Frontier Thesis

The Frontier Thesis, also known as Turner's Thesis or American frontierism, is an argument presented by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893 that the settlement and colonization of the rugged American frontier was decisive in forming a culture of American democracy distinct from European nations.

First published in "The Significance of the Frontier in American History", a paper delivered to the American Historical Association in Chicago, the thesis held that American culture was shaped by the pioneers' work in "winning a wilderness", which instilled discipline, self-sufficiency, and a break from the settled, deferential culture that emerged from European feudalism. Turner used ideas related to manifest destiny to explain various aspects of it: democracy, egalitarianism, and a disinterest in bourgeois or high culture, and an ever-present potential for violence. He wrote, "American democracy was born of no theorist's dream...It came out of the American forest, and it gained new strength each time it touched a new frontier."

Turner elaborated on the theme in lectures and a series of essays published over the next 25 years, published along with his initial paper as The Frontier in American History. He won wide acclaim among historians and intellectuals and influenced thousands of scholarly histories. By the time Turner died in 1932, 60% of the leading history departments in the U.S. were teaching courses in frontier history along Turnerian lines. It was not confined to academia, but was a popular and accepted view. President John F. Kennedy described his programs in the 1960 election as a "New Frontier" to conquer, meaning space and domestic issues. While this view remains reasonably common at a popular level, academic historians have since the 1980s increasingly discounted the Frontier Thesis.