He is, the revisionist historians believe, the idol who must be toppled if the field is to revive and grow. The new historians fault Turner and his latter-day disciples for many things, but most of all for what they consider his ethnocentrism, his triumphalism, his emphasis on individualism and his insistence that Western history as a distinct field of study ends in The essence of the new Western history lies in its effort to challenge the Turnerians on each of those points.
Where Turner saw the 19th-century West as free land awaiting the expansion of Anglo-American settlement and American democracy, the new scholars reject the concept of a frontier altogether and go to considerable lengths to avoid using the word. They emphasize, instead, the elaborate and highly developed civilizations Native American, Hispanic, mixed-blood or "metis" and others that already existed in the region.
In their view, white English-speaking Americans did not so much settle the West as conquer it. That conquest, moreover, was never complete. Anglo-Americans in the West continue to share the region not only with the Indians who preceded them there, but also with the African-Americans, Asians, Latin Americans and others who flowed into the West at the same time they did.
Western history, the new scholars maintain, is a process of cultural convergence, a constant competition and interaction -- economic, political, cultural, and linguistic -- among diverse peoples. The Turnerian West was a place of heroism, triumph and above all progress, a place where Anglo-Americans spread democracy and civilization into untamed lands. The West the new historians describe is a much less happy place -- a land in which bravery and success coexist with oppression, greed and failure; in which decaying ghost towns, bleak Indian reservations, impoverished barrios and ecologically devastated landscapes are as characteristic of Western development as great ranches, rich farms and prosperous cities.
TO Turner and his disciples, the 19th-century West was a place where rugged individualism flourished and replenished American democracy. To the new scholars, Western individualism is a self-serving myth. They argue that the region was always inextricably tied to a national and international capitalist economy; indeed, the only thing that sustained Anglo-American settlement of the West was the demand in other places for its natural resources. Western "pioneers" were never self-sufficient.
They depended on Government-subsidized railroads for access to markets, Federal troops for protection from Indians, and later Government-funded dams and canals for irrigating their fields and sustaining their towns. And while Turner defined the West as a process of settlement that came to an end with the "closing of the frontier " in the late 19th century, the new historians see the West as a region. Its history does not end in It continues into our own time. Anyone looking for a clear indication of what the new Western history actually looks like as opposed to how its champions define themselves theoretically would do well to begin with Richard White's " 'It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own,' " an excellent new synthesis of Western history designed for the textbook market.
That market has been dominated for years by one of the monuments of the Turnerian West: "Westward Expansion," by Turner's biographer and indefatigable disciple Ray Allen Billington. It was recently revised by Martin Ridge. White has launched a formidable challenge to it. He is a lively, graceful writer which by itself makes this an unusual textbook , and he tells a story very different from the traditional picture of the progress of Anglo-American civilization, but no less compelling.
White emphasizes the complicated interactions among the many peoples of the West, not just the seemingly inevitable triumph of English-speaking whites. He challenges the heavily masculine bias of traditional Western history and makes women and gender relations central to the story, illuminating the ways in which the harsh realities of frontier life provided opportunities for women to exert influence far beyond the home.
Discuss how and why it is not an adequate What was the Turner Thesis. Discuss how and why it is not an adequate explanation of theThe Frontier Thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner quot;The emergence of western history as an important field of scholarship can best be traced to the famous paper Frederick Jackson Turner delivered at a meeting of the What was the turner thesis —. Discuss how and why it is not an adequate explanation of theThe Turner Thesis — buyonlinefastessay.
The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of According to Martin Ridge, what was the Turner Thesis According to Martin Ridge, what was the Turner Thesis? What did Turner claim was the principle function of the frontier in American history and why? What Was The Turner Thesis — Reeve trans. Langley, White, Richard, The Middle Ground. Malone, David J. Worster, Donald, Under Western Skies. Wrobel, David M. Steiner, eds.
Lamar, cited in Bernstein. Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, analyses how Europeans and Indians met in the region around the Great Lakes, and how their interactions, exchanges, and "creative misunderstandings" led to the birth of a new society White x. Site map — Syndication. Privacy Policy — About Cookies. Skip to navigation — Site map. Caliban French Journal of English Studies.
Contents - Previous document - Next document. Regional Identities in Question. Index terms Keywords : American West , frontier thesis , New Western History , regionalism , exceptionalism , American identity , crossroads. Outline Frederick Jackson Turner and the frontier thesis. The regionalism of the New Western History.
Full text PDF 91k Send by e-mail. Frederick Jackson Turner and the frontier thesis 3 Considered as the founding father of Western history, Frederick Jackson Turner is famous for a lecture he gave in , entitled "The Significance of the Frontier in American History".
Indians, Empires, and R Notes 1 According to the "germ theory", the ancestors of the Anglo-Saxons had devised their political and social organization in the forests of medieval Germany, institutions that had then influenced the development of England, before reaching the American colonies.
Top of page. Browse Index Authors Keywords. Follow us RSS feed. Newsletters OpenEdition Newsletter. In collaboration with. In All OpenEdition. During the period that followed Jackson, power passed from the region of Kentucky and Tennessee to the border of the Mississippi As Andrew Jackson is the typical democrat of the former region, so Abraham Lincoln is the very embodiment of the pioneer period of the Old Northwest.
Indeed, he is the embodiment of the democracy of the West The pioneer life from which Lincoln came differed in important respects from the frontier democracy typified by Andrew Jackson. Jackson's democracy was contentious. Certainly Turner's perceptions of Jackson presented in this long passage are quite different than those described by Davidson and Lytle in their very brief summary. Probably the most obvious difference is that to Turner, Jackson was not really ''the west itself' but rather was 'the typical democrat ' and ''had the essential traits" of one frontier only, the Kentucky Tennessee frontier.
If any frontiersman was the embodiment of the West in general, according to Turner. That this was an important distinction to Turner is evident by the number of times he made it elsewhere in his frontier essays. This contrast in Turner's perceptions of Jackson and Lincoln underlines another crucial fact about the place of Jackson in his thesis that Davidson and Lytle also apparently have failed to recognize and that is that the frontier traits he attributed to Jackson were almost exclusively negative ones.
Note, for example. It also should be noted that the traits of Jackson that Turner emphasized were mainly those associated with his presidency and Jacksonian Democracy rather than with his rise to wealth and political influence in Tennessee.
This fact is particularly important because Davidson and Lytle, after their brief summary of Turner's views of the frontier and Jackson, compare them with those of Thomas Abernethy, who had been one of Turner's graduate students. As a result, ''Instead of confirming Turner's version of a hardy democracy. Abernethy painted a picture of 'free' Tennessee lands providing fortunes for already powerful men.
According to Davidson and Lytle, Abernethy also presented a very different perception of Jackson. Concentrating exclusively on his early career in Tennessee, Abernethy described his involvement in land speculation and close alliance with Blount and other men of power and wealth. He was, according to Abernethy, ''ever an aristocrat at heart. Unfortunately, here again Davidson and Lytle tend to misrepresent or distort Turner's thesis and perceptions of Jackson.
However, in this instance Abernethy is partly responsible. Professor Frederick Turner, to whom I dedicated the book. Professor Turner believed that American "democracy" originated on the western frontier and that this environmental influence was entirely beneficial to the nation It is certainly true that living conditions on the frontier were primitive and that one could not carry his pedigree into the wilderness.
Consequently, social life was much more informal than in the older, more settled communities. However, the rampant land speculation that prevailed on the frontier constitutes highly persuasive evidence that there were serpents in Professor Turner's egalitarian Eden-evidence that economic and political "privilege" was not wholly absent from the Sylvan scene These statements by Abernethy, as well as those of Davidson and Lytle, as to the implications of his study of the Tennessee frontier for the Turner thesis are, to say the least, most puzzling.
Certainly Turner's description of frontier society and its impact on American institutions and character was much less romantic and idealistic than they suggest. As we have seen, time and again in his frontier essays he acknowledged that there were, indeed, "serpents" and "scum" in his frontier society, that "economic and political 'privilege'" was very much in evidence in his "Sylvan scene. Allen, for example, has pointed out, that the role of land speculators on the frontier received too little attention in Turner's frontier essays, 47 surely they were among the evils of frontier individualism that he had in mind in his references to the "strenuous competition for the spoils of the new country," the "laxity in government affairs" and in "financial integrity," and "the natural resources open to the shrewdest and the boldest," and in his observation that.
Besides the ideals of conquest and of discovery, the pioneer had the ideal of personal development, free from social and governmental constraint. He came from a civilization based on individual competition, and he brought the conception with him to the wilderness where a wealth of resources, and innumerable opportunities gave it a new scope. The prizes were for the keenest and the strongest, for them were the best bottom lands, the finest timber tracts, the best salt-springs, the richest ore beds; and not only these natural gifts, but also the opportunities afforded in the midst of a farming society.
Here were mill sites, town sites, transportation lines, banking centers, openings in the law, in politics all the varied chances for advancement afforded in a rapidly developing society where everything was open to him who knew how to seize the opportunity.
As to comparisons between Turner's and Abernethy's perceptions of Jackson, they are difficult to make for, as has been noted, it is Jackson's conduct as a national leader with which Turner was primarily interested, whereas Abernethy's focus was exclusively on his early career in Tennessee.
However, in those brief passages in which Turner did discuss Jackson, the frontiersman, he is in much less disagreement with Abernethy than Davidson and Lytle suggest. Certainly it is obvious that Jackson was no frontier hero to Turner. Rather, he was a product of and spokesman for the extreme individualism that Turner considered one of the most negative products of frontier democracy' especially in Kentucky and Tennessee.
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