Frederick Jackson Turner
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Frederick Jackson Turner (November 14, 1861 – 14 March 1932) was, with Charles A. Beard, the most influential American historian of the early 20th century. He is best known for The Significance of the Frontier in American History.
Born in Portage, Wisconsin, Turner graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1884, where he was a member of Phi Kappa Psi Fraternity. He gained his Ph.D. in history from Johns Hopkins University in 1890 with a thesis on the Wisconsin fur trade. As a professor of history at Wisconsin (1890–1910) and Harvard (1910–1922), Turner trained scores of disciples who in turn dominated American history programs throughout the country. His emphasis on the importance of the frontier in shaping American character influenced the interpretation found in thousands of scholarly histories. His model of sectionalism as a composite of social forces, such as ethnicity and land ownership, gave historians the tools to use social history as the foundation of all social, economic and political developments in American history. At the American Historical Association, he collaborated with J. Franklin Jameson on major projects.
Turner is remembered for his "Frontier Thesis", which he first published July 12, 1893 in a paper read in Chicago to the American Historical Association during the Chicago World's Fair. In it, he stated that the spirit and success of the United States is directly tied to the country's westward expansion. According to Turner, the forging of the unique and rugged American identity occurred at the juncture between the civilization of settlement and the savagery of wilderness. This produced a new type of citizen - one with the power to tame the wild and one upon whom the wild had conferred strength and individuality.
Turner gave a famous lecture on how the frontier had shaped American development, concluding that the "first period" of American history—-the period that had nurtured individualism, democracy, and widespread opportunity for economic autonomy—-had come to an end.
His essays are collected in The Significance of Sections in American History, which won the Pulitzer Prize in History in 1933. Turner's sectionalism thesis had almost as much influence among historians as his frontier thesis. He argued that different ethno-cultural groups had distinct settlement patterns, and this revealed itself in politics, economics and society.
[edit] Primary Sources
- Turner, Frederick Jackson. "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" (1893)
- Turner, Frederick J. (April 1897). "Dominant Forces in Western Life". The Atlantic monthly 79 (474): 433-443. Retrieved on 2006-10-09.
- Turner, Frederick Jackson. The early writings of Frederick Jackson Turner, with a list of all his works compiled by Everett E. Edwards; University of Wisconsin Press, 1938
- Turner, Frederick Jackson. The frontier in American history (1920)
- Turner, Frederick Jackson. Rise of the new West, 1819-1829. (1906) Gutenberg edition
- Turner, Frederick Jackson. ed. "Correspondence of the French ministers to the United States, 1791-1797" in American Historical Association. Annual report ... for the year 1903. Washington, 1904.
- Turner, Frederick Jackson. "Dear Lady": the letters of Frederick Jackson Turner and Alice Forbes Perkins Hooper, 1910-1932. Edited by Ray Allen Billington. Huntington Library, 1970
- Turner, Frederick Jackson. America's great frontiers and sections: Frederick Jackson Turner's unpublished essays edited by Wilbur R. Jacobs. University of Nebraska Press, 1965.
- Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" and other essays ed by John Mack Faragher, (1999)
[edit] Secondary Sources
- Ray Allen Billington. "Why Some Historians Rarely Write History: A Case Study of Frederick Jackson Turner," The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. 50, No. 1. (Jun., 1963), pp. 3-27. in JSTOR
- Ray Allen Billington. Frederick Jackson Turner: historian, scholar, teacher. (1973). full-scale biography; also online at ACLS History e-Book
- Ray Allen Billington, ed,. The Frontier Thesis: Valid Interpretation of American History? (1966). The major attacks and defenses of Turner.
- Ray Allen Billington. America's Frontier Heritage (1984). Analysis of Turner's theories.
- Allan G. Bogue. Frederick Jackson Turner: Strange Roads Going Down. (1988) full-scale biography
- Richard Hofstadter. The Progressive Historians—Turner, Beard, Parrington. (1979).
