The Significance of the Frontier in American History

Frederick Jackson Turner’s essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” critiques and analyzes prevailing ideologies at the time, offering the modern reader a means to understand concepts of American identity and democratic evolution in the 1890s. This time was a pivotal juncture in 19th-century US history, marked by the symbolic “closing” of the western frontier, as confirmed by the 1890 census. The 1890 census revealed that there were no major tracts of “unsettled” land in the west; the settler "frontier" no longer existed. The definition of the “frontier” and “unsettled” is now acknowledged to be deeply problematic as these lands were inhabited for millennia by the Indigenous population of North America. The census recorded settler populations, reflecting the contemporaneous presentation that unsettled land was synonymous with “uninhabited” and that Indigenous peoples were not “American.” The closing of the settler frontier resonated deeply in 1890s American society as frontier mythology had shaped narratives of American identity for centuries. This mythology can be seen in the idea of “Manifest Destiny,” first articulated by the newspaper columnist John L. O’Sullivan in 1845. This envisioned the nation’s destiny as stretching from coast to coast, ideas which not only fueled the movement toward the frontier but also ingrained a sense of divine entitlement and nationalistic duty among the settlers, rendering the expansion as an almost sacred mission.