The Frontier Thesis has long been a controversial topic amongst historians since the early 20th Century. Frederick J. Turner is infamous for his paper presentation of this hypothesis at the American Historical Society in Chicago of 1893, however his interpretation of westward expansion during the 1800’s is often refuted. It is an argument amongst humanities scholars that has spanned over a century, and the debate is still of topical significance within academic undergraduate survey courses ranging from history to geography to the social sciences.
Despite Turner’s influence, there has been little attention paid to visualizing his conceptualization of a moving frontier in 19th Century America. The Frontier Thesis provides all pertinent information to create an animated map as well as a digital platform for the historical debate via scholarship over the past 126 years. Using the chronological events of expansion provided by Turner, the map will reiterate his statement of the Frontier Thesis with the inclusion of his developments and later inclusions over the span of his academic career.
In addition, the plethora of articles, books, and courses taught throughout the world on the American West will be included in a dataset that links the author or authors to a position on Turner’s thesis. This will be performed using text mining and analysis of open access scholarship available to the general public. The sample pool regarding the commentary of Turner’s work is rather large and will not be narrowed to a specific genre or intellectual sphere given that the writing is meant to be informative/ educational in nature.
For example, The Frontier Thesis supported ideologies (or perhaps aided in the invention of) such as Theodore Roosevelt’s nationalistic focus on “rugged individualism” and responsibility for one’s own success or failure. A mere thirty years later, according to historiography, there is a decline in the support of Turner’s hypothesis in the 1930’s due to a sway towards collectivism amidst the depression era in America amongst young academics.[1] However, in the 1950’s the his thesis resurfaces as a sociological argument in which the hypothesis undergoes the systematic approach of scientific method rather than the primary source based backlash of Turner naysayers of the 30’s and 40’s.[2] The question had become one of a practical nature; is there any logical legitimacy in Turner’s theory?
William Cronon is perhaps the most influential contemporary historian of geography and environmental studies who has written and published much on Turner. Cronon’s contribution to Western American History, through his detailed reimagining and analysis of Turner’s thesis in his article, “Revisiting the Vanishing Frontier: The Legacy of Frederick Jackson Turner” in The Western Historical Quarterly published in 1987 provokes the reader to delve beyond Turner’s frontier statement and invites them into Turner’s classroom. The man behind the thesis is unveiled by Cronon to be a historian trying to move the scholarship needle from “simple narrative” to “studying problems”, in other words Turner’s thesis is a cornerstone for social history.[3]
Questions this project will address: Is there a trend over time in support or opposition to The Frontier Thesis? Is the Frontier Thesis discussed with the same verbiage throughout the academic fields of humanities/ social sciences? Has his thesis been tested/ applied using human experiences- is there truth in his claim that there is a cyclical nature to civilization? Did Turner subscribe indefinitely to this thesis, or was it something he felt was malleable and variable? Is the backlash of Turner’s thesis due to the complications of “doing” social history rather than simply retelling it? Is his thesis applicable the modern “frontier” of “living off the grid” or movement s such as Ken Kesey’s and the Merry Pranksters Electric Kool Aid Acid Tests or the rise of communal living in the 60’s and 70’s? Is there a recurring historical trend of man returning back to nature and negating the comforts of excess?
If there were a place to test Turner’s theory, it would be in the 21st Century. In an America that looks and acts as a collective nationalistic unit (as Turner helped perpetuate), there is a growing desire amongst Millennials and Generation Xers to “turn on, tune in, drop out”.[4] This feeling of otherness or disassociation from mainstream society is representative of the reoccurring theme of Turner’s Frontier. The Frontier offered Americans a place to redefine their place in the universe, to rewrite their heredity. In today’s world there are people seeking this Frontier, and sometimes they are even creating it.
The social phenomenon of the Burning Man event that happens annually over Labor Day since 1986 is a litmus test for Turner’s Frontier Thesis. As an event that started from a few integral people coming from many counterculture groups in the San Francisco Bay Area who pooled their resources and their desires to make a community that was intentionally self-reliant and unapologetically experimental. They moved the event to the Black Rock Desert in 1993 in order to truly allow their vision to develop and manifest, as well as support the growing population of participants. The desert was a new frontier, a place of barrenness, a wilderness of bleak resources and a canvas for reinvention. Burning Man is symbolic of the Frontier that Turner spoke of- it created the possibility to reject civilization and rebuild through newly forged relationships and primitive architectural dwellings.
As time progressed, much like Turner’s observance of Westward expansion in the 19th Century, Burning Man reached a tipping point of sorts. Like the Census data that Turner relied on, the population of Black Rock City forced the Frontier borders to close. For some the evolution of Burning Man from a lawless community of self-sufficient artists into an organized and mechanized multimillion-dollar arts festival inadvertently perpetuated and simulated the mainstream society it was looking to escape.
Why do some humans have the desire to “revert” to primitive
ideologies of living off the land, turning away from first world luxuries of
running water and electricity in order to reset their civilized clocks to a
world of primitive timelessness? What does this intentional turn away from
progress signify? Through this collaborative project we hope to revisit
Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis and bring life to America’s many frontiers.
[1] Billington, Ray Allen. The Frontier Thesis: Valid Interpretation of American History? (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966), 3.
[2] Ibid., 4.
[3] Cronon, William. “Revisiting the Vanishing Frontier: The Legacy of Frederick Jackson Turner.” The Western Historical Quarterly 18, no. 2 (1987): 161. doi:10.2307/969581.
[4] This term was coined by Timothy Leary in 1966 and became his mantra at a gathering in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park in 1967. Leary was essentially urging human beings to ‘turn on’ their inner consciousness, ‘tune in’ to the world around you- understand the peculiar nature you were born into and create a congruous relationship with the world, and ‘drop out’ of the collective conformity of government- to be self-reliant, to celebrate the individual.