Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis

Frederick Jackson Turner released his “frontier thesis” in 1893, he concluded that the frontier was key to forming the sense of an American identity. Turner stated that the frontier provided land, which would become a “safety valve” for the impoverished should they revolt. In other words, with the nation reeling from reconstruction and turning right into the gilded age, the poor were very unhappy and perhaps the land there could be used as a way to get rid of them. Jackson's "frontier-thesis" could be challenged by saying that the frontier didn't shape the American identity. Other cultures helped to form the American identity in ways such as Native Americans helping the first settlers to survive, slaves during the pre-civil war era servicing

The issue of slavery would eventually form into a war on state’s rights and morals. For the time period, the civil war can be considered one of the deadliest American wars. The civil war was comprised of Americans on both the union (anti-slavery and anti-secession) and the confederate side (pro-slavery and pro-secession). The sectional divide over pushing slavery into new territories and over the economy formed by slavery would stay with America centuries after the war.

Following the war was the reconstruction era, which ended in defeat on the Confederate Side, came the freeing of slaves. Many would stay in the south and work as freedmen, go to factories in the north or try their hand at taming the frontier as an exoduster. While slavery was an extremely profitable business in the south, the following century would prove to turn the tables of history. In the 1960s came the Civil Rights Movement, which was headed by Martin Luther King Jr. This revolution came to provide more jobs and opportunities for blacks than ever before, as even after freedom there was not truly equality between the races. In the south there was major segregation and the Plessy vs. Ferguson case only helped to legalize the Jim Crow Laws even