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Frederick Jackson Turner

1861–1932 · 71 years

One paper in 1893 told America where it came from

Portrait of Frederick Jackson Turner — Photographer not named. — 1918 — Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Portage, Wisconsin sat on the neck of land where boats were hauled between the Fox and the Wisconsin rivers, and Frederick Jackson Turner grew up watching the traffic. His father edited and published the local newspaper, worked Republican politics and put money into a railroad. His mother taught school. He took his degree at the University of Wisconsin in 1884, then went to Johns Hopkins for a doctorate, finishing in 1890 under Herbert Baxter Adams, who taught that American institutions had grown from Germanic seeds carried across the Atlantic. Turner wrote his dissertation on the Wisconsin fur trade instead, and came away convinced that his own teacher had the direction exactly backward.

On July 12, 1893, at a meeting of the American Historical Association held in Chicago during the World's Columbian Exposition, Turner read a paper titled The Significance of the Frontier in American History. The claim was plain. What made Americans American was not anything inherited from Europe but the act of settling one frontier after another, and the 1890 census had just declared that line closed. The room reportedly gave him almost nothing back. BriefHistory carries the thesis and what it set loose. This page is about the man who wrote it.

Turner defined the frontier as the meeting point between savagery and civilization, and that phrase carries the whole problem. In his account the Native nations are a condition of the landscape, like timber or rainfall, rather than peoples the United States fought, removed and confined. Women do not appear. Neither do Black homesteaders, the Mexican Americans whose country the United States annexed, or the Chinese laborers who graded the railroads. Beginning in the 1980s, Patricia Nelson Limerick, Richard White and Donald Worster took all of it apart. The free land was free because the army had cleared it. What Turner described as a nation renewing itself was, from the other side of that line, a conquest.

By the time Turner died in Pasadena in 1932, about 60 percent of major American history departments were teaching frontier courses built on his argument. It had become the story the country told about itself. Richard Hofstadter went after it in 1949 and again in 1968, the 1960s finished it, and the New Western historians buried the strong version for good. Turner himself completed almost nothing — a doctoral monograph, one volume of a textbook series, two collections of essays he had already delivered elsewhere. The last, on sectionalism, took the Pulitzer Prize in 1933, a year after he died. Western history is still written against him, which is a rarer kind of survival than being right.

Lifespan

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Frederick Jackson Turner's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

The Character and Influence of the Indian Trade in Wisconsin book
The Johns Hopkins doctoral study of the fur trade, written under Herbert Baxter Adams 1891
The Significance of the Frontier in American History article
Read to the American Historical Association in Chicago and printed the same year 1893
Rise of the New West, 1819-1829 book
His one volume for a general textbook series, and the closest he came to a narrative history 1906
Social Forces in American History article
His presidential address to the American Historical Association, printed in the American Historical Review 1911
The Frontier in American History book
Older essays gathered into a book, with the 1893 paper as chapter one 1920
The Significance of Sections in American History book
The sectionalism essays. It won the Pulitzer Prize in History in 1933, after his death 1932

Life in brief

with age at each point

November 14, 1861 aged 0 Born in Portage, Wisconsin His father edited and published the town newspaper. His mother taught school.
1884 aged ~23 Graduates from the University of Wisconsin
November 1889 aged 27 Marries Caroline Mae Sherwood in Chicago They had three children. Only one lived past childhood.
1890 aged ~29 Takes his doctorate at Johns Hopkins and joins the Wisconsin faculty The dissertation was on the Indian trade in Wisconsin.
July 12, 1893 aged 31 Reads the frontier paper to the American Historical Association in Chicago The meeting was held during the World's Columbian Exposition. The room reportedly barely responded.
1910 aged ~49 Leaves Wisconsin for Harvard and serves as president of the American Historical Association He was by then rated among the two or three most influential historians in the country.
1920 aged ~59 Publishes The Frontier in American History A collection of essays he had written over 25 years rather than a new book.
March 14, 1932 aged 70 Dies in Pasadena, California He had been a research associate at the Huntington Library since retiring from Harvard in 1922.
1933 aged ~72 The Significance of Sections in American History wins the Pulitzer Prize Awarded a year after his death.