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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 February 2011
The frontier interpretation of American history with which Professor Frederick Jackson Turner captivated and intrigued the observers of American development more than forty years ago still retains its fascination. Professor Turner saw the American frontier as an area in which American society was constantly being rebuilt, each time shaped by special problems: “American social development,” he wrote, “has been continually beginning over again on the frontier.” It was on this theme that Professor Turner based his most striking contention that “The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.”
1 “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” originally published in American Historical Association (Annual Report, 1893, 199–227), and frequently revised and reprinted. The edition here employed is that contained in The Early Writings of Frederick Jackson Turner (Madison, 1938), 187Google Scholar.
2 Ibid., 186.
3 Ibid., 221.
4 The Frontier in American History, N. Y., 1921, 259–260Google Scholar. Note also the statement in the essay, “Western State Making in the Revolutionary Era”: “It is the fact of unoccupied territory in America that sets the evolution of American and European institutions in contrast.” In The Significance of Sections in American History (New York, 1932), 87Google Scholar.
5 Goodrich, Carter and Davison, Sol, “The Wage-Earner in the Westward Movement, Political Science Quarterly, L (1935), 161–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar; LI (1936), 61–116; and “The Frontier As Safety Valve: A Rejoinder,” Ibid., LIII (1938), 268–271; Kane, Murray, “Some Considerations of the Safety-Valve Doctrine,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XXIII (1936), 169–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Some Considerations in the Frontier Concept of Frederick Jackson Turner,” Ibid., XXVII (1940), 379–400; Shannon, Fred. A., “The Homestead Act and the Labor Surplus,” American Historical Review, XLI (1936), 637–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tucker, Rufus S., “The Frontier as an Outlet for Surplus Labor,” Southern Economic Journal, VII (1940), 158–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zahler, Helene Sara, Eastern Workingmen and National Land Policy (1941, New York), 182ffGoogle Scholar, and Danhof, Clarence H., “Farm-making Costs and the ‘Safety Valve’: 1850–1860,” Journal of Political Economy, XLIX (1941), 317–359CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 The disappearance of the free land frontier and with it of labor's alleged safety valve has been cited as a justification for economic change through legislation by such men as President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Vice-president Henry A. Wallace, Governor Philip La Follette, General Hugh Johnson, and Professor Rexford Tugwell.