[For this year’s post-Valentine’s non-favorites series, I wanted to follow up last week’s on scholarly books I’ve loved with a handful of scholarly ideas I don’t. Leading up to a perennial favorite crowd-sourced post, a collective airing of grievances of all types!]
On two interconnected issues with Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous thesis.
First things first: there are two important things about “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893) that I am a fan of. I really love the thought that at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, one of the most sizeable and influential communal events in American history, the members of the recently founded American Historical Association (AHA) gathered, making sure that the nascent academic study of history would be part of this historic event. And I also greatly appreciate the fact that a paper delivered at that academic/scholarly gathering became and remains prominent enough to occupy a space in our collective memories more than 130 years later (when I mentioned Turner’s thesis to my Honors Lit Seminar in the Fall as part of a unit on the Gilded Age West, most of the students had heard of it). Even though I’m not a fan of specific aspects of Turner’s paper and thesis, may such prominence be afforded our public scholarly voices and ideas far more regularly!
The main aspect of Turner’s thesis of which I’m not a fan is by now pretty well-known (at least in scholarly circles), but still demands acknowledgment and engagement. Turner’s focus was overwhelmingly on European/white Americans, and thus his vision of the frontier was as a space to which those white settlers had migrated from the East across the century or so prior to his 1893 address. More or less the entire focus of that aforementioned unit in my Honors Lit Seminar was intended as a direct challenge to that vision, as a reminder that the 19th-century West was if anything the most multicultural, multiethnic, multilingual, multi-everything space in all of the U.S.; and more exactly that as those settlers (who themselves were far more diverse than Turner credits) migrated to the West, they encountered all those already-present communities and cultures. I know that it too is now a somewhat dated scholarly idea, but I remain convinced that Patricia Nelson Limerick’s concept of “contact zones” offers a far more accurate and more productive way to analyze the West, the “frontier,” and for that matter most of the United States across our history.
My other main issue with Turner’s thesis might seem distinct from that first one, but I don’t believe it ultimately is. Turner’s second argument (after the titular “significance” of that white-centric frontier) was that the frontier was by the 1890s “closed,” which meant in his view that Americans would need another sphere in which to experience and express the qualities he was praising. Not at all coincidentally, the 1890s were the first period in which America’s imperial expansion around the globe became a prominent goal for the federal government; I’m not suggesting that Turner’s thesis was the only influence on that trend, but I do think it contributed a rationale at least for seeking new “frontiers” to conquer. And I believe that Turner’s white-centered vision of the Western frontier likewise translated directly and frustratingly to the ways that American narratives of imperial expansion explicitly defined the U.S. as a white nation in contrast to the non-white communities and cultures found in these new global “frontiers.” Whether Turner saw any of that coming or not, it’s a follow-up to his thesis, and one I’m definitely not a fan of.
Next non-favorite idea tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Scholarly ideas you’re not a fan of? Other things that gripe your cookies? Share for the weekend post!
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