Frederick Jackson Turner 2.0

by zunguzungu

himself

Frederick Jackson Turner has been pushing himself into my consciousness from a couple of angles lately, so now is as good a time as any to post the results of a little experiment I did with my writing class last semester. We were reading the famous “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” essay, but I was also trying to get them to think about the thesis in their own papers, and since Turner’s “frontier thesis” is often referenced as a critical commonplace (but which is, I think, much less self-explanatory than it is usually taken to be), I asked them each to select the sentences that looked to them like Turner’s thesis. And then I compiled the results and we talked about them. It worked pretty well, I thought, both as a way into the text and as an exercise in composition writing, one of the few times last semester that blissful combination happened. But anyway, behold, below, the compiled wisdom of the crowds:

(the number indicates the number of students that selected each sentence as the thesis)

11 — “Thus the advance of the frontier has meant a steady movement away from the influence of Europe, a steady growth of independence on American lines.”
7 — “Steadily the frontier of settlement advanced and carried with it individualism, democracy, and nationalism, and powerfully affected the East and the Old World.”
6 — “The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.”
6 — “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.”
4 — “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.”
4 — “Each frontier has made similar contributions to American character,…”
4 — “First, we note that the frontier promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people.”
3 — “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. “America,” he says, “has the key to the historical enigma which Europe has sought for centuries in vain, and the land which has no history reveals luminously the course of universal history.”
3 — “American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier…
3 — “The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe.”
3 — “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.”
3 — “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.”
3 — “But the most important effect of the frontier has been in the promotion of democracy here and in Europe. … It produces antipathy to control, and particularly to any direct control.”
2 — “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.”
2 — “The legislation which most developed the powers of the national government, and played the largest part in its activity, was conditioned on the frontier.”
2 — “The United States lies like a huge page in the history of society. Line by line as we read this continental page from West to East we find the record of social evolution.”
2 — “This paper will make no attempt to treat the subject exhaustively; its aim is simply to call attention to the frontier as a fertile field for investigation, and to suggest some of the problems which arise in connection with it.”
2 — “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.”
2 — “It would be a work worth the historian’s labors to mark these various frontiers and in detail compare one with another. Not only would there result a more adequate conception of American development and characteristics, but invaluable additions would be made to the history of society.
2 — “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.”
1 — “In another way the advance of the frontier decreased our dependence on England.”
1 — “But the 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.”
1 — “The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is the Great West.”
1 — “The trading frontier, while steadily undermining Indian power by making the tribes ultimately dependent on the whites, yet, through its sale of guns, gave to the Indian increased power of resistance to the farming frontier.”
1 — “This then is the heritage of pioneer experience,–a passionate belief that a democracy was possible which should leave the individual a part to play in free society and not make him a cog in a machine operated from above; which trusted in the common man, in his tolerance, his ability to adjust differences with good humor, and to work out an American type from the contributions of all nations–a type for which he would fight against those who challenged it in arms, and for which in time of war he would make sacrifices, even the temporary sacrifice of individual freedom and his life, lest that freedom be lost forever.”
1 — “It appears then that the universal disposition of Americans to emigrate to the western wilderness, in order to enlarge their dominion over inanimate nature, is the actual result of an expansive power which is inherent in them, and which by continually agitating all classes of society is constantly throwing a large portion of the whole population on the extreme confines of the State, in order to gain space for its development”‘
1 — “It was least sectional, not only because it lay between North and South, but also because with no barriers to shut out its frontiers from its settled region, and with a system of connecting waterways, the Middle region mediated between East and West as well as between North and South. Thus it became the typically American region.”
1 — “Her destiny is our destiny.”
1 — “The frontier individualism has from the beginning promoted democracy.”

1 — “From the beginning of the settlement of America, the frontier regions have exercised a steady influence toward democracy”
1 — “In a word, the unchecked development of the individual was the significant product of this frontier democracy”
1 — “The ideals of a people, their aspirations and convictions, their hopes and ambitions, their dreams and determinations, are assets in their civilization as real and important as per capita wealth or industrial skill”
1 — “But the United States has believed that it had an original contribution to make to the history of society by the production of a self-determining, self-restrained, intelligent democracy”
1 — “The most significant thing about the American frontier is that it lies at the hither edge of free land.”
1 — “It is the connection that 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 frontiersmen.”
1 — “The frontier caused the rise of important questions of transportation and internal improvement– social evolution.”
1 — “The growth of nationalism and the evolution of American political institutions were dependent on the advance of the frontier.”
1 — “Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West.”