Standard: C7, PO2: Emergence of Modern America (Immigration, Exclusion, Urbanization, Reform, Media)
Objective: I can read a variety of sources for information so that I can explain the social developments that influenced American society in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Big Idea: Power EQ: How do nations use and abuse power?
Directions:
1) Read the background text on Mahan and the summary of his famous writing “The Influence of Sea Power upon History”. Complete the questions and the accompanying graphic organizers.
2) Read Turner’s background, a selection from Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis “The Significance of the Frontier in American History”, and the selection from “Critiquing Turner’s Thesis”. Complete the questions and the accompanying graphic organizers.
3) When you have finished reading the selections, create a cause and effect chart of your choice that explains why America went from begin an isolationist to an imperialist country.
RUBRIC: (Also use this as a checklist) This assignment will be graded as a summative assessment.
____ 100- Followed all directions, AND correctly answered all questions, AND on task 100% of the time, AND worked cooperatively. Student shows complete and thorough understanding of the topic. Can complete the task 100% without struggling.
____ 90- Followed all directions, AND correctly answered 90% of questions, AND on task 100% of the time, AND worked cooperatively. Student shows a strong understanding of the topic. Can complete most of the task without struggling.
____ 80- Followed all directions, AND correctly answered 80% of questions, AND on task most of the time (redirected once), AND worked cooperatively. Student shows a basic understanding of the topic, not completely strong. Cannot complete the task without a moderate amount of struggling.
____ 70- Followed all directions, AND correctly answered 70% of questions, AND on task most of the time (redirected twice), AND worked cooperatively. Student shows a slight understanding of the topic, only a mild grasp of the task. Cannot complete most of the task without struggling.
____ 40- Illustrates less than the requirements for a “7”. Has no apparent understanding of the topic or task. Cannot complete the task without struggling.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932)
BACKGROUND: Turner was born in Portage, Wisconsin, in 1861. His father, a journalist by trade and local historian by avocation, piqued Turner's interest in history. After his graduation from the University of Wisconsin in 1884, Turner decided to become a professional historian, and received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1890. He served as a teacher and scholar at the University of Wisconsin from 1889 to 1910, when he joined Harvard's faculty. He retired in 1924 but continued his research until his death in 1932.
Turner's contribution to American history was to argue that the frontier past best explained the distinctive history of the United States. He most cogently articulated this idea in "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," which he first delivered to a gathering of historians in 1893 at Chicago, then the site of the World's Columbian Exposition, an enormous fair to mark the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus' voyage. Although almost totally ignored at the time, Turner's lecture eventually gained such wide distribution and influence that a contemporary scholar has called it "the single most influential piece of writing in the history of American history."
Three years before Turner's pronouncement of the frontier thesis, the U.S. Census Bureau had announced the disappearance of a contiguous frontier line. Turner took this "closing of the frontier" as an opportunity to reflect upon the influence it had exercised. He argued that the frontier had meant that every American generation returned "to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line." Along this frontier -- which he also described as "the meeting point between savagery and civilization" -- Americans again and again recapitulated the developmental stages of the emerging industrial order of the 1890's. This development, in Turner's description of the frontier, "begins with the Indian and the hunter; it goes on with the disintegration of savagery by the entrance of the trader... the pastoral stage in ranch life; the exploitation of the soil by the raising of unrotated crops of corn and wheat in sparsely settled farm communities; the intensive culture of the denser farm settlement; and finally the manufacturing organization with the city and the factory system."
For Turner, the deeper significance of the frontier lay in the effects of this social recapitulation on the American character. "The frontier," he claimed, "is the line of most rapid Americanization." The presence and predominance of numerous cultural traits -- "that coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and acquisitiveness; that practical inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things... that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism" -- could all be attributed to the influence of the frontier.
Turner's essay reached triumphalist heights in his belief that the promotion of individualistic democracy was the most important effect of the frontier. Individuals, forced to rely on their own wits and strength, he believed, were simply too scornful of rank to be amenable to the exercise of centralized political power.
Turner offered his frontier thesis as both an analysis of the past and a warning about the future. If the frontier had been so essential to the development of American culture and democracy, then what would befall them as the frontier closed? It was on this forboding note that he closed his address: "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."
More than a century after he first delivered his frontier thesis, historians still hotly debate Turner's ideas and approach. His critics have denied everything from his basic assumptions to the small details of his argument. The mainstream of the profession has long since discarded Turner's assumption that the frontier is the key to American history as a whole; they point instead to the critical influence of such factors as slavery and the Civil War, immigration, and the development of industrial capitalism. But even within Western and frontier history, a growing body of historians has contested Turner's approach.
Some have long disputed the very idea of a frontier of "free land." Turner's formulation ignored the presence of the numerous Indian peoples whose subjugation was required by the nation's westward march, and assumed that the bulk of newly acquired lands were actually democratically distributed to yeomen pioneers. The numerous Indian wars provoked by American expansion belie Turner's argument that the American "free land" frontier was a sharp contrast with European nations' borders with other states.
On a more analytic level, an increasing number of Western historians have found the very concept of a frontier dubious, because it applies to too many disparate places and times to be useful. How much do Puritan New England and the California of the transcontinental railroad really have in common? Many such critics have sought to replace the idea of a moving frontier with the idea of the West as a distinctive region, much like the American South.
Where Turner told the triumphalist story of the frontier's promotion of a distinctly American democracy, many of his critics have argued that precisely the opposite was the case. Cooperation and communities of various sorts, not isolated individuals, made possible the absorption of the West into the United States. Most migrant wagon trains, for example, were composed of extended kinship networks. Moreover, as the 19th century wore on, the role of the federal government and large corporations grew increasingly important. Corporate investors headquartered in New York laid the railroads; government troops defeated Indian nations who refused to get out of the way of manifest destiny; even the cowboys, enshrined in popular mythology as rugged loners, were generally low-level employees of sometimes foreign-owned cattle corporations.
Moreover, these revisionist scholars argue, for many places the West has not been the land of freedom and opportunity that both Turnerian history and popular mythology would have us believe. For many women, Asians, Mexicans who suddenly found themselves residents of the United States, and, of course, Indians, the West was no promised land.
The more foreboding and cautionary tale which increasing numbers of Western historians have offered in place of Turner's account has provoked sharp controversy. "New" Western historians -- many of whom actually echo and draw upon fairly old scholarly works -- often argue that their accounts offer a more inclusive and honest reckoning of the Western past. Western historians who still adhere roughly to Turner's approach accuse their opponents of mistaking a simple-minded political correctness for good scholarship in their quest to recount only the doom and gloom of the Western past. Often the rhetoric reaches an acrimonious crescendo. But in a sense, the very acrimony of these debates takes us full circle back to Turner and his legacy, for debates about the significance of Western history are hardly ever confined to the past. In our understanding of what we are as a nation, if on no other level, the Western past continues to define us today.
Question to address before moving forward: Who was Turner and why should we care about his writings?
Summary: Turner’s Frontier Thesis
In 1893 Frederick Jackson Turner presented a paper at the Chicago World's Fair entitled 'The Significance of the Frontier in American History." The Frontier (Turner) Thesis dramatically altered the course of historical inquiry by rejecting the accepted method of understanding American history. Prior to the Turner Thesis, historians believed the American experience could best be understood by studying the alteration of European "germs" in the American environment. That is, American history was viewed as a reaction to what was going on in Europe rather than anything new or different. Turner suggested that the proper way to understand U.S. history was by studying the impact of the frontier on American institutions. In his own words
“The existence of an area of free land, its continual recession, and the advance of American
settlement westward, explain American development."
Turner defined the frontier as "the meeting point between savagery and civilization" as opposed to the European concept of the frontier being the established fortified boundaries between developed states. This meant that the American frontier advanced along a single discernible line and that American institutions underwent a constant rebirth by being continuously thrown back into a primitive state. In Turner's words
“This perennial rebirth, this fluidity in American life, this expansion westward with its new
opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces
dominating American character."
Turner saw the frontier experience as the primary reason that Americans were individualistic, materialistic, ingenious, and democratic. On the frontier new immigrants discarded their old ways and emerged as "Americans", a unique, new, improved breed of man. Because of the lure of the frontier, Turner believed that Eastern institutions were altered to become more democratic to prevent loss of population to the west. He saw the frontier process as one of evolutionary development repeated again and again on each successive frontier. The hunter was followed by the trapper and miner, who in turn was replaced by the pioneer farmer, who in turn gave way to the specialized farmer, who in turn yielded to the town or city dweller.
Turner and/or his followers saw the frontier as having at least six "noteworthy effects" on American history. First, the frontier served as a melting pot, breaking down the unique cultural differences of early immigrants and creating a composite nationality of the American people. Second, the frontier experience decreased our dependence on England, ultimately fostering a manufacturing economy as it became impractical to transport English goods deep into the interior. Third, the frontier conditioned the type of legislation enacted by the national government, creating a need for internal improvements and a protective tariff to bring "the factory to the farm." This necessitated a loose interpretation of the Constitution to respond to the unforeseen needs of the frontier. Fourth, the demand for cheap land led to the dominance of the national government over the states by requiring the survey and distribution of land and by the admitting of new states as civilization conquered savagery. Fifth, the frontier promoted democracy because the relative equality of the settlers there led to the establishment of more innovative and democratic institutions which eventually worked their way back east. Finally, the frontier served as a "safety valve," siphoning off discontent in the east and giving the disadvantaged the optimistic hope of bettering their lot. This created a more stable society by eliminating the need for the development of radical political doctrine in eastern urban centers.
STATE THE MAIN IDEAS
Directions: After reading Turner’s summary, complete the organizer below to find the main ideas and supporting details.
Next, read the following critique on Turner’s Frontier Thesis. Be sure to note points you think are valid and/or invalid. Use different color ink to distinguish between what you think is valid and invalid (Ex: underline with blue if you agree, and red if you disagree).
Critiquing Turner’s Thesis
Undoubtedly, the frontier thesis broadened the view of American historians and provided a new and insightful way of viewing U.S. history. The first generation of historians who followed Turner seemed to jump on the bandwagon and work to support the thesis. Gradually, critics began to emerge. In general, critics argued that Turner's thesis was at best over simplistic and at worst factually flawed. Robert Riegel, reflective of the early critics, viewed the Turner thesis as a valuable additional way of looking at American history from a different point of view, but not the only, or necessarily, correct way. Riegel criticized the frontier on several fronts.
First, he contended that there were significant exceptions to the pattern of development that Turner suggested. Riegel contended that Turner failed to emphasize the importance of the land speculator who was present on every frontier. The speculator did not intend to settle on the land but was intent on profiting from it, thus increasing the cost of the land to real settlers. Most of the land purchased by settlers was purchased from railroads or speculators rather than under provisions of the Homestead Act. Billington contends that for every newcomer who homesteaded, six purchased land from speculators.