frontier

1. 1. An international border.
   2. The area along an international border.
2. A region just beyond or at the edge of a settled area.
3. An undeveloped area or field for discovery or research: theories on the frontier of astrophysics.

[Middle English frountier, from Old French frontier, from front, forehead, front. See front.]

noun

The line or area separating geopolitical units: border, borderland, boundary, march², marchland. See edge/center, territory.

Definition: boundary
Antonyms: interior

n

Definition: undiscovered countryside
Antonyms: metropolis, settled region

If there is a single word that shaped the American experience, it is frontier. So, at least, it was argued at the turn of the last century, when the frontier as we had known it for nearly three hundred years came to an end. On that occasion, historian Frederick Jackson Turner said, "The peculiarity of American institutions is, the fact that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people--to the changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and in developing, at each area of this progress, out of the primitive economic and political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life."

Frontier was not a new word to the English-speaking settlers of the Atlantic colonies, but they applied it in a new way. The beginnings can be seen in a 1676 account of "Calling downe our Forces from the defence of the Frontiers, and most weake Exposed Places." As Turner wrote two centuries later, "The American frontier is sharply distinguished from the European frontier--a fortified boundary line running through dense populations. The most significant thing about the American frontier is, that it lies at the hither edge of free land." American Indians, with un-European ideas about nations and property, did not erect barricades to the flow of settlers west. So the settlers thought of the frontier not as a marked border but as the place where civilization dwindled away and wilderness began.

All this came to an end when the country was settled from coast to coast. What would Americans do without the frontier? Turner wondered. We didn't. We kept right on, preserving the frontier by extending the meaning of the word. We invented "new frontiers," in space or science or medicine or politics, the most famous being the new frontier adopted as a theme of John Kennedy's presidential campaign in 1960: "We stand today on the edge of a new frontier,...a frontier of unknown opportunities and paths, a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats.... The new frontier...is not a set of promises, it is a set of challenges. It sums up not what I intend to offer the American people, but what I intend to ask of them."

That part of a country which lies on the limit of the settled area. It differs from a boundary because the term frontier indicates outward expansion into an area previously unsettled by a particular state. Some frontiers have occurred where two nations advance from different directions, leading to boundary disputes. A settlement frontier marks the furthest advance of settlement within a state while the political frontier is where the limit of the state coincides with the limit of settlement.

Modern dance in one act, with choreography by Graham, music by Horst, set by Noguchi, and costumes by Graham. Premiered 28 Apr. 1935 at the Guild Theater, New York, with Graham and her company. It portrays the determination and energy of the early pioneers. It was originally danced as part of a larger work, Perspectives Nos. 1 and 2, but the group section in this work, ‘Marching Song’, was subsequently dropped.

Commonly regarded as the area where the settled portions of civilization meet the untamed wilderness, the frontier has persisted in American history as a topic of profound importance and intense debate. The conceptualization of the frontier has shifted greatly over time, evolving from older concepts that treated the frontier as a line of demarcation separating civilization from savagery to more modern considerations that treat the frontier as a zone of interaction and exchange between differing cultures. While numerous conceptualizations of the frontier contend for acceptance by the American public, all agree that the frontier occupies an influential position in the story of the American past.

Turner's Thesis: the Frontier As Process

Although the frontier has fascinated Americans since the colonial era, it first came to prominence as a true ideological concept late in the nineteenth century. On 12 July 1893, a young University of Wisconsin history professor named Frederick Jackson Turner, who sought to discover an antidote to the "germ theory" of history, which argued that all American institutions evolved from European precedents transplanted into the New World by the colonists, argued that the frontier was more important than any other single factor in shaping American history and culture. An influential address delivered before the American Historical Association, Turner's "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" suggests that the process of westward migration across the North American continent unleashed forces directly responsible for shaping the national character, an argument that boldly proclaimed the exceptionalism of the American experience and downplayed Europe's influence upon the development of the United States.

For Turner, the frontier was not so much a place as a reoccurring process of adaptation and change. The lure of abundant and inexpensive land brought Anglo-Europeans westward in an effort to improve their social and economic standings. As these migrants conquered the wilderness and spread across the North American continent, they experienced challenges and hardships unlike anything previously encountered in the Western world. In Turner's estimation, the process of overcoming the frontier transformed the Anglo-Europeans into a new national form, Americans. The core traits held dear by Americans, including democracy, individualism, freedom, and thrift, were generated by their experience of taming the wilderness. Turner attributed the greatest successes of American development, from the adoption of democratic self-rule to the belief in economic egalitarianism, to the indomitable national spirit created by the westering experience of the frontier populace, average people who reshaped European values and institutions in their own image. Nonetheless, Turner conceived of the frontier as a part of the past, and, based on the assertion of the 1890 census that Americans had completely filled the territorial borders of the forty-eight contiguous states, he warned that the nation was entering into a new phase in which it could no longer count upon the abundance of western land to provide the lifeblood of American culture.

The Turner thesis, as his concept of the frontier came to be known, proved extremely influential during the first half of the twentieth century. His initial essay sparked a series of test theories, conducted both by Turner and by his students, that emphasized the uniqueness of American history and the exceptionalness of the United States among the world's great nations. One Turnerian advocate, the historian Walter Prescott Webb, even expanded Turner's frontier process to include the entire Anglo-European world. The frontier experience, according to Webb, not only redefined America but also reached across the ocean to influence the modern development of Europe, giving rise to the dominant social and political institutions of the West. In a direct reversal of the European germ theory, Webb argued that democratic government, capitalist economic theory, and individualistic Protestant religion all were directly linked to the experience of westward movement and the conquering of the American frontier.

Revising Turner

Turner's grand scheme spawned a long line of criticism, ranging from petty oversimplifications of his arguments to sophisticated criticisms of his approach to the frontier. While the Turner thesis remains a formidable force in the study of the American frontier, his frontier process has some serious problems. Among the most noticeable is the racially exclusive environment created by the Turner thesis. Turner's frontier process is the triumphant story of the Anglo-American conquest of the wilderness, and it makes little mention of the diversity of peoples who played important roles in the history of the American frontier. For the most part, American Indians, African Americans, and Mexican and Asian immigrants do not merit consideration as influential players on the Turnerian frontier. Only the American Indians are afforded a place in Turner's world, and they are only an obstacle easily overcome in the advancement of the American nation. In addition, Turner's frontier does not attribute a significant role to women. His thesis gives no voice to the thousands of pioneering women who toiled alongside their husbands and fathers in the conquest of the American frontier, nor does he attempt to assess the contributions made by frontier women to the development of cherished American institutions. Finally, Turner's model allows no room for the diversity of the frontier experience in North America. His process of conquest and transformation does not lend itself favorably to the frontier history of New France, where cultural mediation and compromise prevailed, or to the Spanish frontier in America, which illustrates the construction of a frontier that existed more as a defensive perimeter for the core culture of Mexico than as a successive process of territorial conquest and acculturation.

During the 1980s, the problems inherent in the Turner thesis led to the codification of the critique under the leadership of a group of influential frontier thinkers known as the new western historians. Their concepts emphasized the frontier as a geographical region rather than as a process of westward movement, offering a more inclusive story of the American frontier than that allowed by Turner or his adherents. Focusing their attention primarily on the trans-Mississippi West, the new western historians argued that the historical diversity of the frontier must not be overlooked. All the peoples of the frontier, including American Indians, African Americans, Mexicans, Asians, and women, participated in shaping frontier America. In the estimation of the new western historians, the interaction of ethnic minorities with Anglo-American ideals, which in many instances was antagonistic, set many of the parameters for the subjugation of the frontier. New western historians also took issue with the celebratory climate invoked by Turner's seeming irresistible process of frontier transformation. Rather, they argued that taming the American wilderness was a fierce struggle, most appropriately designated by what one new western historian dubbed "the legacy of conquest." At the core of the reassessment is an understanding that all of the questions that dominate mainstream historical inquiry, including notions of conflict, race, gender, and society, provide fertile ground for studying the frontier. In addition, it is not a study bound by defined temporal limits but a legacy still at work. New western historians argue that the conquest of the frontier did not come to end in 1890, as Turner suggested, but that it continues during the modern era in the form of continuing legal and political battles over the finite resources of the American West.

New Frontiers for All

While the new western historians posed serious challenges to the Turnerian model and questioned the perspective from which the frontier should be viewed, the debate over the significance of the frontier in American history continued unabated into the twenty-first century. Turner's frontier process was perhaps deeply flawed, but it seems undeniable that the frontier played an influential role in the development of the American nation. Perhaps for this reason twenty-first-century conceptualizations of the frontier represent a delicate melding of Turner and new western history. Modern interpretations often define the frontier as a meeting place, or contact point, where differing cultures interacted on a relatively equal footing with no one group able to assert total superiority over the other. This approach to the frontier leaves no room for Turner's unstoppable process of American advancement, but what remains is Turner's suggestion that the frontier was a unique place of contact and exchange where no culture, Anglo-American or otherwise, could remain unchanged.

This concept has helped spawn a renewed interest in frontier history, not just of the western United States but of the eastern frontier as well. After the early 1990s, a new field of study, termed "backcountry history" by its adherents, applied the tenets of both Turner and new western historians to earlier frontiers, ranging from the first efforts to colonize North America through the early period of westward movement over the Appalachian Mountains. In the process, the study of the first American frontiers helped synthesize new approaches to frontier history and helped link the East to the West in a grand narrative of American westward migration.

Bibliography

Cayton, Andrew R. L., and Fredrika J. Teute, eds. Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750–1830. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Davis, William C. The American Frontier: Pioneers, Settlers, and Cowboys, 1800–1899. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999.

Faragher, John Mack, ed. Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" and Other Essays. New York: Henry Holt, 1994.

Jones, Mary Ellen. The American Frontier: Opposing Viewpoints. San Diego, Calif.: Greenhaven Press, 1994.

Klein, Kerwin Lee. Frontiers of Historical Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Limerick, Patricia Nelson. The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. New York: Norton, 1987.

Nobles, Gregory H. American Frontiers: Cultural Encounters and Continental Conquest. New York: Hill and Wang, 1997.

White, Richard. "It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own": A History of the American West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991.

—Daniel P. Barr

This article is about the political and geographic term. For other uses, see Frontier (disambiguation).

A restored pioneer house at the National Ranching Heritage Center in Lubbock, Texas.

A frontier is a political and geographical term referring to areas near or beyond a boundary.

Contents 1 United States 1.1 Colonial North America 1.2 American frontier 2 Canadian frontier 2.1 Canadian prairies 3 European Union 4 See also 5 Notes 6 References 6.1 US history 6.2 Canada 7 External links

United States

In the United States, the frontier was the term applied by scholars to the impact of the zone of land beyond the region of existing European occupation. That is, as pioneers moved into the frontier zone they were changed significantly by the encounter. That is what Frederick Jackson Turner called "the significance of the frontier." For example, Turner argued in 1893, one change was that unlimited free land in the zone was available and thus offered the psychological sense of unlimited opportunity, which in turn had many consequences, such as optimism, future orientation, shedding of restraints due to land scarcity, and wastefulness of natural resources. Operating in tandem with the doctrine of "manifest destiny", the "frontier" concept also had a massive impact on native Americans -- like the declaration of terra nullius^[1] enacted by the British ca. 1835 to legitimize their colonization of Australia, the idea implicitly negated any recognition of legitimate pre-existing occupation and embodied a blank denial of land rights to the indigenous peoples whose territories were being annexed by European colonists.

Throughout American history, the expansion of settlement was largely from the east to the west, and thus the frontier is often identified with "the west". On the Pacific Coast, settlement moved eastward. In New England, it moved north.

'Frontier' was borrowed into English from French in the 15th century with the meaning "borderland," the region of a country that fronts on another country (see also marches). The use of frontier to mean "a region at the edge of a settled area" is a special North American development. (Compare the Australian "outback".) In the Turnerian sense, "frontier" was a technical term that was explicated by hundreds of scholars.

Colonial North America

See also: Colonial America, British colonization of the Americas, French colonization of the Americas, and Spanish colonization of the Americas

In the earliest days of European settlement of the Atlantic coast, the frontier was essentially any part of the forested interior of the continent beyond the fringe of existing settlements along the coast and the great rivers, such as the St. Lawrence, Connecticut, Hudson, Delaware, Susquehanna River and James.

English, French, Spanish and Dutch patterns of expansion and settlement were quite different. Only a few thousand French migrated to Canada; these habitants settled in villages along the St. Lawrence river, building communities that remained stable for long stretches; they did not leapfrog west the way the Americans did. Although French fur traders ranged widely through the Great Lakes and Mississippi River watershed, as far as the Rocky Mountains, they did not usually settle down. Actual French settlement in these areas was limited to a few very small villages on the lower Mississippi and in the Illinois Country.^[2] Likewise, the Dutch set up fur trading posts in the Hudson river valley, followed by large grants of land to patroons who brought in tenant farmers who created compact, permanent villages. They did not push westward. ^[3]

In contrast, the English colonies generally pursued a more systematic policy of widespread settlement of the New World for cultivation and exploitation of the land, a practice that required the extension of European property rights to the new continent. The typical English settlements were quite compact and small--under a square mile. Conflict with the Native Americans arose out of political issues, viz. who would rule. Early frontier areas east of the Appalachian Mountains included the Connecticut river valley.^[4] The French and Indian Wars of the 1760s resulted in a complete victory for the British, who took over the French colonial territory west of the Appalachians to the Mississippi River. Americans began moving across the Appalachians into areas such the Ohio Country and the New River Valley.

American frontier

For more details on the context of the American frontier, see American Old West.

Following the victory of the United States in the American Revolutionary War and the signing Treaty of Paris in 1783, the United States gained formal, if not actual, control of the British lands west of the Appalachians. Many thousands of settlers, typified by Daniel Boone, had already reached Kentucky and Tennessee and adjacent areas. Some areas, such as the Virginia Military District and the Connecticut Western Reserve (both in Ohio), were used by the states as rewards to veterans of the war. How to formally include these new frontier areas into the nation was an important issue in the Continental Congress of the 1780s and was partly resolved by the Northwest Ordinance (1787). The Southwest Territory saw a similar pattern of settlement pressure.

For the next century, the expansion of the nation into these areas, as well as the subsequently acquired Louisiana Purchase, Oregon Country, and Mexican Cession, attracted hundreds of thousands of settlers. The question of whether the Kansas frontier would become "slave" or "free" was a spark of the American Civil War. In general before 1860 Northern Democrats promoted easy land ownership and Whigs and Southern Democrats resisted. The Southerners resisted Homestead Acts because it supported the growth of a free farmer population that might oppose slavery.

When the Republican party came to power in 1860 they promoted a free land policy — notably the Homestead Act of 1862, coupled with railroad land grants that opened cheap (but not free) lands for settlers. In 1890, the frontier line had broken up (Census maps defined the frontier line as a line beyond which the population was under 2 persons per square mile).

The popular culture impact of the frontier was enormous, in dime novels, Wild West shows, and, after 1910, Western movies set on the frontier.

The American frontier was generally the most Western edge of settlement and typically more democratic and free-spirited in nature than the East because of its lack of social and political institutions. The idea that the frontier provided the core defining quality of the United States was elaborated by the great historian Frederick Jackson Turner, who built his Frontier Thesis in 1893 around this notion.

Canadian frontier

A Canadian frontier thesis was developed by Canadian historians Harold Adams Innis and J. M. S. Careless. They emphasized the relationship between the center and periphery. Katerberg argues that "in Canada the imagined West must be understood in relation to the mythic power of the North." [Katerberg 2003] In Innis's 1930 work The Fur Trade in Canada, he expounded on what became known as the Laurentian thesis: that the most creative and major developments in Canadian history occurred in the metropolitan centers of central Canada and that the civilization of North America is the civilization of Europe. Innis considered place as critical in the development of the Canadian West and wrote of the importance of metropolitan areas, settlements, and indigenous people in the creation of markets. Turner and Innis continue to exert influence over the historiography of the American and Canadian Wests. The Quebec frontier showed little of the individualism or democracy that Turner ascribed to the American zone to the south. The Nova Scotia and Ontario frontiers were rather more democratic than the rest of Canada, but whether that was caused by the need to be self-reliant on the frontier itself or the presence of large numbers of American immigrants is debated.

The Canadian political thinker Charles Blattberg has argued that such events ought to be seen as part of a process in which Canadians advanced a "border"-- as distinct from a "frontier"--from east to west. According to Blattberg, a border assumes a significantly sharper contrast between the civilized and the uncivilized since, unlike with a frontier process, the civilizing force is not supposed to be shaped by that which it is civilizing. Blattberg criticizes both the frontier and border "civilizing" processes.

Canadian prairies

The pattern of settlement of the Canadian prairies began in 1896, when the American prairie states had already achieved statehood. Pioneers then headed north to the "Last Best West." Before settlers began to arrive, the North West Mounted Police was dispatched to the region. When settlers began to arrive, a system of law and order was already in place and the Dakota lawlessness for which the American "Wild West" was famed did not occur in Canada. Before settlers arrived, the federal government also sent teams of negotiators to meet with the Native peoples of the region. In a series of treaties, the basis for peaceful relations was established and the long wars with the Natives that occurred in the United States largely did not spread to Canada. Like their American counterparts, the Prairie provinces supported populist and democratic movements in the early 20th century. ^[5]

European Union

In the European Union, the frontier is a term used to describe the region beyond the expanding borders of the European Union. The European Union has designated the countries surrounding it as part of the European Neighbourhood. This is a region of primarily less-developed countries, many of which aspire to become part of the European Union itself. Current applicants include Turkey and Croatia. Ukraine has also set itself the primary task of eventually joining the Union, as have many small countries in the Balkans and South Caucasus. Romania and Bulgaria joined the European Union in 2007. Proposals to admit Turkey have been debated but are now currently stalled, partly on the ground that Turkey is beyond Europe's historic frontier and it is yet to comply with the 35 point policy areas set out by the EU. If all or most East European states become members, the frontier may be the boundaries with Russia and Turkey.

See also

• American Old West
• Cabin Rights
• Frontier Thesis
• Marches

Notes

1. ^ [1]
2. ^ Clarence Walworth Alvord, The Illinois Country 1673-1818 (1918)
3. ^ Arthur G. Adams, The Hudson Through the Years (1996); Sung Bok Kim, Landlord and Tenant in Colonial New York: Manorial Society, 1664-1775 (1987)
4. ^ Allan Kulikoff, From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers (2000)
5. ^ Laycock, David. Populism and Democratic Thought in the Canadian Prairies, 1910 to 1945. 1990; Seymour Martin Lipset, Agrarian Socialism (1950).

References

The examples and perspective in this article deal primarily with North America and do not represent a worldwide view of the subject. Please improve this article or discuss the issue on the talk page.

US history

• The Frontier In American History by Frederick Jackson Turner
• Billington, Ray Allen. America's Frontier Heritage (1984), an analysis of the frontier experience from perspective of social sciences and historiography
• Billington, Ray Allen. Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier (1952 and later editions), the most detailed textbook, with highly detailed annotated bibliographies
• Billington, Ray Allen. Land of Savagery / Land of Promise: The European Image of the American Frontier in the Nineteenth Century (1981)
• Blattberg, Charles Shall We Dance? A Patriotic Politics for Canada (2003), ch. 3, a comparison of the Canadian 'border' with the American 'frontier'
• Hine, Robert V. and John Mack Faragher. The American West: A New Interpretive History (2000), recent textbook
• Lamar, Howard R. ed. The New Encyclopedia of the American West (1998), 1000+ pages of articles by scholars
• Milner, Clyde A., II ed. Major Problems in the History of the American West 2nd ed (1997), primary sources and essays by scholars
• Nichols, Roger L. ed. American Frontier and Western Issues: An Historiographical Review (1986) essays by 14 scholars
• Paxson, Frederic, History of the American Frontier, 1763-1893 (1924)
• Slotkin, Richard, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (2000), University of Oklahoma Press

Canada

• Blattberg, Charles Shall We Dance? A Patriotic Politics for Canada (2003), ch. 3, a comparison of the Canadian 'border' with the American 'frontier'
• Cavell, Janice. "The Second Frontier: the North in English-Canadian Historical Writing." Canadian Historical Review 2002 83(3): 364-389. ISSN 0008-3755 Fulltext in Ebsco
• Clarke, John. Land, Power, and Economics on the Frontier of Upper Canada. McGill-Queen's U. Press, 2001. 747 pp.
• Colpitts, George. Game in the Garden: A Human History of Wildlife in Western Canada to 1940 U. of British Columbia Press, 2002. 216 pp.
• Forkey, Neil S. Shaping the Upper Canadian Frontier: Environment, Society and Culture in the Trent Valley. U. of Calgary Press 2003. 164 pp.
• Katerberg, William H. "A Northern Vision: Frontiers and the West in the Canadian and American Imagination." American Review of Canadian Studies 2003 33(4): 543-563. ISSN 0272-2011 Fulltext online at Ebsco
• Mulvihill, Peter R.; Baker, Douglas C.; and Morrison, William R. "A Conceptual Framework for Environmental History in Canada's North." Environmental History 2001 6(4): 611-626. ISSN 1084-5453. Proposes a five-part conceptual framework for the study of environmental history in the Canadian North. The first element of the framework analyzes approaches to environmental history that are applicable to the Canadian North. The second element reviews historical forces, myths, and defining characteristics that pertain to the region. A third element of the framework tests the validity of Turner's Frontier Thesis and Creighton's Metropolitan Thesis when applied to northern Canada. The fourth element consists of an overview of major northern environmental trends. The final element consists of four interrelated themes that identify the environmental relationships between northern and southern Canada.

External links

• Turner Thesis text
• Transhumanist.com: Opening Space as a Frontier

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - grænse, uudforsket område

Nederlands (Dutch)
grens, grensgebied, nieuw terrein voor onderzoek etc.

Français (French)
n. - (lit, fig) frontière, zone frontalière
adj. - frontalier, de frontière

Deutsch (German)
n. - Grenze, Grenzgebiet
adj. - Grenz-

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - σύνορο, μεθόριος
adj. - παραμεθόριος, συνοριακός, μεθοριακός, ακριτικός

Italiano (Italian)
frontiera, zona di frontiera

Português (Portuguese)
n. - fronteira (f)
adj. - fronteiriço

Русский (Russian)
граница, предел, осваиваемая территория, рубеж

Español (Spanish)
n. - frontera, límite, zona fronteriza
adj. - fronterizo, limítrofe

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - gräns, forskningsfält
adj. - gräns-

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
边界, 边境

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 邊界, 邊境

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 국경지방, 미연구 분야

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 国境, 辺境, 開拓前線, 国境地方, 未研究分野
adj. - 国境の

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) حد , تخم (صفه) واقع على الحدود‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮גבול, איזור-ספר‬

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