Frederick Jackson Turner

For more information on Frederick Jackson Turner, visit Britannica.com.

American historian Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932) is regarded as one of the greatest writers of United States history. Several of his concepts caused a virtual rewriting of American history in the early 20th century.

Frederick Jackson Turner was born on Nov. 14, 1861, in Portage, Wis., a rural town populated by a variety of European immigrants. In Turner's youth Portage was still visited by Indians living in the nearby wilderness. Turner's autobiographical notes, preserved among his papers at the Henry E. Huntington Library in San Marino, Calif., relate that he attended Portage High School and won a prize for a graduation address that was printed in his father's newspaper. He worked in his father's office as a typesetter.

In 1880, Turner entered the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he fell under the influence of Professor William F. Allen, who taught him how to understand historical institutions such as the medieval church and the feudal monarchy. Turner later claimed that Allen showed him the importance of institutional history, a theme that appeared in Turner's writings on the origins of American democracy. Following his graduation in 1884 and the later completion of his master's degree at Wisconsin, Turner went to Johns Hopkins University to study for his doctorate in 1888. He married Caroline Mae Sherwood of Chicago in 1889.

Teaching Career

Turner's doctoral dissertation, The Character and Influence of the Indian Trade in Wisconsin (1891), portrayed the trading post as an institution of the early American frontier. At the University of Wisconsin, where Turner taught from 1889 to 1910, he emphasized frontier history in his lectures and in his writings. His most important publication, a paper entitled "The Significance of the Frontier in American History, " which he read in 1893, set forth his frontier hypothesis. His first major book, Rise of the New West, 1819-1829 (1906), was followed by a volume of essays, The Frontier in American History (1920). These volumes provided a wide audience for his ideas.

Turner moved to Harvard University in 1910 and retired in 1924 to southern California, where he continued his investigations as research associate at the Huntington Library. After his death on March 4, 1932, his last two books were published: The Significance of Sections in American History (1932) was awarded a Pulitzer Prize; The United States 1830-1850: The Nation and Its Sections (1935) was partly dictated and lacks the literary finesse of his other writings.

Frontier Theory

Turner's frontier theory (often called his frontier hypothesis) has been applied to Latin American nations, to Australia, and to Russia to explain the origin of national characteristics. Turner believed that the particular tone of American democracy, the nature of American institutions of government, and the uniqueness of the American character could be traced to America's frontier experience. In his writings Turner stressed the changes that took place in colonial American society when a European civilization was transplanted to a wilderness environment. Frontier individualism, stimulated by the presence of free (or virtually free) land in the West, left its imprint upon Americans of modern times.

In Turner's view a restless energy, a self-reliance, and a love of freedom are part of the American heritage, which is also symbolized by great leaders such as Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and Abraham Lincoln. Turner wrote that the lives of these presidents illustrate the influence of western democracy in American life. The original raw frontier areas of America were eventually transformed by generations of a new society. Social change caused by the modifying influence of geographical, economic, social, and political forces created a new nationality in America. American society developed with sectional or regional variations, the largest and most powerful sections being the North and the South.

Turner's most significant contribution to historical thinking has been to encourage a better understanding of the origins of American democracy. His theories have been thoroughly debated and criticized, yet he remains one of the most original and provocative historians that America has produced. Even though Turner admitted that he perhaps exaggerated when he "hammered hard" on the subject of the frontier in promoting democracy, his thesis that the westward movement greatly influenced American history and the growth of the American traits of character is generally accepted as valid.

Further Reading

Wilbur R. Jacobs, The Historical World of Frederick Jackson Turner (1968), traces Turner's professional career and includes excerpts from his correspondence. Jacobs edited America's Great Frontiers and Sections (1969), which includes Turner's unpublished essays and contains the best short biography of him. Critical essays on Turner's frontier theory are in George Rogers Taylor, ed., The Role of the Frontier in American History (1949; rev. ed. 1956), and R. A. Billington, ed., The Frontier Thesis: Valid Interpretation of American History? (1966). Billington's America's Frontier Heritage (1966) has an excellent evaluation of the frontier theory. Wilbur R. Jacobs and others, Turner, Bolton and Webb (1965), shows Turner's influence on two other leading American writers, and Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians (1968), discusses the affinities among Turner, Beard, and Vernon Parrington. Turner figures prominently in John Higham's work on historiography, Writing American History: Essays on Modern Scholarship (1970). For a superb history of the United States that emphasizes Turnerean themes of interpretation see R. A. Billington, Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier (1967).

Additional Sources

Bennett, James D., Frederick Jackson Turner, Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1975.

Carpenter, Ronald H., The eloquence of Frederick Jackson Turner, San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1983.

Frederick Jackson Turner: Wisconsin's historian of the frontier, Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1986.

(1861-1932), historian. Turner was educated at the University of Wisconsin and received his doctorate from Johns Hopkins University (1891). He taught at Wisconsin and at Harvard and then served as a senior research associate at the Huntington Library until his death. He was a gifted public speaker with a vibrant voice, and he loved the outdoors.

Turner made significant contributions to many fields in American history and also pioneered new methodologies. He challenged historians to utilize the research in cognate disciplines such as geography, statistics, economics, and sociology. His research, methods, and sources were often so different from those of traditional historians that some of them doubted that he was one himself, but he argued that historians should use whatever knowledge and tools would help them explain the past. He urged American historians to escape the parochialism of New England and the Seaboard South and to study immigration and assimilation, urbanization, diplomacy, economic history, political behavior, social and cultural history, and the frontier experience.

His nostalgic view of frontier Wisconsin led him to rebel against the conventional wisdom of his generation. He was trained by Herbert Baxter Adams at Hopkins, who endorsed German scientific methods of historical investigation and espoused the so-called germ theory, which held that all American institutions derived from early Germanic tribal practices. Turner's doctoral dissertation on the Indian trade in Wisconsin only partly accepted Adams's ideas.

His later essay, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" (1893), which repudiated the germ theory altogether, was a turning point in American historical scholarship. Within a decade of the essay's publication, the "Turner thesis"--that the frontier experience had a lasting if not permanent impact on the American character and society--became the organizing principle of American historical studies and a subject of continuing controversy.

Another essay was less successful: "The Significance of the Section in American History" (1925), which integrated political and cultural attitudes with geographical units and economic interest groups. Although his subsequent book on the subject won a Pulitzer Prize, the sectionalism thesis has been of only marginal influence in organizing historical study, but it achieved healthy recognition among some economists, geographers, and political scientists.

Turner believed in the uniqueness of America and suggested that it offered a laboratory to study the evolution of society. But he accepted multiple causation and was neither a geographic nor an economic determinist.

Turner, along with historians Woodrow Wilson, Charles Homer Haskins, Max Farrand, and J. Franklin Jameson, made up a network that dominated the discipline and controlled appointments to major institutions and editorial boards for decades. Although sharply criticized almost from the start, his work and that of his disciples and students were important in most American universities until at least the Great Depression. His ideas also enjoyed a renaissance after the Second World War, but in modified form. Today, historians, whether defenders or critics of Turner's ideas, still feel compelled to confront them. Moreover, his methodological concerns, especially his search for a means of correlating numerical data, made him a forerunner of contemporary quantitative social and political history.

Bibliography:

R. A. Billington, The American Frontier Thesis: Attack and Defense (1971); R. A. Billington, Frederick Jackson Turner: Historian, Scholar, Teacher (1973).

Author:

Martin Ridge

See also History and Historians; Progressivism.

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

Frederick Jackson Turner

Frederick Jackson Turner (November 14, 1861 – March 14, 1932) was an American historian in the early 20th century. He is best known for The Significance of the Frontier in American History.

Contents 1 Early life, education, and career 2 Turner's Frontier Thesis 3 Works 4 Marriage, family, and death 5 Primary sources 6 Secondary sources 7 References 8 External links 9 Notes

Early life, education, and career

Born in Portage, Wisconsin, the son of Andrew Jackson Turner and Mary Olivia Hanford Turner, Frederick Jackson Turner graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Madison 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's Frontier Thesis

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.^[1]

Works

His essays are collected in The Significance of the Frontier in American History, which won the Pulitzer Prize for 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.

Marriage, family, and death

Frederick Jackson Turner married Caroline Mae Sherwood in Chicago in November 1889. They had three children: Dorothy Kinsley Turner (later Main), who lived to give them grandchildren; Jackson Allen Turner, who died in October 1899 and Mae Sherwood Turner, who died in February 1899. One of Main's grandchildren was historian Jackson Turner Main (1917–2003), a scholar of Revolutionary America.

Frederick Jackson Turner died in 1932 in California where he had been a research associate at the Huntington Library.^[2]

Primary sources

• Turner, Frederick Jackson. "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," address before the American Historical Association, Chicago, 1893.
• Turner, Frederick Jackson.. "Dominant Forces in Western Life". The Atlantic Monthly 79 (474): 433–4432934-0079-51. 
• 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. Pulitzer prize winner.
• 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

• Bogue, Allan G., Frederick Jackson Turner: Strange Roads Going Down, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998, ISBN 0-08061-3039-3
• Burkhart, J. A. "The Turner Thesis: A Historian's Controversy." Wisconsin Magazine of History, vol. 31, no. 1 (Sep 1947), pp. 70-83.
• Faragher, John Mack (ed.) Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" and other essays. 1999.

References

1. ^ "The Old Frontiers" by Alan Taylor, The New Republic, May 7, 2008
2. ^ Bogue, Allan G., Frederick Jackson Turner: Strange Roads Going Down, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998, ISBN 0-08061-3039-3

External links

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

• The Frontier in American History Turner's 1921 collection of essays on the West including the full text of his 1893 paper. From American Studies at the University of Virginia
• A biography of Frederick Jackson Turner
• Another biography
• Some more links
• Wisconsin Electronic Reader.
• Works by Frederick Jackson Turner at Project Gutenberg

Notes

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