by the buffalo, and even the wilderness was changed by people to satisfy the markets in Chicago. The extensive damming of the West’s rivers described by Worster required the United States government to conquer, control and discipline nature. While this conquest was somewhat illusory, the United States government was committed to reshaping the West and ecology to fit its vision.

Each of these books demonstrates that the Turner thesis no longer holds a predominant position in the scholarship of the American West. The history of the American West has been revitalized by its demise. While westward expansion plays an important role in the history of the United States, it did not define the west. Turner’s thesis was fundamentally undermined because it did not provide an accurate description of how the West was peopled. The nineteenth century of the west is not composed primarily of family farmers. Instead, it is a story of a region peopled by a diverse group of people: Native Americans, Asians, Chicanos, Anglos, African Americans, women, merchants, immigrants, prostitutes, swindlers, doctors, lawyers, farmers are just a few of the characters who inhabit western history.

Suggested Readings

Our systems are now restored following recent technical disruption, and we’re working hard to catch up on publishing. We apologise for the inconvenience caused. Find out more: https://www.cambridge.org/universitypress/about-us/news-and-blogs/cambridge-university-press-publishing-update-following-technical-disruption

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings .

Login Alert

• > Journals
• > Journal of American Studies
• > Volume 27 Issue 2
• > Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis and the...

Article contents

Frederick jackson turner's frontier thesis and the self-consciousness of america.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

In their work on Turner's formative period, Ray A. Billington and Fulmer Mood have shown that the Frontier Thesis, formulated in 1893 in “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” is not so much a brilliant early effort by a young scholar as a mature study in which Turner gave his ideas an organization that proved to be final. During the rest of his life he developed but never disclaimed or modified them. Billington and Mood also add that the Frontier Thesis is meant to test a new approach to history that Turner had been developing since the beginning of his academic career. We can fully understand it, then, only by setting it within the framework of the assumptions and goals of his 1891 essay, “The Significance of History,” Turner's only attempt to sketch a philosophy of history.

Access options

1 Billington , Ray A. , The Genesis of the Frontier Thesis: A Study in Historical Creativity ( San Marino, Ca. : The Huntington Library , 1971 ) Google Scholar ; Mood , Fulmer , “ The Development of Frederick J.Turner as a Historical Thinker ,” Transactions of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts , 1937–42, 34 ( 1943 ), 283 – 352 . Google Scholar

2 Turner , Frederick J. , “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Proceedings of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin , 14 12 1893 . Google Scholar

3 Turner , Frederick J. , “ The Significance of History ,” Wisconsin Journal of Education , 21 ( 10 1891 ), 230 –4, ( 11 1891 ), 253–6. Google Scholar

4 Turner , , “The Significance of History,” in Frontier and Section: Selected Essays of F. J. Turner , Billington , Ray A. ed. ( Englewood Cliffs, N.J. : Prentice-Hall , 1961 ), 20 . Google Scholar

5 Turner , , “The Significance of History,” 17 . Google Scholar

7 Ibid. , 18.

8 Ibid. , 27.

9 Ibid. , 18.

10 Turner , Frederick J. , “Problems in American History,” in Frontier and Section , Billington, ed., 29 . Google Scholar

11 Billington , Ray A. , Frederick J. Turner: Historian, Scholar, Teacher ( New York : Oxford University Press , 1973 ), chapter 5 Google Scholar ; Coleman , William , “ Science and Symbol in Turner Frontier Hypothesis ,” American Historical Review , 72 , 3 ( 1966 ), 22 – 49 . CrossRef Google Scholar

12 Turner , , “The Significance of the Frontier,” 1 – 2 Google Scholar ; see also “Problems in American History,” 29 . Google Scholar

13 Turner , , “The Significance of the Frontier,” 2 . Google Scholar

14 The link between the “instinct for moving” and the development of human history and culture was forcefully made by Turner in an 1891 address to the Madison Literary Club: “The colonizing spirit is one form of the nomadic instinct. The immigrant train on its way to the far west or the steamer laden with passengers for Australia is but the last embodiment of the impulse that took Abraham out of Ur of the Chaldees and sent our Aryan forefathers from their primitive pasture lands to Greece and Italy and India and Scandinavia”: Turner , Frederick J. , “American Colonization,” published in Carpenter , Ronald H. , The Eloquence of Frederick J. Turner ( San Marino, Ca. : The Huntington Library , 1893 ), 176 . Google Scholar

15 Turner , , “The Significance of the Frontier,” 11 . Google Scholar

16 See, for instance, his treatment of populism, “The Significance of the Frontier,” 32 . Google Scholar

17 Ibid. , 37.

18 Ibid. , 4.

19 Turner , , “The Problem of the West,” in Frontier and Section , Billington ed, 206 Google Scholar ; also: “At first the frontier was the Atlantic coast. It was the frontier of Europe in a very real sense. Moving westward, the frontier became more and more American,” Turner , , “The Significance of the Frontier,” 4 . Google Scholar

20 Foucault , Michel , L'ordre du discours ( Paris : 1970 ). Google Scholar

21 See, Trails: Toward a New Western History , Limerick , Patricia Nelson , Milner , Clyde A. II , Rankin , Charles E. eds. ( University Press of Kansas ). CrossRef Google Scholar

22 Turner , , “The Significance of the Frontier,” 3 – 4 . Google Scholar

23 Turner , , “The Problem of the West,” 205 . Google Scholar

24 Ibid. , 207.

25 Turner , , “The Significance of the Frontier,” 2 . Google Scholar

26 See Morgan , Lewis Henry , Ancient Society ( 1877 ). Google Scholar

27 Billington , , Frederick Jackson Turner , 76 –9, 122–3. Google Scholar

28 Turner , , “The Significance of the Frontier,” 21 , 38. Google Scholar

29 Ibid. , 12.

30 Ibid. , 4.

31 Turner , , “The Problem of the West,” 205 . Google Scholar

32 See Morgan , Lewis H. , Ancient Society ( 1877 ) Google Scholar , and Bagehot , Walter , Physics and Politics: An Application of the Principles of Natural Selection and Heredity to Political Society ( 1872 ) Google Scholar , on the first and second points respectively. The pervasive influence in late 19th century culture of Sumner Maine's theory of the transition from status to contract should also be kept in mind.

33 Turner , , “The Significance of the Frontier,” 30 . Google Scholar

34 Ibid. , 37; “The problem of the West,” 211 . Google Scholar

35 Ibid. , quoted.

36 Turner , , “The Significance of the Frontier,” 31 . Google Scholar

37 Turner , , “The Problem of the West,” 213 . Google Scholar

38 Billington , , Frederick Jackson Turner , 425 . Google Scholar

39 Bonazzi , Tiziano , “Un'analisi della American Promise: ordine e senso nel discorso storico-politico,” in Bonazzi , Tiziano , Struttura e metamorfosi della civilta' progressista ( Venezia : Marsilio , 1974 ), 41 – 140 . Google Scholar

40 Baritz , Loren , “ The Idea of the West ,” American Historical Review , 66 , 3 ( 1961 ), 618 –40. CrossRef Google Scholar An important parallel can also be made with Walzer , Michael , Exodus and Revolution ( New York : Basic Books , 1985 ). Google Scholar

41 Smith , Henry Nash , Virgin Land: The American West As Symbol and Myth ( Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press , 1950 ). Google Scholar On the importance of foundation myths, see Voegelin , Eric , The New Science of Politics ( Chicago : University of Chicago Press , 1952 ). Google Scholar

42 Noble , David W. , Historians against History. The Frontier Thesis and the National Covenant in American Historical Writing since 1830 ( Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press , 1965 ) Google Scholar , and The End of American History ( Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press , 1985 ). Google Scholar

43 Turner , to Becker , Carl , 21 01 1911 Google Scholar , in Jacobs , Wilbur R. , The Historical World of Frederick J. Turner ( New Haven-London : Yale University Press , 1968 ), 135 Google Scholar ; also, Turner , to Skinner , Constance Lindsay , 15 03 1922 Google Scholar , in Jacobs , , The Historical World , 56 . Google Scholar

44 Turner , , “Problems in American History,” 29 . Google Scholar

45 Ibid. , 32.

46 Turner , , “The Problem of the West,” 68 –9. Google Scholar

47 Ibid. , 69. This expression follows immediately upon the sentence previously quoted.

48 Turner , , “The Significance of the Frontier,” 38 . Google Scholar

49 Turner , to Becker , Carl , in Jacobs , , The Historical World , 135 . Google Scholar

50 Turner , , “Contributions of the West to American Democracy,” Google Scholar in Turner , , The Frontier in American History , 264 –6. Google Scholar

51 Ibid. , 258.

52 Turner , , “The Problem of the West,” 216 . Google Scholar

53 Turner , , “The West and American Ideals,” Google Scholar in Turner , , The Frontier in American History , 305 . Google Scholar

54 Turner , , “Social Forces in American History,” Google Scholar in Turner , , The Frontier in American History , 331 . Google Scholar

55 Turner , , “Pioneer Ideals and the State University,” Google Scholar in Turner , , The Frontier in American History , 284 . Google Scholar

56 Turner , , “The State University,” in America's Great Frontier and Sections: Frederick Jackson Turner's Unpublished Essays , Jacobs , Wilbur R. ed. ( Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press , 1969 ), 196 . Google Scholar

57 Turner , , “The West and American Ideals,” 300 . Google Scholar

58 See his “Pioneer Ideals and the State University,” 269 –89. Google Scholar

59 Turner , , “The Significance of History,” in Frontier and Section , Billington ed., 21 . Google Scholar

60 Ibid. , 18.

61 Lyotard , Jean-Francois , La condition postmoderne ( Paris : Les Editions de Minuit , 1979 ). Google Scholar

62 Reference is made here to Wallerstein , Immanuel , The Modern World-System ( New York : Academic Press , 1976 ). Google Scholar

63 Bercovitch , Sacvan , The American Jeremiad ( Madison : Wisconsin University Press , 1978 ) Google Scholar ; also Bercovitch , Sacvan , “The Rites of Assent: Rhetoric, Ritual, and the Ideology of American Consensus,” in The American Self: Myth, Ideology and Popular Culture , Girgus , Sam B. ed. ( Albuquerque : New Mexico University Press , 1980 ), 5 – 45 . Google Scholar On the “rhetorical impact” of the Frontier Thesis upon the American public mind see Carpenter , Ronald H. , The Eloquence of F. J. Turner , 47 – 95 . Google Scholar

64 Wiebe , Robert H. , The Search for Order , 1877–1920 ( New York : Hill and Wang , 1967 ), ch. 5. Google Scholar

65 The idea of a transition from an age of scarcity to an age of abundance was articulated by Patten , Simon N. , professor of economics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, in The New Basis of Civilization ( New York : Macmillan , 1907 ). Google Scholar

66 Tudor , Henry , Political Myth ( London : 1972 ) CrossRef Google Scholar ; also, Bonazzi , Tiziano , “Mito politico,” in Dizionario di politico , Bobbio , Norberto and Matteucci , Nicola eds. ( Torino : UTET , 1976 ), 587 –94. Google Scholar The most important interpretation of politics based on the dialectics amicus-hostis is that of Carl Schmitt, see, among his many publications, Der Bergriff des Politischen. Text von 1932 mit einem Vorwort und drei Corollarien (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1963 ). Google Scholar

67 Barthes , Ronald , Mythologies ( Paris : Editions du Seuil , 1957 ). Google Scholar

68 See Turner's articles on immigration in Chicago Record-Herald , 28 08 , 4, 11, 18, 25 09 , 16 10 1901 . Google Scholar Let us not forget, however, that Marcus Hansen was one of Turner's students.

69 Derrida , Jacques , L'autre cap ( Paris : Les Editions de Minuit , 1991 ). Google Scholar

70 Turner , , “The Significance of the Frontier,” 3 . Google Scholar

This article has been cited by the following publications. This list is generated based on data provided by Crossref .

• Google Scholar

View all Google Scholar citations for this article.

Save article to Kindle

To save this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle .

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

• Volume 27, Issue 2
• Tiziano Bonazzi (a1)
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875800031509

Save article to Dropbox

To save this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Dropbox account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox .

Save article to Google Drive

To save this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Google Drive account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive .

Reply to: Submit a response

- No HTML tags allowed - Web page URLs will display as text only - Lines and paragraphs break automatically - Attachments, images or tables are not permitted

Your details

Your email address will be used in order to notify you when your comment has been reviewed by the moderator and in case the author(s) of the article or the moderator need to contact you directly.

You have entered the maximum number of contributors

Conflicting interests.

Please list any fees and grants from, employment by, consultancy for, shared ownership in or any close relationship with, at any time over the preceding 36 months, any organisation whose interests may be affected by the publication of the response. Please also list any non-financial associations or interests (personal, professional, political, institutional, religious or other) that a reasonable reader would want to know about in relation to the submitted work. This pertains to all the authors of the piece, their spouses or partners.

Claude Berube’s Substack

Letter of Marque 10: Beyond the Frontier

Frederick jackson turner’s “frontier thesis” is only half of the american experience.

"Can half a man live? "

- Kirk's good duplicate, to his evil counterpart

Star Trek, “The Enemy Within”

The first time I heard of Frederick Jackson Turner’s “Frontier Thesis” was not in college but in graduate school during my first course on American historians. Professor Ray Robinson stood imperiously behind the podium speaking his first words in his stentorian voice to us in 1989 – “they say, Ray, when will you retire. I tell them, ‘when they pry my cold, dead fingers from this podium.’” That was Ray - dry-witted but a powerful storyteller who had studied at Harvard under Samuel Eliot Morison. Ray was one of those we lost during COVID, long after he retired from the classroom that he said he would never leave. He became one of my mentors with many discussions and dinners he hosted in his home with my classmates. He took care of us, a tradition I continued by hosting dinners for my own students until I retired. Ray and I sometimes discussed his late brother Rem – Rembrandt Robinson , the only Navy flag officer to die during the Vietnam War when his helicopter went down in the Gulf of Tonkin as he was returning to his ship.

Few addresses at academic conferences are remembered. In 1893, however, Turner delivered “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association. His thesis, which became one of the most influential interpretations of American history, argued that the existence of a frontier shaped the nation's democratic institutions, individualism, and political culture:

“The peculiarity of American institutions is, the fact that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people to the changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and in developing at each area of this progress out of the primitive economic and political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life.”

 The West produced, he argued, the promotion of democracy, at least a uniquely American version that was “anti-social,” produced “antipathy to control, and particularly to any direct control.” It was a democracy “born of free land, strong in selfishness and individualism, intolerant of administrative experience and education, and pressing individual liberty beyond its proper bounds, has its dangers as well as its benefits.”

Turner wrote that “up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West.” But this statement ignores the other, equally significant aspect of American history.” Long before Americans pushed westward, the sea was the first frontier. The Atlantic coastline and its cities were hubs of international commerce, connecting the fledgling colonies to the rest of the world. It was from these coastal outposts that American merchants traded with Europe, the Caribbean, and Africa, building wealth and networks of influence that played a critical role in the birth of the nation. In short, “The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is the Great West.”

Turner didn’t entirely ignore the sea, but he wrote of it in an oblique way. He mentioned the railroads sent “an increasing tide of immigrants into the Far West” but failed to acknowledge that ships brought those immigrants to American (with the exception of French-Canadians who took railroads directly to New England.) He wrote of “the rising steam navigation on western waters” and the “opening of the Erie Canal” but, again, they are in the quiet context of supporting the frontier. It was not the railroad that conveyed resources to the world, but first to the sea and the ships on the East Coast that enabled those exports to occur.

While Turner’s frontier emphasized rugged individualism and isolation, the maritime economy cultivated a different form of individualism—one that required coordination, navigation of global markets, and diplomacy. This coastal network was outward-looking, interconnected, and cosmopolitan. From the very beginning, the sea was a political arena where American leaders negotiated their place on the world stage.

Turner highlighted the ruggedness of pioneers carving out homesteads in the wilderness, but the navy and merchant shipping firms secured America’s position in global trade and diplomacy. By controlling key shipping routes and projecting naval power, the United States was able to expand its influence far beyond the continental frontier. Just as the west gave rise to mining firms, ranchers and railroad magnates, the ocean offered opportunities to build shipping and merchant firms. The rugged individualism of the West was matched by the necessary cooperation to make a ship function in the calmest of seas and especially the most violent of tempests. The West’s self-reliance countered by maritime teamwork; frontier justice as compared to shipboard governance and courts-martial; the geographical boundaries of a frontier achieved by westward expansion opposed by the oceans which had no boundaries other than the lands they touched. A frontier that was shaped by an individual’s work to succeed was distinct from the complex, interconnectivity of individuals and organizations that comprised the nation’s maritime destiny.

Shipping posed its own character. There were the risks, the unknowns, and the lengthy periods away from home and any form of communication – or the impact of those periods waiting for the ship and crew to return. Good shipping was based on making profits, the most capitalistic idea. But every ship had regulations which tempered the dangerously unfettered aspects of individualism in order to ensure the ship’s work continued just as crews had to submit to the laws of the ports they visited. Crews were willing to be governed without question to ensure that stability. There was accountability at sea. In the antebellum United States, slavery did not exist at sea where some twenty percent of crews were African-American.

And there was the issue of peace. Peace was good for business and profit, while it seemed that in Turner’s frontier world with an “ever-present potential for violence” was simply a way of life. This was reflected in the differences between the Army and Navy. The former acted as a constabulary force in the West during comparative peacetime and as a force during conflicts, while the Navy was protecting trade (with obvious exceptions).

The maritime frontier had as much impact on American culture as the fronter. In terms of literature, Turner might have referred to James Fenimore Cooper’s “Last of the Mohicans,” (he did not that I’m aware of.) However Cooper had been a midshipman in the US Navy prior to the War of 1812, wrote a series of articles about the Navy in the 1830s, and would pen the first history of the US Navy in 1839. Other literary luminaries captured the public’s imagination with the sea such as Richard Henry Dana’s “Two Years Before the Mast,” and Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick.” Alexis de Tocquefille found space in his own thoughts on the young republic, "Already Americans can enforce respect for their flag, soon they will be able to make it feared…. They are born to rule the seas, as the Romans were to conquer the world.”

Nor was this maritime culture isolated to the men who sailed. For every sailor, there were perhaps five jobs ashore that directly supported the shipping industry. This included provisioning, building ships, insurers, longshoremen, stevedores, and the many local small businesses in each port. Those ashore would not have understood what it meant to be on the ocean, but they recognized its importance.

Why is this discussion of the “Frontier Thesis” relevant today?

We live in a bifurcated political system, each party drawing on imagery and underlying philosophies and culture. Each party stresses its value system. Those values are different from each other. But neither, alone, is correct. Just as Turner’s thesis suggests a universality of American values, each party argues on what its policies are based, often expressing two very different cultures. So it is with the maritime counterpart of the Frontier Thesis. What emerged were two entirely different systems – one based on the land and the other based on the sea. Perhaps that is what caused the division in our American culture and our political system. One side promoting the individual based on the frontier work ethic and dreams, while the other was about accepting governance and norms. As with everything, balance is required. A bird with one wing can’t fly, nor can our political system in permanent partition.

The values that arose out of both the land and sea, nevertheless, did share some common attributes that more fully reflect Americanism. The first is choice – the choice to select either system. The second is cooperation – America could never have expanded without both the land and sea working together. The third is the ability to differ. But that third characteristic is the most important because if ever loses control, both sides lose. Fourth, and finally, neither the frontier nor the maritime destiny exist in their previous forms.

Turner would write that the frontier ended in 1890 with the closing of the west. The geographical boundary had been set. To a similar degree the country’s maritime destiny shaped by jobs and ships and trade, waned by the late 20 th century. But both today’s individualism and collectivism are reflections of those earlier times, still ingrained in our collective conscience.

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?

Ask the publishers to restore access to 500,000+ books.

Internet Archive Audio

• This Just In
• Grateful Dead
• Old Time Radio
• 78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings
• Audio Books & Poetry
• Computers, Technology and Science
• Music, Arts & Culture
• News & Public Affairs
• Spirituality & Religion
• Radio News Archive

• Flickr Commons
• Occupy Wall Street Flickr
• NASA Images
• Solar System Collection
• Ames Research Center

• All Software
• Old School Emulation
• MS-DOS Games
• Historical Software
• Classic PC Games
• Software Library
• Kodi Archive and Support File
• Vintage Software
• CD-ROM Software
• CD-ROM Software Library
• Software Sites
• Tucows Software Library
• Shareware CD-ROMs
• Software Capsules Compilation
• CD-ROM Images
• ZX Spectrum
• DOOM Level CD

• Smithsonian Libraries
• FEDLINK (US)
• Lincoln Collection
• American Libraries
• Canadian Libraries
• Universal Library
• Project Gutenberg
• Children's Library
• Biodiversity Heritage Library
• Books by Language
• Additional Collections

• Prelinger Archives
• Democracy Now!
• Occupy Wall Street
• TV NSA Clip Library
• Animation & Cartoons
• Arts & Music
• Computers & Technology
• Cultural & Academic Films
• Ephemeral Films
• Sports Videos
• Videogame Videos
• Youth Media

Search the history of over 866 billion web pages on the Internet.

Mobile Apps

• Wayback Machine (iOS)
• Wayback Machine (Android)

Browser Extensions

Archive-it subscription.

• Explore the Collections
• Build Collections

Save Page Now

Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in the future.

Please enter a valid web address

• Donate Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape

The frontier in American history

Bookreader item preview, share or embed this item, flag this item for.

• Graphic Violence
• Explicit Sexual Content
• Hate Speech
• Misinformation/Disinformation
• Marketing/Phishing/Advertising
• Misleading/Inaccurate/Missing Metadata

plus-circle Add Review comment Reviews

4 Favorites

Better World Books

DOWNLOAD OPTIONS

For users with print-disabilities

IN COLLECTIONS

Uploaded by associate-joseph-ondreicka on April 10, 2023

SIMILAR ITEMS (based on metadata)