1893: Turner’s Thesis

Historian Frederick Jackson Turner believed that the strength and the vitality of the America identity lay in its land and vast frontier.

In 1893, Turner spoke at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, where millions of Americans had flocked to Chicago for this 1893 multi-month event to experience displays of new technologies, new products, and new tastes. In the pavilions and halls of the Exposition, the electric light bulb, the moveable sidewalk, the Ferris wheel, diet carbonated soda, and Cream of Wheat were a few of the many exciting things unveiled.

Amidst the excitement, Frederick Jackson Turner offered his listeners at a American historians seminar, a new idea. His thesis “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” mournfully proclaimed that the once vast American western frontier was closed. “American energy,” Turner maintained, “will continually demand a wider field for its exercise.”

the conclusion of Frederick Jackson Turner that the wellsprings of American exceptionalism and vitality have always been the American frontier, the region between urbanized, civilized society and the untamed wilderness. In the thesis, the frontier created freedom, “breaking the bonds of custom, offering new experiences, and calling out new institutions and activities.” Turner first announced his thesis in a paper entitled “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” delivered to the American Historical Association in 1893 at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.