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Frederick Jackson Turner

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• Wisconsin Life - Frederick Jackson Turner and the History of the American West
• Weber State University - Biography of Frederick Jackson Turner
• National Humanities Center - The Significance of the Frontier in American History 1893
• Frederick Jackson Turner - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)

Frederick Jackson Turner (born November 14, 1861, Portage , Wisconsin , U.S.—died March 14, 1932, San Marino , California) was an American historian best known for the “ frontier thesis.” The single most influential interpretation of the American past, it proposed that the distinctiveness of the United States was attributable to its long history of “westering.” Despite the fame of this monocausal interpretation, as the teacher and mentor of dozens of young historians, Turner insisted on a multicausal model of history , with a recognition of the interaction of politics, economics , culture , and geography. Turner’s penetrating analyses of American history and culture were powerfully influential and changed the direction of much American historical writing.

Born in frontier Wisconsin and educated at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Turner did graduate work at Johns Hopkins University under Herbert Baxter Adams . Awarded a doctorate in 1891, Turner was one of the first historians professionally trained in the United States rather than in Europe. He began his teaching career at the University of Wisconsin in 1889. He began to make his mark with his first professional paper, “ The Significance of History” (1891), which contains the famous line “Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time.” The controversial notion that there was no fixed historical truth, and that all historical interpretation should be shaped by present concerns, would become the hallmark of the so-called “New History,” a movement that called for studies illuminating the historical development of the political and cultural controversies of the day. Turner should be counted among the “progressive historians,” though, with the political temperament of a small-town Midwesterner, his progressivism was rather timid. Nevertheless, he made it clear that his historical writing was shaped by a contemporary agenda.

Turner first detailed his own interpretation of American history in his justly famous paper, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” delivered at a meeting of historians in Chicago in 1893 and published many times thereafter. Adams, his mentor at Johns Hopkins , had argued that all significant American institutions derived from German and English antecedents . Rebelling against this view, Turner argued instead that Europeans had been transformed by the process of settling the American continent and that what was unique about the United States was its frontier history . (Ironically, Turner passed up an opportunity to attend Buffalo Bill ’s Wild West show so that he could complete “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” on the morning that he presented it.) He traced the social evolution of frontier life as it continually developed across the continent from the primitive conditions experienced by the explorer, trapper, and trader, through maturing agricultural stages, finally reaching the complexity of city and factory. Turner held that the American character was decisively shaped by conditions on the frontier, in particular the abundance of free land, the settling of which engendered such traits as self-reliance, individualism , inventiveness, restless energy, mobility, materialism, and optimism. Turner’s “frontier thesis” rose to become the dominant interpretation of American history for the next half-century and longer. In the words of historian William Appleman Williams, it “rolled through the universities and into popular literature like a tidal wave.” While today’s professional historians tend to reject such sweeping theories, emphasizing instead a variety of factors in their interpretations of the past, Turner’s frontier thesis remains the most popular explanation of American development among the literate public.

For a scholar of such wide influence, Turner wrote relatively few books. His Rise of the New West, 1819–1829 (1906) was published as a volume in The American Nation series, which included contributions from the nation’s leading historians. The follow-up to that study, The United States, 1830–1850: The Nation and Its Sections (1935), would not be published until after his death. Turner may have had difficulty writing books, but he was a brilliant master of the historical essay. The winner of an oratorical medal as an undergraduate, he also was a gifted and active public speaker. His deep, melodious voice commanded attention whether he was addressing a teachers group, an audience of alumni, or a branch of the Chautauqua movement . His writing, too, bore the stamp of oratory; indeed, he reworked his lectures into articles that appeared in the nation’s most influential popular and scholarly journals.

Many of Turner’s best essays were collected in The Frontier in American History (1920) and The Significance of Sections in American History (1932), for which he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1933. In these writings Turner promoted new methods in historical research, including the techniques of the newly founded social sciences , and urged his colleagues to study new topics such as immigration , urbanization , economic development , and social and cultural history . He also commented directly on the connections he saw between the past and the present.

The end of the frontier era of continental expansion, Turner reasoned, had thrown the nation “back upon itself.” Writing that “imperious will and force” had to be replaced by social reorganization, he called for an expanded system of educational opportunity that would supplant the geographic mobility of the frontier. “The test tube and the microscope are needed rather than ax and rifle,” he wrote; “in place of old frontiers of wilderness, there are new frontiers of unwon fields of science.” Pioneer ideals were to be maintained by American universities through the training of new leaders who would strive “to reconcile popular government and culture with the huge industrial society of the modern world.”

Whereas in his 1893 essay he celebrated the pioneers for the spirit of individualism that spurred migration westward, 25 years later Turner castigated “these slashers of the forest, these self-sufficing pioneers, raising the corn and livestock for their own need, living scattered and apart.” For Turner the national problem was “no longer how to cut and burn away the vast screen of the dense and daunting forest” but “how to save and wisely use the remaining timber.” At the end of his career, he stressed the vital role that regionalism would play in counteracting the atomization brought about by the frontier experience. Turner hoped that stability would replace mobility as a defining factor in the development of American society and that communities would become stronger as a result. What the world needed now, he argued, was “a highly organized provincial life to serve as a check upon mob psychology on a national scale, and to furnish that variety which is essential to vital growth and originality.” Turner never ceased to treat history as contemporary knowledge, seeking to explore the ways that the nation might rechannel its expansionist impulses into the development of community life.

Turner taught at the University of Wisconsin until 1910, when he accepted an appointment to a distinguished chair of history at Harvard University . At these two institutions he helped build two of the great university history departments of the 20th century and trained many distinguished historians, including Carl Becker , Merle Curti, Herbert Bolton , and Frederick Merk, who became Turner’s successor at Harvard. He was an early leader of the American Historical Association , serving as its president in 1910 and on the editorial board of the association’s American Historical Review from 1910 to 1915. Poor health forced his early retirement from Harvard in 1924. Turner moved to the Huntington Library in San Marino, California , where he remained as senior research associate until his death.

How the Myth of the American Frontier Got Its Start

Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis informed decades of scholarship and culture. Then he realized he was wrong

Colin Woodard

On the evening of   July 12, 1893, in the hall of a massive new Beaux-Arts building that would soon house the Art Institute of Chicago, a young professor named Frederick Jackson Turner rose to present what would become the most influential essay in the study of U.S. history.

It was getting late. The lecture hall was stifling from a day of blazing sun, which had tormented the throngs visiting the nearby Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, a carnival of never-before-seen wonders, like a fully illuminated electric city and George Ferris’ 264-foot-tall rotating observation wheel. Many of the hundred or so historians attending the conference, a meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA), were dazed and dusty from an afternoon spent watching Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show at a stadium near the fairground’s gates. They had already sat through three other speeches. Some may have been dozing off as the thin, 31-year-old associate professor from the University of Wisconsin in nearby Madison began his remarks.

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Turner told them the force that had forged Americans into one people was the frontier of the Midwest and Far West. In this virgin world, settlers had finally been relieved of the European baggage of feudalism that their ancestors had brought across the Atlantic, freeing them to find their true selves: self-sufficient, pragmatic, egalitarian and civic-minded. “The frontier promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people,” he told the audience. “In the crucible of the frontier, the immigrants were Americanized, liberated and fused into a mixed race, English in neither nationality nor characteristics.”

The audience was unmoved.

In their dispatches the following morning, most of the newspaper reporters covering the conference didn’t even mention Turner’s talk. Nor did the official account of the proceedings prepared by the librarian William F. Poole for The Dial , an influential literary journal. Turner’s own father, writing to relatives a few days later, praised Turner’s skills as the family’s guide at the fair, but he said nothing at all about the speech that had brought them there.

Yet in less than a decade, Turner would be the most influential living historian in the United States, and his Frontier Thesis would become the dominant lens through which Americans understood their character, origins and destiny. Soon, Jackson’s theme was prevalent in political speech, in the way high schools taught history, in patriotic paintings—in short, everywhere. Perfectly timed to meet the needs of a country experiencing dramatic and destabilizing change, Turner’s thesis was swiftly embraced by academic and political institutions, just as railroads, manufacturing machines and telegraph systems were rapidly reshaping American life.

By that time, Turner himself had realized that his theory was almost entirely wrong.

American historians had long believed that Providence had chosen their people to spread Anglo-Saxon freedom across the continent. As an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, Turner was introduced to a different argument by his mentor, the classical scholar William Francis Allen. Extrapolating from Darwinism, Allen believed societies evolved like organisms, adapting themselves to the environments they encountered. Scientific laws, not divine will, he advised his mentee, guided the course of nations. After graduating, Turner pursued a doctorate at Johns Hopkins University, where he impressed the history program’s leader, Herbert Baxter Adams, and formed a lifelong friendship with one of his teachers, an ambitious young professor named Woodrow Wilson. The connections were useful: When Allen died in 1889, Adams and Wilson aided Turner in his quest to take Allen’s place as head of Wisconsin’s history department. And on the strength of Turner’s early work, Adams invited him to present a paper at the 1893 meeting of the AHA, to be held in conjunction with the World’s Congress Auxiliary of the World’s Columbian Exposition.

The resulting essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” offered a vivid evocation of life in the American West. Stripped of “the garments of civilization,” settlers between the 1780s and the 1830s found themselves “in the birch canoe” wearing “the hunting shirt and the moccasin.” Soon, they were “planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick” and even shouting war cries. Faced with Native American resistance—Turner largely overlooked what the ethnic cleansing campaign that created all that “free land” might say about the American character—the settlers looked to the federal government for protection from Native enemies and foreign empires, including during the War of 1812, thus fostering a loyalty to the nation rather than to their half-forgotten nations of origin.

He warned that with the disappearance of the force that had shaped them—in 1890, the head of the Census Bureau concluded there was no longer a frontier line between areas that had been settled by European Americans and those that had not—Americans would no longer be able to flee west for an easy escape from responsibility, failure or oppression. “Each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past,” Turner concluded. “Now … the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.”

When he left the podium on that sweltering night, he could not have known how fervently the nation would embrace his thesis.

Like so many young scholars, Turner worked hard to bring attention to his thesis. He incorporated it into the graduate seminars he taught, lectured about it across the Midwest and wrote the entry for “Frontier” in the widely read Johnson’s Universal Cyclopædia. He arranged to have the thesis reprinted in the journal of the Wisconsin Historical Society and in the AHA’s 1893 annual report. Wilson championed it in his own writings, and the essay was read by hundreds of schoolteachers who found it reprinted in the popular pedagogical journal of the Herbart Society, a group devoted to the scientific study of teaching. Turner’s big break came when the Atlantic Monthly ’s editors asked him to use his novel viewpoint to explain the sudden rise of populists in the rural Midwest, and how they had managed to seize control of the Democratic Party to make their candidate, William Jennings Bryan, its nominee for president. Turner’s 1896 Atlantic Monthly essay , which tied the populists’ agitation to the social pressures allegedly caused by the closing of the frontier—soil depletion, debt, rising land prices—was promptly picked up by newspapers and popular journals across the country.

Meanwhile, Turner’s graduate students became tenured professors and disseminated his ideas to the up-and-coming generation of academics. The thrust of the thesis appeared in political speeches, dime-store western novels and even the new popular medium of film, where it fueled the work of a young director named John Ford who would become the master of the Hollywood western. In 1911, Columbia University’s David Muzzey incorporated it into a textbook—initially titled History of the American People —that would be used by most of the nation’s secondary schools for half a century.

Americans embraced Turner’s argument because it provided a fresh and credible explanation for the nation’s exceptionalism—the notion that the U.S. follows a path soaring above those of other countries—one that relied not on earlier Calvinist notions of being “the elect,” but rather on the scientific (and fashionable) observations of Charles Darwin. In a rapidly diversifying country, the Frontier Thesis denied a special role to the Eastern colonies’ British heritage; we were instead a “composite nation,” birthed in the Mississippi watershed. Turner’s emphasis on mobility, progress and individualism echoed the values of the Gilded Age—when readers devoured Horatio Alger’s rags-to-riches stories—and lent them credibility for the generations to follow.

But as a researcher, Turner himself turned away from the Frontier Thesis in the years after the 1890s. He never wrote it down in book form or even in academic articles. He declined invitations to defend it, and before long he himself lost faith in it.

For one thing, he had been relying too narrowly on the experiences in his own region of the Upper Midwest, which had been colonized by a settlement stream originating in New England. In fact, he found, the values he had ascribed to the frontier’s environmental conditioning were actually those of this Greater New England settlement culture, one his family and most of his fellow citizens in Portage, Wisconsin, remained part of, with their commitment to strong village and town governments, taxpayer-financed public schools and the direct democracy of the town meeting. He saw that other parts of the frontier had been colonized by other settlement streams anchored in Scots-Irish Appalachia or in the slave plantations of the Southern lowlands, and he noted that their populations continued to behave completely differently from one another, both politically and culturally, even when they lived in similar physical environments. Somehow settlers moving west from these distinct regional cultures were resisting the Darwinian environmental and cultural forces that had supposedly forged, as Turner’s biographer, Ray Allen Billington, put it, “a new political species” of human, the American. Instead, they were stubbornly remaining themselves. “Men are not absolutely dictated to by climate, geography, soils or economic interests,” Turner wrote in 1922. “The influence of the stock from which they sprang, the inherited ideals, the spiritual factors, often triumph over the material interests.”

Turner spent the last decades of his life working on what he intended to be his magnum opus, a book not about American unity but rather about the abiding differences between its regions, or “sections,” as he called them. “In respect to problems of common action, we are like what a United States of Europe would be,” he wrote in 1922, at the age of 60. For example, the Scots-Irish and German small farmers and herders who settled the uplands of the southeastern states had long clashed with nearby English enslavers over education spending, tax policy and political representation. Turner saw the whole history of the country as a wrestling match between these smaller quasi-nations, albeit a largely peaceful one guided by rules, laws and shared American ideals: “When we think of the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, as steps in the marking off of spheres of influence and the assignment of mandates [between nations] … we see a resemblance to what has gone on in the Old World,” Turner explained. He hoped shared ideals—and federal institutions—would prove cohesive for a nation suddenly coming of age, its frontier closed, its people having to steward their lands rather than striking out for someplace new.

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Colin Woodard | | READ MORE

Colin Woodard is a journalist and historian, and the author of six books including Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood . He lives in Maine.

The American Yawp Reader

Frederick jackson turner, “significance of the frontier in american history” (1893).

Perhaps the most influential essay by an American historian, Frederick Jackson Turner’s address to the American Historical Association on “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” defined for many Americans the relationship between the frontier and American culture and contemplated what might follow “the closing of the frontier.”

In a recent bulletin of the Superintendent of the Census for 1890 appear these significant words: “Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports.” This brief official statement marks the closing of a great historic movement. Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.

Behind institutions, behind constitutional forms and modifications, lie the vital forces that call these organs into life and shape them to meet changing conditions. 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. Said Calhoun in 1817, “We are great, and rapidly—I was about to say fearfully—growing!” So saying, he touched the distinguishing feature of American life. All peoples show development; the germ theory of politics has been sufficiently emphasized. In the case of most nations, however, the development has occurred in a limited area; and if the nation has expanded, it has met other growing peoples whom it has conquered. But in the case of the United States we have a different phenomenon. Limiting our attention to the Atlantic coast, we have the familiar phenomenon of the evolution of institutions in a limited area, such as the rise of representative government; the differentiation of simple colonial governments into complex organs; the progress from primitive industrial society, without division of labor, up to manufacturing civilization. But we have in addition to this a recurrence of the process of evolution in each western area reached in the process of expansion. Thus American development has exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area. American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character. The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is the Great West. …

In this advance, the frontier is the outer edge of the wave—the meeting point between savagery and civilization. Much has been written about the frontier from the point of view of border warfare and the chase, but as a field for the serious study of the economist and the historian it has been neglected.

From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of profound importance. The works of travelers along each frontier from colonial days onward describe certain common traits, and these traits have, while softening down, still persisted as survivals in the place of their origin, even when a higher social organization succeeded. The result is that to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom—these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier. Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them. He would be a rash prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life has now entirely ceased. Movement has been its dominant fact, and, unless this training has no effect upon a people, the American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise. But never again will such gifts of free land offer themselves. For a moment, at the frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant. There is not  tabula rasa . The stubborn American environment is there with its imperious summons to accept its conditions; the inherited ways of doing things are also there; and yet, in spite of environment, and in spite of custom, each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifference to its lessons, have accompanied the frontier. What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the nations of Europe more remotely. And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.

Source: Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History, 1919.

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13 The Significance of the Frontier in the Middle Ages

• Published: May 1992
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The frontier is a heroic place to take one's stand. On the other hand, the frontier in history, and its image in letters and film, is a concept umbilically attached to Frederick Jackson Turner, a historian half a century dead, whose theories have been savaged and repudiated. It is common to find Turner absurd, and by extension any multiplication of frontiers wherever descried. In order to approach the significance of the frontier, then, one must first come to terms with the notion of frontier itself. This means confronting Turner and his Thesis. Turner has become a kind of vampire, killed on many a day with a stake through his Thesis, yet ever undead and stalking abroad. His paradigm for the history of the American West has currently transmogrified into separate varieties of neo-Turnerism. The chapter further discusses Robert Porter, Turnerianism, and Turner's Frontier Thesis.

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Jessica M. DeWitt: Editing and Consulting

Comps Notes: Frederick Jackson Turner’s “The Significance of the Frontier in American History”

I decided to publish my write-ups from my comprehensive exam reading fields. I am publishing them *as is.* Thus they represent my thoughts as a new PhD student. They were written between September 2011 and July 2012.  The full collection is accessible  here . 

“The Significance of the Frontier in American History”

Frederick jackson turner.

The dominant theme in Turner’s thesis is that of social evolution. Turner believes that civilization has an orderly evolutionary cycle that starts in the savage state, moves to pastoralism, and ends with cities and industry. Europeans had long been trapped in the suffocating confines of the final stage, which had caused corruption and staleness both in Europe and in the eastern United States, where European traditions had continued to reign. However, the availability of free, undeveloped land in the West had enabled Americans to go through a kind of rebirthing process. Individualism was king on the frontier. Men were able to start anew, almost at the savage stage, but what separated these men from the Native Americans was that they brought the best of the European practices with them. Those European characteristics and institutions that were sullied were quickly rooted out for they had no place on the even playing field of the West, which enabled pure, unadulterated democracy to blossom into fruition.

Wilderness to Turner is an entity that is commendable only in its role in furthering man’s development. Wilderness is swell, but it is even better during and after the conquering process. It is the challenges that wilderness throws the frontiersman’s way that allow the frontiersmen to shed the over embellished skin of European civilization, and to step forward a new, improved, self-reliant, and rugged individual ready to turn the western wilderness into an superior Mecca of democracy. Despite the wilderness’s key role in this process, man’s duty, according to Turner, is still to subdue and improve wilderness with the onslaught of culture and society. Until 1890, there was always more wilderness available beyond the frontier line in which for further generations to undergo the rebirthing process and to ensure that the United States did not begin to brew in the morose of decayed civilization, a predicament that had despoiled the nations of Europe.

Important to the environmental historian is Turner’s idea of geographic sectionalism that he only slightly introduces in “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” but goes into more depth about in his later writings. Turner believes that state lines are artificial constructs, and that regions are really divided by natural boundary lines, such as mountains. This sectionalism had a great deal of influence on the development of the frontier. Turner’s assertion is significant because he is rather ahead of his time in acknowledging the fact that different environmental conditions led to diverse experiences amongst different groups of pioneers. The particular environmental situation to which these individuals were subjected directly affected their economic and social development.

Turner’s thesis has many holes in it. Firstly, his rendition of the western story revolves solely around white, anglo men. Women and minorities are not a part of his pretty picture. Secondly, his story only accounts for those that chose an agrarian occupation, ignoring other industries such as mining. Thirdly, he ignores the fact that Eastern corporations, particularly railroad companies, had a large hand in making the western expansion process possible. However, despite these shortcomings the Frontier thesis and its message provided the United States with an origin myth that they could cling to in an uneasy time during which countries were feverishly clawing for any piece of exceptionality that would provide them with a superior sense of nationalism. According to Henry Nash Smith, despite the fact that Turner’s thesis confounds common sense and is full of contradictions and falsities, the powerful impact that it had on the American imagination and collective identity gives it intellectual credence. Of course it was not viewed as myth by individuals at the time, and is still pulsing through the American conscious, though weakened, today. Aside from allowing for the birth of American exceptionalism, Turner’s theory also heavily influenced the historical profession, and was considered  the  account of Western History for many generations. Historians are still working under its shadow, even though many have been fighting for decades to dissolve its potency.

Feature Photo :

• Title: The silenced warwhoop / Chas. Schreyvogel.
• Creator(s):  Schreyvogel, Charles, 1861-1912 , artist
• Date Created/Published: [United States], [1908]
• Medium: 1 photograph : gelatin silver print ; sheet 36 x 51 cm.
• Summary: Photograph shows reproduction of painting with Indians fighting U.S. Cavalry.
• Reproduction Number: LC-DIG-ds-05465 (digital file from original item) LC-USZ62-4347 (b&w film copy neg.) LC-USZ62-814 (b&w film copy neg. from reproduction in book)
• Rights Advisory: No known restrictions on publication.
• Call Number: LOT 4655 [item] [P&P]
• Repository: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print

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Published by jessica m. dewitt.

Dr. Jessica M. DeWitt is an environmental historian of Canada and the United States. She is passionate about the use of digital technologies to bridge the gap between the public and researchers. In addition to her community and professional work, she offers various editing and social media consultancy services. View more posts

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The Concept of the Frontier: Its Linguistic and Cultural Significance in American English

Bulletin of the Moscow State Regional University (Linguistics)

Related Papers

John Tirman

Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica, 4, 1 (2012) 149-156

Tamas Vrauko

In my paper the American frontier is described as a moving zone, a social, historical and economic as well as geographical phenomenon. The frontier experience determines American art, literature and social thinking to a large extent even today. The paper deals with the frontier as a moving space in historiography and literature. The essay consists of three parts. In the first part the concept of the frontier as a moving space is outlined. In the second part the relevant works of some American historians are-very briefly-analysed, from the aspect of the frontier as migrating space. The third part deals with a selection of literary works-novels and short stories-that show how the frontier is described by prominent and well-known American prose writers.

Titien Diah Soelistyarini

Tracy L. Brown

Thurlene Anderson

Explore popular American identity and frontier theories hold up to the autobiography of a circuit rider and confederate soldier's mid-1800s adventures in the sparsely settled central and northwest regions of Texas.

A CONTEMPORARY REVIEW ON SENSE OF PLACE AND BORDER IN NINETEENTH CENTURY NARRATIVES OF AMERICAN EXPANSIONISM

YONCA DENIZARSLANI

Since its discovery, the New World has had a lasting impact on Western mind. While the geographical explorations of fifteenth century were progressing as an outcome of economic and political competition in Western Europe, transatlantic voyages transformed the feudal darkness of the Middle Ages and the concept of borderline. Beginning with the thirteen colonies in the Eastern sea board of North America, the Anglo Saxon dominance started its course of expansionism with the foundation of the United States of America. In this era, frontiersmen's diaries, pamphlets, works of literature, political articles and various other cultural products of folk and high art were highlighting American patriotism, which gained momentum within Westward expansion. This study aims to review the sense of place and border in nineteenth century narratives of American expansionism and trace back the historical imprints of today's American notion of frontier with reference to John O

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Ukraine's push into the Kursk region exposed Russia's vulnerabilities. Here's what to know.

Updated on: August 16, 2024 / 7:20 AM EDT / CBS/AP

A daring Ukrainian military push into Russia's Kursk region has seen Kyiv's forces seize scores of villages, take hundreds of prisoners and force the evacuation of tens of thousands of civilians in what has become the largest incursion into Russia since World War II.

In more than a week of fighting , Russian troops are still struggling to drive out the invaders.

Why did the Russian military seem to be caught so unprepared?

Russia's regions of Kursk, Bryansk and Belgorod share a 720-mile border with Ukraine. That includes a 152-mile section in the Kursk region. This frontier had only symbolic protection before Moscow invaded Ukraine in 2022. It's been reinforced since then with checkpoints on key roads and field fortifications in places, but building solid defenses has remained a daunting task.

The most capable Russian units are fighting in eastern Ukraine, where they have been pressing offensives in several sectors, with incremental but steady gains. Moscow has used the regions to launch airstrikes and missile attacks on Ukrainian territory but doesn't have enough land forces there.

Because of the porous border and manpower shortages, there have been earlier forays into the Belgorod and Bryansk by shadowy groups of pro-Kyiv commandos fighting alongside Ukrainian forces before they pulled back.

Russia's drones, surveillance equipment and intelligence assets are focused in eastern Ukraine, helping Kyiv to covertly pull its troops to the border under the cover of deep forests.

Retired Gen. Andrei Gurulev, a member of the lower house of Russia's parliament, criticized the military for failing to protect the border.

"Regrettably, the group of forces protecting the border didn't have its own intelligence assets," he said on a channel of his messaging app. "No one likes to see the truth in reports, everybody just wants to hear that all is good."

Ukrainian troops participating in the incursion reportedly were told their mission only a day before it began. That secrecy contrasted sharply with last year's counteroffensive, when Kyiv openly declared its main goal of cutting the land corridor to Crimea, which President Vladimir Putin illegally annexed in 2014. That military action failed as Ukrainian troops trudged through Russian minefields and were pummeled by artillery and drones.

Ukrainian troops faced no such obstacles entering the Kursk region.

Battle-hardened mechanized units easily overwhelmed lightly armed Russian border guards and small infantry units consisting of inexperienced conscripts. Hundreds were taken prisoner, Ukrainian officials said. The Ukrainians drove deep into the region in several directions, facing little resistance and sowing chaos and panic.

The operation resembled Ukraine's September 2022 counteroffensive in which its forces reclaimed control of the northeastern Kharkiv region after taking advantage of Russian manpower shortages and a lack of field fortifications.

Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, who led the Kharkiv operation two years ago, is now Ukraine's top military officer. Russian forces in Kursk answer to Gen. Alexander Lapin, who commanded Moscow's forces in Kharkiv in 2022 and was criticized for that debacle. But his ties to the chief of the General Staff, Gen. Valery Gerasimov, reportedly helped him survive and even get a promotion.

Syrskyi claims Ukrainian forces advanced across 390 square miles of the Kursk region, although it's not possible to independently verify what exactly Ukrainian forces effectively control.

"Thus far, the Russians have demonstrated tactical and operational shock, which has led to a slow tactical response and has allowed the Ukrainians to continue exploiting their breakthrough of the Russian defensive lines," said retired Australian Maj. Gen. Mick Ryan in an analysis.

The Russian military command initially relied on warplanes and helicopters to try to stop the onslaught. At least one Russian helicopter gunship was shot down and another was damaged.

At the same time, Moscow began pulling in reinforcements, which managed to slow Ukraine's advances but failed to completely block Ukrainian maneuvering through vast forests.

"Russia seems to do quite poorly when it has to respond dynamically in a situation like this," said military analyst Michael Kofman of the Carnegie Endowment in a podcast. "Russian forces do far better when they're operating with prepared defense, fixed lines, more on positional warfare."

Kofman noted the Russian reserves arriving in the Kursk area seemed to lack combat experience and had trouble coordinating with each other.

In one instance, a military convoy carelessly parked on the roadside near the fighting area shortly after the incursion began, and it was quickly hit by Ukrainian rockets.

"That's the kind of mistake the Russian forces along the line of control typically don't make," Kofman noted.

What are the risks for Ukraine of its incursion into Russia?

Kyiv remains tight-lipped about whether it intends to seek a foothold in the Kursk region or pull back into Ukrainian territory. The first option is risky because supply lines extending deep into the region would be vulnerable to Russian strikes, analysts say.

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Ryan, the retired Australian general, warned that "losing a large number of forces in this scenario also makes it a strategic and political liability."

That would "squander the very positive strategic messaging that has been generated by the Ukrainian surprise attack into Russia," he said. Ukrainian forces could try to retreat to a more defensible area near the border or fully pull back to Ukraine, he said.

The incursion already has boosted Ukraine's morale and proven its ability to seize initiative and take the war to Russian soil. Kyiv hasn't explained what the goal of the incursion is, but Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he's considering setting up military offices in the Kursk region to help coordinate military and humanitarian efforts there.

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What other developments are there in the war?

Ukraine ordered the evacuation of the Dontesk Oblast city of Pokrovsk on Friday, with the head of the city's military administration saying that Russian troops were "rapidly approaching" the city's outskirts and urging residents not to delay, according to CBS News partner network BBC News.

The Reuters news agency reported that three civilians were killed and five were injured in the Donetsk region in the last 24 hours.

Zelenskyy said on social media on Thursday that Ukraine's key frontline defensive considerations were "Toretsk, Pokrovsk, and others. These areas are currently facing the most intense Russian assaults and are receiving our utmost defensive attention," Zelenskyy said. "Priority supplies-everything that is needed-are being sent there."

Haley Ott contributed to this report.

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