Frederick Jackson Turner’s `Frontier Essay

The â€Å"Frontier† is a Turner wrote is â€Å"the outer wave of expansion, the meeting point between savagery and civilization.† When people left settled territory, when people went into often unexplored areas, the weight of society bore less heavily upon them. They went into areas where they had no settled established governments, no institutions like churches, courts of law, and the like. People, in a sense, left civilization behind. They had to find new ways of adjusting, new ways of peaceful coexistence at this â€Å"meeting point between savage and civilization.† This is the historical thinking popularized by Frederick Jackson Turner which laid the foundation of modern American study of American West. According to him, â€Å"The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development.† He thought largely that the frontier experience had a lasting and permanent impact on American character and society. When American pioneers escaped and left behind the settled institutions of society, a plunging into the forests, or later into the grasslands of the Great Plains, Turner thought this promoted productive individualism. When people entered areas without established social structures, each person was pretty much on a basis of equality with each other person. On this kind of set up people learn to develop civil and democratic ways of social cooperation. They have to learn how to peacefully co-exist amongst each other. This made Turner generalize that democracy sprang from this – free land, and of free, self-reliant individuals moving out on to lands unknown learning the tricks and trade of how to get along with one another. So is this what Turner really meant by the word â€Å"frontier†? If you just take a first glance, he seemed to be spousing a kind of geographical determinism, an idea or a notion that â€Å"free land bred free individuals†; that the geography itself and the way in which people reacted to that geography produced democratic equality and a democratic form of government. Settlers in a new geographical terrain learned to innovate and find ways. Where there were not adequate lakes or rivers, they dug wells. Where the grass land plains did not allow for settled farming, they invented barbed wire to hedge in cattle, to hedge in sheep. These and other various learning experiences seem to be the result of human beings acting as innovators in response to geography. The land itself, Turner seemed to say, made human beings more self-reliant. And self-reliance is at the core of the American democratic experience, or so we have long told ourselves. But as I see it, geography might have something to do with it but not solely. The development of democracy and civilization is a far more a complicated process. I would say much of it would be social development itself. Turner might be right in identifying a certain event in history at a specific location crucial social development occurred which propels modern civilization to where it is now but what I am saying is that it can happen anywhere in the world and not just in a certain specified area. References Schultz, Stanley K. and Tishler, William P., â€Å"American History 102 (Civil War to Present)†. Copyright 2004 University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents pg 4. Retrieved February 3, 2007