Frederick Jackson Turner's Famous Text Thesis

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But he asserts that their cultural connections were far more tenuous with the East and with Europe, in contrast to costal states. Especially early on, the Western lands were poorly administered, based in the "common law" of the settlers, in the words of Henry Clay, rather than upon a model strict European administration. Turner calls the states of the frontier and the populist movements of the frontier almost primitive in their orientation and disdain of government.

For Turner, the geographical centers of the U.S. have distinct personalities almost function like emotional forces of nature. The East is depicting as fearing and mourning the expansion of the West, and feebly resisting its unregulated sprawl. This echoes modern cultural vocabulary in discussing the divides of Blue vs. Red, which often breaks down into West vs. East, or coast vs. heartland. Turner's West is characterized by mechanical facility, a disdain for intellectualism, an embrace of opportunity, a love of material goods like land, a hatred of custom, and confidence born of a proud unawareness of the past, what Turner calls "scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifference to its lessons."

Turner's history is thus a literary and cultural polemic, not a text that focuses on specific case studies of American Western history.

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He attempts a philosophical broad-brushing of American ideas, referring in general terms to certain epochs and movements, like the West vs. East. But there is a resonance in his thesis, even though its imagery cannot be said to function as a strictly factual portrait of history. And even as a cultural portrait, his concept that "frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history," seem unsound, given its echoes in modern cultural discourse. We have ended the physical frontier's sprawl, but we still internalize the divide culturally, in modern debates about gun control, for example, the West's hatred of European models of social democracy, and the idea that patriotism is synonymous with embracing the policies of the American government. 'Freedom Fries,' 'my country do or die' -- the popularity of these cultural catchphrases suggests that the Western frontier lives on in words and in the American mind. Turner's thesis in his book is not 'proved' in conventional historical methodology, and certainly would not convince someone who disagrees with him, but his ideas are throughout provoking on a conceptual level.

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