"The Significance of the Frontier in American History"

Excerpted from The Frontier in American History

Originally published in 1920

In 1893 a then little-known historian named Frederick Jackson Turner (1861–1932) delivered an address at the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago that changed the way Americans thought about the American character and the conquest of the West. For years, scholars and historians who had tried to explain the development of America emphasized the European influences on American culture. According to these scholars and historians, the explorers, the settlers, their material culture (the physical things they owned), their institutions, their beliefs and values—all had been forged in Europe. Yet such explanations ignored a decisive factor in the shaping of the American character, argued Turner. That factor...