Frederick Jackson Turner

For other people of this same name, see Frederick Jackson (disambiguation) and Frederick Turner (disambiguation)

Frederick Jackson Turner
Born	( 1861 -11-14)November 14, 1861 Portage, Wisconsin
Died	March 14, 1932(1932-03-14) (aged 70) San Marino, California
Citizenship	United States
Fields	Historian
Institutions	University of Wisconsin Harvard University Huntington Library
Alma mater	University of Wisconsin (A.B.) Johns Hopkins University (Ph.D.)
Thesis	The Character and Influence of the Indian Trade in Wisconsin (1890)
Doctoral advisor	Herbert Baxter Adams
Known for	Frontier Thesis, Sectional Hypothesis
Spouse	Caroline Mae Sherwood
Children	Dorothy Kinsley Turner (later Main), Jackson Allen Turner, Mae Sherwood Turner

Frederick Jackson Turner (November 14, 1861 – March 14, 1932) was an American historian in the early 20th century, based at the University of Wisconsin until 1910, and then at Harvard. He trained many PhDs who came to occupy prominent places in the history profession. He promoted interdisciplinary and quantitative methods, often with a focus on the Midwest. He is best known for his essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American History", whose ideas formed the Frontier Thesis. He argued that the moving western frontier shaped American democracy and the American character from the colonial era until 1890. He is also known for his theories of geographical sectionalism. In recent years historians and academics have argued strenuously over Turner's work; all agree that the Frontier Thesis has had an enormous impact on historical scholarship and the American mind.

Early life, education, and career

Born in Portage, Wisconsin, the son of Andrew Jackson Turner and Mary Olivia Hanford Turner, Turner grew up in a middle-class family. His father was active in Republican politics, an investor in the railroad, and was a newspaper editor and publisher. His mother taught school.^[1] Turner was very much influenced by the writing of Emerson, a poet known for his focus on nature. So too was Turner influenced by scientists such as Darwin, Spencer, and Huxley, and the development of Cartography.^[2] He graduated from the University of Wisconsin (now University of Wisconsin–Madison) in 1884, where he was a member of Phi Kappa Psi Fraternity.

He earned his Ph.D. in history from Johns Hopkins University in 1890 with a thesis on the Wisconsin fur trade, titled "The Character and Influence of the Indian Trade in Wisconsin", directed by Herbert Baxter Adams. As a professor of history at Wisconsin (1890–1910), and later Harvard (1911–1924), Turner trained scores of disciples, who in turn dominated American history programs throughout the country. Turner did not publish extensively; his influence came from tersely expressed interpretive theories (published in articles), which influenced his hundreds of disciples. Two theories in particular were influential, the "Frontier Thesis" and the "Sectional Hypothesis".

Although he published little, he did more research than almost anyone and had an encyclopedic knowledge of American history, earning a reputation by 1910 as one of the two or three most influential historians in the country. He proved adept at promoting his ideas and his students, whom he systematically placed in leading universities. He circulated copies of his essays and lectures to important scholars and literary figures; he published extensively in highbrow magazines; he recycled favorite material, attaining the largest possible audience for key concepts; and he wielded considerable influence within the American Historical Association as an officer and advisor for the American Historical Review. 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 for all social, economic and political developments in American history. 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.^[3]

Annoyed by the university regents who demanded less research and more teaching and state service, Turner sought out an environment that would support research.^[4] Declining offers from California, he accepted a call to Harvard in 1910 and remained a professor there until 1924. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1911.^[5] Turner was never comfortable at Harvard; when he retired in 1922 he became a visiting scholar at the Huntington Library in Los Angeles, where his note cards and files continued to pile up, but few monographs got published. His The Frontier in American History (1920) was a collection of older essays.

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 numerous major projects.^[6]

Turner's theories slipped out of fashion in the 1960s, as critics complained that he neglected regionalism. They complained that he celebrated too much the egalitarianism and democracy of a frontier that was rough on women and minorities. After Turner's death his former colleague Isaiah Bowman had this to say of his work: "Turner's ideas were curiously wanting in evidence from field studies...He represents a type of historian who rests his case on documents and general impression rather than a scientist who goes out for to see." ^[7] His ideas never disappeared; indeed they influenced the new field of environmental history.^[8] Turner gave a strong impetus to quantitative methods, and scholars using new statistical techniques and data sets have, for example, confirmed many of Turner's suggestions about population movements.^[9] Turner believed that because of his own biases and the amount of conflicting historical evidence surrounding topics was so vast that any one approach to historical interpretation would be insufficient, that an interdisciplinary approach was the most accurate way to write history.^[10]

Works

Frontier thesis

Turner's "Frontier Thesis", was put forth in a scholarly paper in 1893, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History", read before the American Historical Association in Chicago during the World's Columbian Exposition (Chicago World's Fair). He believed the spirit and success of the United States was directly tied to the country's westward expansion. Turner expounded an evolutionary model; he had been influenced by work with geologists at Wisconsin. The West, not the East, was where distinctively American characteristics emerged. 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.^[11] As each generation of pioneers moved 50 to 100 miles west, they abandoned useless European practices, institutions and ideas, and instead found new solutions to new problems created by their new environment. Over multiple generations, the frontier produced characteristics of informality, violence, crudeness, democracy and initiative that the world recognized as "American".

Turner ignored gender and race, downplayed class, and left no room for victims. Historians of the 1960s and later stressed that race, class and gender were powerful explanatory tools. The new generation stressed gender, ethnicity, professional categorization, and the contrasting victor and victim legacies of manifest destiny and imperialist expansion. Some criticized Turner's frontier thesis and the theme of American exceptionalism. The disunity of the concept of the West, the similarity of American expansion to European colonialism and imperialism in the 19th century, and the realities of minority group oppression revealed the limits of Turnerian and exceptionalist paradigms.^[12]

Sectionalism

His sectionalism 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, but never became widely known to the general public as did the frontier thesis. He argued that different ethnocultural groups had distinct settlement patterns, and this revealed itself in politics, economics and society.

Influence

Turner's ideas influenced many areas of historiography. In the history of religion, for example, Boles (1993) notes that William Warren Sweet at the University of Chicago Divinity School, argued that churches adapted to the characteristics of the frontier, creating new denominations such as the Mormons, the Church of Christ, the Disciples of Christ, and the Cumberland Presbyterians. The frontier, they argued, shaped uniquely American institutions such as revivals, camp meetings, and itinerant preaching. This view dominated religious historiography for decades.^[13] Moos (2002) shows that the 1910s to 1940s black filmmaker and novelist Oscar Micheaux incorporated Turner's frontier thesis into his work. Micheaux promoted the West as a place where blacks could transcend race and earn economic success through hard work and perseverance.^[14]

Slatta (2001) argues that the widespread popularization of Turner's frontier thesis influenced popular histories, motion pictures, and novels, which characterize the West in terms of individualism, frontier violence, and rough justice. Disneyland's Frontierland of the late 20th century reflected the myth of rugged individualism that celebrated what was perceived to be the American heritage. The public has ignored academic historians' anti-Turnerian models, largely because they conflict with and often destroy the icons of Western heritage. However, the work of historians during the 1980s-1990s, some of whom sought to bury Turner's conception of the frontier and others who have sought to spare the concept while presenting a more balanced and nuanced view, have done much to place Western myths in context and rescue Western history from them.^[15]

Marriage, family, and death

Turner married Caroline Mae Sherwood in Chicago in November 1889. They had three children: only one survived childhood. Dorothy Kinsley Turner (later Main) was the mother of the historian Jackson Turner Main (1917–2003), a scholar of Revolutionary America who married a fellow scholar.

He died in 1932 in San Marino, California, where he had been a research associate at the Huntington Library.

Notes

References

This article incorporates material from the Citizendium article "Frederick Jackson Turner", which is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License but not under the GFDL.

• Turner, Frederick Jackson. Edwards, Everett E. (comp.) The early writings of Frederick Jackson Turner, with a list of all his works. Compiled by Everett E. Edwards. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1938.
• Turner, Frederick Jackson.
• Rise of the New West, 1819-1829 at Project Gutenberg
• 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. "Is Sectionalism in America Dying Away?" (1908). American Journal of Sociology, 13: 661-75.
• Turner, Frederick Jackson. "Social Forces in American History," presidential address before the American Historical Association American Historical Review, 16: 217-33.
• Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Frontier in American History. New York: Holt, 1921.
• Turner, Frederick Jackson. "The significance of the section in American history." Wisconsin Magazine Of History, vol. 8, no. 3 (Mar 1925) pp. 255–280.
• Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Significance of Sections in American History. New York: Holt, 1932.
• 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. "Turner's Autobiographic Letter." Wisconsin Magazine Of History, vol. 19, no. 1 (Sep 1935) pp. 91–102.
• 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.

Secondary sources

• Billington, Ray Allen. "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
• Billington, Ray Allen. America's Frontier Heritage (1984). detailed analysis of Turner's theories from social science perspective
• Billington, Ray Allen. ed,. The Frontier Thesis: Valid Interpretation of American History? (1966). The major attacks and defenses of Turner.
• Billington, Ray Allen. Frederick Jackson Turner: historian, scholar, teacher. (1973). full-scale biography; online at ACLS e-books
• Bogue, Allan G. "Frederick Jackson Turner Reconsidered," The History Teacher, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Feb., 1994), pp. 195–221 in JSTOR
• Bogue, Allan G. Frederick Jackson Turner: Strange Roads Going Down. (1988) along with Billington (1973), the leading full-scale biography
• Boles, John B. "Turner, The Frontier, and the Study of Religion in America." Journal of the Early Republic (1993) 13#2 pp 205–216. in JSTOR
• Burkhart, J. A. "The Turner Thesis: A Historian's Controversy." Wisconsin Magazine of History, vol. 31, no. 1 (Sep 1947), pp. 70–83.
• Cronon, E. David. An Uncommon Professor: Frederick Jackson Turner at Wisconsin, Wisconsin Magazine of History, vol. 78, no. 4 (Summer 1995), pp. 276–293.
• Cronon, William. "Revisiting the Vanishing Frontier: The Legacy of Frederick Jackson Turner," The Western Historical Quarterly, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Apr., 1987), pp. 157–176 online at JSTOR
• Curti, Merle E. "Frontier in American History: the Methodological Concepts of Frederick Jackson Turner," in Stuart Rice, ed. Methods in Social Science: A Case Book (1931) pp 353–67 online edition
• Faragher, John Mack (ed.) Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: The Significance of the Frontier in American History and Other Essays. New York: Holt, 1994. ISBN 0-8050-3298-3
• Hall, Patricia Kelly, and Steven Ruggles. "'Restless in the midst of Their Prosperity': New Evidence on the Internal Migration of Americans, 1850-2000. Journal of American History 2004 91(3): 829-846. in History Cooperative
• Hutton, T. R. C. "Beating a Dead Horse: the Continuing Presence of Frederick Jackson Turner in Environmental and Western History." International Social Science Review 2002 77(1-2): 47-57.
• Hofstadter, Richard. The Progressive Historians—Turner, Beard, Parrington. (1979), highly influential critique.
• Hutton, T. R. C. "Beating a Dead Horse: the Continuing Presence of Frederick Jackson Turner in Environmental and Western History." International Social Science Review 2002 77(1-2): 47-57. Issn: 0278-2308 Fulltext: in Ebsco;
• Jacobs, Wilbur R. On Turner's Trail: 100 Years of Writing Western History (1994).
• Jensen, Richard. "On Modernizing Frederick Jackson Turner: The Historiography of Regionalism," The Western Historical Quarterly 11, No. 3 (July 1980), 307-322 in JSTOR
• Limerick, Patricia N. "Turnerians All: The Dream of a Helpful History in an Intelligible World," American Historical Review 100 (June 1995):697-716 in JSTOR
• Moos, Dan. "Reclaiming the Frontier: Oscar Micheaux as Black Turnerian." African American Review 2002 36(3): 357-381. in JSTOR
• Nichols, Roger L. American Frontier and Western Issues: A Historiographical Review (1986) online edition
• Scharff, Virginia, et al. "Claims and Prospects of Western History: a Roundtable." Western Historical Quarterly 2000 31(1): 25-46. Issn: 0043-3810 in Jstor
• Steiner, Michael C. "From Frontier to Region: Frederick Jackson Turner and the New Western History," Pacific Historical Review 64 (November 1995): 479-501 in JSTOR

External links

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Frederick Jackson Turner

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Frederick Jackson Turner.

• A biography of Frederick Jackson Turner
• Another biography
• Frederick Jackson Turner at the Wisconsin Electronic Reader
• Works by Frederick Jackson Turner at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Frederick Jackson Turner in libraries (WorldCat catalog)