Turner's Frontier Thesis

Turner’s frontier offered an unshakeable ethnocentric and nationalistic view of western

history. This is where New Social historians saw an opportunity to fashion a new, more diverse,

more conclusive version of westward expansion. Turner’s key ideas of “The American West”

and the “frontier” were transformed by a new generation of historians looking to challenge the

status quo. One of the most technical problems concerning Turner’s methods was the fact that in

studying the frontier, one is studying a time that had a definite end, with no manner of

connecting such ideas to contemporary themes.

Equally problematic, Turner fashioned his Frontier thesis into a mythologized image of

the west. “The agrarian myth” as it would come to

Furthermore, scholars like Earl Pomeroy and Gerald Nash consider the end of the American west

to be far past the year 1890, taking the era into the twentieth century.

Anne Hyde’s Empires, Nations and Families: A History of the North American West,

1800-1860, proposes there are many stories of the American West. First she supposes “it could

be a mythic place where people tested and remade themselves into powerful individuals

independent of social pressures.” She also suggests “the west as a Colossus bashing where great empires and great fighters fought over great resources in which the winner took all,

leaving trails of post-Conquest wreckage everywhere. Her third supposition is that the west was

a “blank slate whose geographical features became imaginary at the Mississippi River.

Scholarship of the New American West examines the accuracy of each of these, and attempts to

prove why more traditional ideas are dated and irrelevant.

Geographically William Davis considered the physical definition to also be fluid. With

each westward step that Europeans took, the smaller the American west became

The

idea of a western fantasy land is first realized by the expeditions of Christopher Columbus

landing in the western isles. Like in any circumstance, myth is an inflated version of the truth. A

little embellishment here and there from a broader perspective, is a gross exaggeration.

One of the most significant themes in the New American West is conquest. Almost

exclusively, the white Anglo-Saxons were the conquerors, and everybody else is the conquered.

Patricia Limerick Nelson a preeminent historian of the New American West, argues that western

history “has been an ongoing competition for legitimacy—for the right to claim oneself and

sometimes for one’s group the status of legitimate beneficiary of Western resources.” As many other New Western historians argue, She further notes “the intersection of ethnic diversity with

property allocation unifies Western history.”

Conquest further involved a struggle over languages, cultures and religions. Patricia

Limerick Nelson and Richard White concur that the American West was a product of conquest.

The conquest therein was spurred on by such a diverse population. Nelson takes it further