Frederick Jackson Turner

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

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 his essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American History", whose ideas are referred to as the Frontier Thesis. He is also known for his theories of geographical sectionalism. In recent years western history has seen pitched arguments over his Frontier Thesis, with the only point of agreement being his 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 Yankee family. 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 gained his Ph.D. in history from Johns Hopkins University in 1890 with a thesis on the Wisconsin fur trade, 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. At the American Historical Association, he collaborated with J. Franklin Jameson on major projects.

Annoyed by the university regents who demanded less research and more teaching and state service, Turner sought out an environment that would support research. 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. 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.

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 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. 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'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. 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.

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.

Turner ignored gender and race, downplayed class, and left no room for victims. His values represented a challenge to historians of the 1960s and later who 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.

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.

Turner's theories slipped out of fashion in the 1960s, as critics complained, unfairly, 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. His ideas never disappeared; indeed they influenced the new field of environmental history. 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.

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 1999 and Mae Sherwood Turner, who died in February 1999. One of Main's grandchildren was historian Jackson Turner Main (1917–2003), a scholar of Revolutionary America who married Gloria Main, a fellow scholar.

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

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

• 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.
• Cronon, E. David. An Uncommon Professor: Frederick Jackson Turner at Wisconsin, Wisconsin Magazine of History, vol. 78, no. 4 (Summer 1995), pp. 276–293.
• Faragher, John Mack (ed.) Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: The Significance of the Frontier in American History and Other Essays. New York: Holt, 1994. ISBN 0805032983
• 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.
• Scharff, Virginia, et al. "Claims and Prospects of Western History: a Roundtable." Western Historical Quarterly 2000 31(1): 25-46.

External links

• A biography of Frederick Jackson Turner
• Another biography
• Frederick Jackson Turner at the Wisconsin Electronic Reader
• Works by Frederick Jackson Turner at Project Gutenberg