Turner`s Frontier

Frederick Jackson Turner 's `Frontier

The Frontier ' is a Turner wrote is the outer wave of expansion the meeting point

between savagery and civilization " When people left settled territory when people went into

often unexplored areas , the weight of society bore less heavily upon them . They went into areas

where they had no settled established governments , no institutions like churches , courts of law

and the like . People , in a sense , left civilization behind . They had to find new ways of adjusting

new ways of peaceful coexistence at this "meeting

point between savage and civilization

This is the historical thinking popularized by Frederick Jackson Turner which laid the

foundation of modern American study of American West . According to him The existence of

an area of free land , its continuous recession , and the advance of American settlement westward

explain American development ' He thought largely that the frontier experience had a lasting

and permanent impact on American character and society

When American pioneers escaped and left behind the settled institutions of society , a

plunging into the forests , or later into the grasslands of the Great Plains , Turner thought this

promoted productive individualism . When people entered areas without established social

structures , each person was pretty much on a basis of equality with each other person . On this

kind of set up people learn to develop civil and democratic ways of social cooperation . They

have to learn how to peacefully co-exist amongst each other . This made Turner generalize that

democracy sprang from this - free land , and of free , self-reliant individuals moving out on to

lands unknown learning the tricks and trade of how to get along with one another

So is this what Turner really meant by the word "frontier ? If you just take a

first glance , he seemed to be spousing a kind of geographical determinism , an idea or a notion

that "free land bred free individuals that the geography itself and the way in which people

reacted to that geography produced democratic equality and a democratic form of government

Settlers in a new geographical terrain learned to innovate and find ways . Where there were not

adequate lakes or rivers , they dug wells . Where the grass land plains did not allow for settled

farming , they invented barbed wire to hedge in cattle , to hedge in sheep . These and other various

learning experiences seem to be the result of human beings acting as innovators in response to

geography . The land itself , Turner seemed to say , made human beings more self-reliant . And

self-reliance is at the core of the American democratic experience , or so we have long told

ourselves

But as I see it , geography might have something to do with it but not solely . The

development of democracy and civilization is a far more a complicated process . I would say

much of it would be social development itself . Turner might be right in identifying a certain

event in history at a specific location crucial social development occurred which propels modern

civilization to where it is...